ЈАСК WILLIS

The Toulouse and England openside has had a roller-coaster few years. He delves into it all here...

- Tom English

EVERYWHERE HE looks at Stade Ernest-Wallon there are glorious reminders of the mecca of rugby that Jack Willis is now living in. Black-and-white photographs of the boys of the 1920s who won five leagues in quick succession, colour images of the four-in-a-row heroes of the 1990s, snapshots of their immortal captains - Emile Ntamack, father of his team-mate Romain, lifting the club's first European Cup, Fabien Pelous lifting the second and third, Thierry Dusautoir lifting their fourth and Antoine Dupont lifting their fifth.

You can't miss the history and scale of the place and you can't miss the poignancy of Willis being here either. If his club has quite a back story then so, too, has their tough 26-year-old flanker, recently of Wasps until administration hit and redundancy called, but now of Toulouse.

You might say Willis landed on his feet. You might also say he absolutely deserved to. We tend to forget it now but Willis had a horrendous injury in 2018 when rupturing his ACL in a Premiership semi-final against Saracens.

He came back and stormed the league in 2019-20, winning the Players' Player of the Year, the Premiership Player of the Year and the Discovery of the Year awards. He was the turnover titan, the new prince of the breakdown. He was also an England cap until a second horror knee injury befell him playing against Italy in the 2021 Six Nations. That cost him a year. A lot of bleak moments in that year. Only those closest to him fully understand what he went through.

He came again and then Wasps went bust. The club he had played for since he was a teenager dispensed with him, his brother Tom and more than 150 others like they were putting out the rubbish. To him, it feels like another lifetime since it happened but it was only last autumn.