Guram Gogichashvili

Guram Gogichashvili was signed at nineteen, during the 2018 junior world championship, which was being played in France. He joined the academy and never appeared for the under-23 side. He went straight into the first-team squad and played twenty-three matches in his first season, fourteen of them starts.

Loosehead prop at Racing 92, 1.83m and 118kg, and 27 years old.

Khashuri in central Georgia is where he was born, and the Locomotive Tbilisi academy is where he learned to scrummage. He played two junior world championships, in 2017 and 2018, which is how the French scouts came to be watching him at all.

Yannick Nyanga, then the club’s sporting manager, said at the time that he had the potential to become the best prop in the world. That is a large claim to put on a teenager and it has not been borne out, but the assessment of what he could do in a scrum has not really been disputed since.

Georgia capped him in November 2018, against Samoa, in a 27-19 win, six weeks after his club debut. He played every match of the 2019 World Cup in Japan and returned for a second tournament in 2023.

Eight seasons at the same French club is unusual for a Georgian forward, most of whom move every two or three years as the money follows the scrum. He has been in the Top 14 since he was nineteen and has not played anywhere else.

A short, heavy, technically orthodox loosehead of the Georgian school, and a two-time World Cup player at 27.