Jonny Hill

Jonny Hill started the 2020 Champions Cup final and won it 31-27. The side he beat that afternoon was Racing 92, and five years later he signed for them.

Second row at Racing 92, 2.02m and 133kg, and 32 years old.

Ludlow, in Shropshire, is where he grew up, and Luctonians had him from the age of nine. Football took most of his teens, and rugby only had him fully from Hartpury College in 2013, his first senior appearances coming in the fourth tier. Gloucester’s academy used him twice in the Anglo-Welsh Cup before he left in June 2015 for their rivals Exeter.

Seven years in Devon made him one of the best locks in Europe. Exeter took the English title in 2017 and again in 2020, and in that second one he started both finals, beating Racing 31-27 and Wasps 19-13 for the double, and made the league’s team of the season. Twelve months later he started a sixth consecutive domestic final beside Jonny Gray and lost it 40-38 to Harlequins.

Sale announced his arrival in December 2021, and he started the 2023 final that Saracens won 35-25. That spell carried a sanction: in November 2024 he accepted a charge and a ten-week ban over an incident at the previous season’s play-off semi-final against Bath, where a supporter said Hill had taken him by the throat and left him with a cut above the eye. He was available again from 7 December 2024, and his last match there was a play-off defeat by Leicester.

England capped him on 31 October 2020, in the second row with Maro Itoje, in the rearranged Six Nations fixture in Italy that confirmed the title, four years after a first call-up he spent among the Exeter forwards Eddie Jones was slow to pick. An Autumn Nations Cup followed that December, a try against Italy in 2021, and a Lions tour with no Test. In Australia in 2022 a yellow card for pulling Darcy Swain’s hair made him a villain in the local press; he kept his place and played every minute of the series-winning decider.

A three-year deal took him to Paris in July 2025, at 31, into a Top 14 that rewards a lock who wins his own lineout ball. The club had been on the wrong end of the best afternoon of his career.