Why UBB are eyeing Obano for Poirot’s position, even as he keeps playing

The news was picked up everywhere with the same explanation: Poirot is getting older. That's true, but it's not what his playing-time curve shows.

Midi Olympique revealed on Saturday that Union Bordeaux-Bègles had made England international loosehead prop Beno Obano, 31, one of their targets for summer 2027. The news was picked up everywhere in the hours that followed, with the same explanation: Jefferson Poirot turns 34 in November and is coming to the end of his contract.

That’s true, but it’s not what his playing-time curve shows.

In December 2024, he signed what he described as his last contract

At the time, Poirot was coming out of a spell of weariness and had made no secret of the fact that he was nearing the end. Our data shows what happened next.

His two heaviest seasons of the period are the two that followed that signing. He doubled his playing time compared with 2021-2022 and put together two campaigns with more than twenty starts. This summer he returned to the France side: three matches, two starts, 145 minutes.

In other words, the player whose departure the press says should be planned for on age grounds is also the club’s most-used loosehead, and one who has just revived an international career at 33. UBB have never said they intend to part with him.

The real timeline is the contracts

The deadline is not biological, it is administrative. Poirot and Matis Perchaud both come to the end of their contracts at the same time, in June 2027. The club’s two loosehead props have been free to talk to other clubs since this summer.

That is the real constraint: the position could empty in one go. A club that has won two Champions Cups in a row does not find itself in June with no loosehead under contract without having prepared something else.

Perchaud is coming back from surgery

The other unknown is the fitness of the younger man. Perchaud, 23, a product of the club’s academy, injured his knee in mid-May against Perpignan. After surgery, he missed the Champions Cup final against Leinster and the end of the season, which explains his eleven starts in thirty matches in 2025-2026.

What followed is more reassuring: still in rehab at the 11 August injury update, he returned to training with the squad on the 13th. He will therefore be available for the season opener on 5 September.

What the targeted player brings

Three almost identical seasons, around twenty starts and 1,300 minutes. The consistency of an established starter, achieved late: in 2021-2022 and 2022-2023, he played only seven and then ten matches.

He is approaching two hundred appearances for Bath, his only club since his debut in February 2015. The English club has already lost its first-choice tighthead Thomas du Toit to the Sharks this summer, and Obano’s understudy, François Van Wyk, has left for Connacht.

Nothing is signed, and the deadline is two seasons away.