Cristian Ojovan

Cristian Ojovan did not touch a rugby ball until he was sixteen. Before that he wrestled and lifted weights in Chișinău, which is a reasonable apprenticeship for a tighthead prop and a very unusual one for the Top 14.

He is 1.83m and 120kg, born in Soroca in northern Moldova on 4 January 1997, and he plays at No. 3 for Clermont.

France took him in young. He joined the Section Paloise academy in 2016, then found himself without a club at the end of the 2016-17 season and picked up by Aurillac. In July 2018 Aurillac gave him three more years, one in the espoirs and two professional. He started his first professional match a month later, in the second round of Pro D2 against Provence.

He became the back-up to Anthony Alvès almost immediately: 26 games that season, 14 of them starts. When Alvès left for Grenoble he took the shirt outright, starting 16 of the 19 he played, before Covid suspended and then cancelled the season.

Clermont had already signed him. The deal was agreed in October 2019 for three seasons from 2020-21. His first European game was the delayed Champions Cup quarter-final in September 2020, lost to Racing 92.

What has followed is a long fight for minutes and a run of interruptions. He was behind Rabah Slimani in his first season, level with him in the second, and in 2022-23 the two of them were the only senior tightheads at the club. Slimani got hurt in round one, so Ojovan started seven of the first eight, then hurt himself against Bordeaux-Bègles and lost a month. He came back at the end of November, played three, and went off in the sixth minute against the Stormers. Several more weeks gone.

He extended to 2026 in the middle of all that.

Moldova capped him in 2016 and he has four caps, from the European Championship 1B and Trophy campaigns in 2016 and 2017. He scored his first international try against Switzerland.

He has won nothing. Whether he can get through a season without something tearing is the whole question, and it has been the whole question for four years.