Mathieu Hirigoyen

Football first, then France sevens at under-18 and under-20, then a junior world championship at twenty.

Mathieu Hirigoyen started at Les Genêts d’Anglet playing football, alongside Cheikh Tiberghien. He came to rugby afterwards, went through France’s sevens sides at under-18 and under-20, and was a junior world champion by 2019.

Blindside flanker at Stade Français, 1.94m and 95kg, and 27 years old.

Bayonne is where he was born, and Biarritz is where the professional career happened first. He was there for the 2021 Pro D2 final, which the club lost.

Sevens stayed on his record after the age-grade years. He was in a France preparation camp in November 2020, and the following November the French Barbarians invited him to face Tonga at Gerland, a match the Baa-Baas won 42-17 with six tries.

In April 2022 he signed three seasons in Paris, in the same window that took Lucas Peyresblanques out of the Biarritz squad. Two forwards from one second-division dressing room, bought by the same club in the same month, is a specific kind of endorsement of what that dressing room was producing.

Sevens is not a detour on a CV like this one. It is where a light, tall forward learns to cover ground and to arrive at a breakdown already moving, and it is the reason a player of his build is picked in the back row at all rather than being told to put on fifteen kilos.

He is 1.94m and 95kg, tall and light for a flanker in this division, which is the build of a lineout option and a link forward rather than a collision one. The sevens years are visible in it.

The junior world title of 2019 is the highest honour on his record, and no senior cap has followed it. A Barbarians invitation and a sevens camp are the nearest he has been.