Mohamed Haouas

Mohamed Haouas came out of Le Petit Bard, a working-class district of Montpellier, through a scheme set up to get children in those neighbourhoods playing sport. He did taekwondo first. A coach pointed him at the rugby club at fifteen, and he won a Grand Slam with France.

Tighthead prop for Montpellier, 1.85m and 127kg, and 32 years old.

The French Navy trained him as a teenager, which let him play for the naval club and become a military international. He took bronze at the Military World Cup in England in October 2015 while still attached to the recruitment centre in Montpellier.

A three-year contract with his home club followed in 2016 and a Top 14 debut in August 2017 against Agen. He holds dual French and Algerian nationality and turned down an approach from the Algerian federation.

Fabien Galthié started him in the opening match of the 2020 Six Nations and for the three after it. At Murrayfield that March he was sent off in the 37th minute for punching a Scotland player. He was sent off against Scotland again in 2023, that time for an accidental head-on-head collision with Ben White.

The honours are real: a Challenge Cup in 2021, the championship in 2022, the Grand Slam with France in the same year, and a second Challenge Cup in 2026.

So is the record in the courts. In February 2022 he received an eighteen-month suspended sentence and a 15,000-euro fine for a 2014 burglary; the five years of judicial supervision that case imposed ended days before his first France cap. On 30 May 2023 the Montpellier court sentenced him to a year in prison, served under adjusted conditions, for domestic violence. Clermont cancelled his transfer and the French federation ended his international career. A further conviction followed that June over a 2014 fight, which he appealed.