Josiah Maraku

Narbonne won five matches in 2021-22 and went down. Josiah Maraku played fifteen of them, scored three tries, and beat several defenders to score the winner against Provence in the closing seconds. Lyon signed him out of the wreckage.

Centre, 1.80m and 97kg, born in New Zealand on 30 March 2000.

He grew up in Manawatu-Wanganui and started at five in Feilding. At Feilding High School he won the national co-educational schools title in 2016 and scored in the final, played age-grade rugby for the Hurricanes at Under-17 and Under-18, and was in the Manawatu academy. New Zealand Schools Barbarians picked him in 2017 and New Zealand Schools in 2018, in a side containing Tamaiti Williams and Josh Lord.

Manawatu gave him a professional contract in June 2019, at nineteen. He debuted against Taranaki that August, played seven matches in his first NPC season, and was used mostly on the wing despite being a centre. He held the No. 13 shirt through 2020 and 2021. He was in the enlarged New Zealand Under-20 squad in 2020 and never played, because the tournament was cancelled.

Narbonne signed him in November 2021 and he arrived in France in December, playing his first match in the Aude derby against Carcassonne within a week.

Lyon took him to replace Pierre-Louis Barassi, who had gone to Toulouse. He debuted against Brive on 3 September 2022 and finished his first Top 14 season with eighteen matches, fifteen starts and seven tries, one of them in the play-off against Bordeaux-Bègles. Lyon extended him to 2026 the following August.

Seven tries in a first season in a new country, in a position where adaptation usually takes two, explains why the extension came so quickly.