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
