Gareth Anscombe

In his first start in Super Rugby, against the Bulls in March 2012, Gareth Anscombe scored all 29 of the Blues’ points in a 29-23 win. He was 20. When John Kirwan took over the franchise later that year, Anscombe was cut from the roster anyway.

A fly-half who covers full-back, 1.83m and 96kg, he joined Bayonne on a one-year deal to replace the retiring Camille Lopez.

Anscombe was born in Auckland and came through there, finishing the 2011 Junior World Championship as its leading scorer with 86 points as New Zealand won it. That did not tie him to New Zealand — only an All Blacks cap would have — and his mother was born in Cardiff.

Warren Gatland took the hint. Cardiff Blues signed him for 2014-15, Wales called him up in January 2015, and he won his first cap against Ireland that August. Left out of the initial World Cup thirty-one, he was recalled after injuries to Scott Williams and Hallam Amos, and started at full-back against Australia and in the quarter-final defeat to South Africa.

He won a Challenge Cup with Cardiff in 2018, moved to the Ospreys in 2019, and was Wales’s fly-half for the 2019 Grand Slam.

Then it went wrong. He signed for Tokyo Sungoliath in July 2023, got injured at that year’s World Cup, needed surgery and eight to ten weeks out, and the Japanese club cancelled the contract and signed Nicolás Sánchez instead. He spent 2024-25 at Gloucester as a free agent before coming to France.

Forty-two caps, 168 points, two World Cups.

What Bayonne have bought is a distributing ten with a serious boot, not a runner. At 35 that means game management. Watch the goal-kicking percentage, because that is what a one-year deal at this age gets judged on.