Simon Meka

Castres list nine forwards of 1.93m or taller. Simon Meka is the shortest of them and the third lightest. That is the whole competitive problem on one line.

He is 1.93m and 110kg, was born on 14 March 2000, and plays second row.

The build sits between lock and back row: light for a modern second row, tall enough to take lineout ball, and at 26 unlikely to change much now.

The record stops at those numbers. Neither the French nor the English encyclopedia carries him, nothing at age-grade level is filed under this name, and the club’s season write-ups pass over him.

The queue ahead of him is the issue. Paul Jedrasiak and Guillaume Ducat are France internationals, Leone Nakarawa is a Fiji international and a former European player of the year, and Florent Vanverberghe and Gauthier Maravat are both ahead on published record. Romain Macurdy was too, until he left.

He has been on the roster since 2020 without a documented senior appearance. Six seasons is a long time to be cover in a position where injuries are frequent and cover usually gets a run.

A page for a player at the back of that queue is going to be short. Padding it with a route he may not have taken would be worse than admitting the gap, and this one gets rewritten when the record says something.