Fabien Galthié has named Jeremy Ward, the Junior Springbok captain of 2016 and a Sharks centre for six seasons, in his France squad for next month’s Nations Championship. Paul Gustard, the Stade Français head coach who tracked him for six years before he signed him, tells James While how it happened and what Galthié is getting.

When I asked Gustard about Ward this week, he began with “where do I start?” and then answered himself by going back six years, to Harlequins, to a squad he was rebuilding around a teenager called Marcus Smith, and to a Sharks centre he’d never met.

Gustard needs little introduction to a South African reader. He built the Saracens defence the club called the Wolfpack, he was Eddie Jones’s defence coach through England’s 2016 Grand Slam and the 3-0 series win in Australia that summer, he ran Harlequins, he had a spell at Benetton, and since October 2024 he’s been head coach of Stade Français, where he took a side fighting relegation to third in the Top 14 and a semi-final last season and has just agreed a new deal to 2029. He’s also a coach who, twice now, has gone to Durban for a centre to straighten a line.

“When I was at Harlequins rebuilding the squad, I was looking at the style of play I was trying to develop,” he told me. “We had this young kid coming through called Marcus Smith, who is, let’s say, a generational talent, we had Danny Care at nine and Joe Marchant at 13, but we had a lot of lateral players, and what I was looking for was people who could straighten the line. Paul Lasike was the first version of that. André Esterhuizen was the deluxe version.”

Scouted through Esterhuizen

“By watching André and watching the Sharks, I saw a lot of Jeremy Ward playing Currie Cup. He was always blocked a bit at Super Rugby, because of André, because of Lukhanyo Am and guys like that, so he played a fair bit, but not as much as he could have done, and he was a regular in the Currie Cup side.”

Sharks supporters know that story already, and the Eastern Cape knew it first. Ward is a Grey High School boy from Port Elizabeth who captained Eastern Province to a first U19 title in 2015, captained the EP Kings in the 2016 Currie Cup qualifiers and captained the Junior Springboks at that year’s World Rugby U20 Championship in Manchester, scoring twice against Japan before a yellow card in the semi-final against England cost him a two-week ban and the third-place play-off. He moved to Durban in 2017 and won the Currie Cup in 2018, but the Sharks’ midfield in those years was Esterhuizen and Am, which is to say a Springbok midfield, and in his final season he made nine URC appearances. In cricketing terms he was scoring hundreds for the second XI whilst the first XI picked itself.

A phone call to Michael Horak

Gustard had left Quins by the time he could do anything about it. “When we were at Benetton we were looking for a centre, and the year after they ended up signing Malakai Fekitoa, but I’d already left. When I went to Stade Français we were looking for centres, because when I signed they had Nicolás Sánchez, who at one stage was a superstar, they had Ngani Laumape, they had Waisea Nayacalevu and Sefa Naivalu, so the backline looked pretty tasty, and up front they had Yoann Maestri, Tolu Latu, Tala Gray, Antoine Burban, all these kinds of guys who, by the time I actually joined, weren’t there. They’d moved on.

“So we were looking at loads of different names, people I’d coached, people I’d seen, and I threw Jeremy into the mix. I said, look, this is the guy you should go for. I ended up speaking to Michael Horak, who I played with at London Irish, and at Leicester actually, and who was and is head of recruitment at the Sharks, and we managed to negotiate a release. Jeremy was keen to try something new. His pathway was getting blocked.”

Horak, for the younger reader, is the former Leicester and London Irish full-back who won his one England cap in Argentina in 2002 and has been on the Sharks’ staff since 2015. The release is a sentence that reads worse from the Durban end this week than it did at the time; the two-year deal was announced on 24 August 2022, and the Paris press read it as a straight replacement for Laumape, who’d left for Kobe with two years still on his contract.

Gustard remembers the first game rather than the paperwork. “He came over around October time and his first game was against Bordeaux. You could probably look back and watch it; he buried somebody under the sticks. It was probably as good a debut as you could imagine, two massive tackles, and it showed a sign of what was to come. I really fought hard for him to get into the club. We pushed for him and for Tommaso Menoncello, but we couldn’t get Menoncello, so we ended up getting Paolo Odogwu later in the year to bolster the centre position, because we’d lost a couple there.” For the record, the debut was 1 October 2022 at Chaban-Delmas in Bordeaux, 14 minutes off the bench in a defeat; Odogwu arrived from the Wasps wreckage three weeks later, in the same week as Vincent Koch; and Menoncello stayed in Treviso and was the Six Nations Player of the Championship in 2024.

One of the Guardians

Ask Gustard to describe the player and he describes the man first. “What an exceptional human being. Great guy, full of energy, always smiling, a very, very good professional, one of those guys who gets in early, does his pre-hab, has his breakfast, has his routine, does his ice bath, stretches, mobility, gets himself ready, and knows all his detail. He knows his role.”

That last line matters at Jean-Bouin, because Gustard runs the place on a contract that cuts both ways. “We ask three things of the players. First is a positive mindset. Second is to continually work on your skill set. Third, know your role. That’s the deal for them. The return deal, on me and the coaching group, is to be aligned, to make sure we don’t contradict each other, so if Morgan’s talking about attack I don’t chip in and change the tune; to know our detail, the system, the rules, the regs, so we’re ahead of the game; to give consistent feedback on performance, individual and collective; and to remain consistent in our behaviour. If we’re normally upbeat, we stay upbeat, so the players understand it’s not personal, it’s a constant in how we behave, and it’s consistent with the standards we push for on the field. That’s the buy-in, the contract we set up at the club.”

Morgan is Morgan Parra, the former France scrum-half who coaches the Paris attack, and the feedback, Gustard is keen to stress, travels in both directions. “Jeremy, on his side of things, lives up to that. He’s part of the group I call the Guardians, the guardians of the club, of the standards, the values and the behaviours. He’s one of our co-captains. In four or five years he’s captained the team quite regularly; we’ve got four captains, Léo Barré, Jeremy Ward, Romain Briatte and Paul Gabrillagues.”

Two centres in one midfield

On the rugby, Gustard is generous and specific, and he raises the criticism before I can. “Earlier in his career he probably got criticised for not being as efficient or as effective in attack as somebody else. But he’s got a very low error rate, he does things correctly, he runs hard, he runs straight, he’s got an outside break and he’s got a nice little grubber kick. And I think it’d be fair to say he’s the best defensive centre in the league, certainly in terms of reading, but also in terms of physicality. He’s very fit, super professional, a leader of men. He’s just a bloody good rugby player, mate.”

The sheet backs him up. In the Top 14 last season Ward made 208 tackles and won 12 turnovers, and on the other side of the ball he made 20 clean breaks and beat 29 defenders, which answers the old criticism about his attack without anybody having to argue it. He was named at 13 in the Top 14 team of the season.

The harder evidence is what happened when the club signed Joe Marchant from Harlequins in 2023. “He’s so good, in fact, that when we signed Joe, who’d had plenty of games where he deserved to start at 13, we ended up trying to find a position for both of them. Joe ended up playing 13 and Jeremy 12, or Jeremy 13 and Joe on the wing, because they’re both so good that we needed them both in the team. They work well together, and they’re good friends as well.”

It’s worth saying what that midfield has been part of. Gustard took over in October 2024 with Stade Français in a relegation fight; last season they finished third in the regular season, put 45 points on La Rochelle in the play-off, Ward among the try-scorers, and went out 25-15 to Montpellier in the semi-final in Marseille. Tani Vili, the other half of the club midfield for much of that run, is in the same France squad as a Test rookie, whilst Nicolas Depoortère, with 10 caps, isn’t.

Why Galthié wants him now

Which brings us to the part that will exercise the pubs in Durban. Ward completes his five years of residency next July, so when the Springboks arrive at the Stade de France on Friday 13 November he’ll be a training partner rather than a selection, and the first window in which he can pull on the shirt is the run-in to a World Cup.

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“The only thing is, he’s not eligible, so he can’t play until the World Cup,” Gustard said. “I can only imagine they want to bring him in now for communication, to see how he fits in the group, how he blends, how he moves between the different set-ups, international back to club, that kind of thing. But he can’t actually play for them until the five years, or until he gets his passport.”

The passport, as anyone who’s queued at a préfecture will tell you, is the longer of the two games, and Galthié has done this before. Emmanuel Meafou and Tevita Tatafu were both brought into camp before they were eligible, and both have since played for France, once together, against Japan in 2024. Ward himself, speaking to RMC Sport last week, was careful about it, acknowledging the queue of centres already in front of him and saying only that “if there’s the opportunity to get there, yes, maybe”. Nobody in Durban would call it a grievance either; the midfield he couldn’t get past went on to win two World Cups.

“I can’t speak highly enough about him,” Gustard said. “I think he’s a tremendous person and a very, very good rugby player.”

France play Fiji in Lyon on 7 November, South Africa at the Stade de France on Friday 13 November and Argentina at the same ground on 21 November. Ward becomes eligible in July 2027. The World Cup starts in Australia on 1 October 2027.