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Huw Jones to travel to France this week to complete Top 14 switch

Scotland's Huw Jones (Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)

Fresh from Scotland’s latest Calcutta Cup win over England, Huw Jones is set to take advantage of a fallow week in the Guinness Six Nations to complete a move to Top 14 strugglers Montpellier.

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The 30-year-old Glasgow outside centre, who had a move to Bayonne scrapped three years ago after they were relegated to Pro D2, is due to travel to France to complete the move in the next 48 hours.

Bayonne were still keen on Jones but he has chosen to move to Montpellier, who secured a 28-23 victory over Bayonne at GGL Stadium last weekend. That was their fourth success in five matches, but they remain in 13th place in the league, two points from safety behind the 12th-place Perpignan.

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Rhys Patchell on his move to the Highlanders in Super Rugby

Former Scarlets and Wales number ten Rhys Patchell told RugbyPass’s Finn Morton about how his move to New Zealand came about.

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Rhys Patchell on his move to the Highlanders in Super Rugby

Former Scarlets and Wales number ten Rhys Patchell told RugbyPass’s Finn Morton about how his move to New Zealand came about.

Jones was born in Scotland and educated in England before moving to South Africa in his gap year where he started his rugby career with Western Province and then the Stormers in Super Rugby.

He is in his second spell at Scotstoun on either side of spending a season in the Gallagher Premiership with Harlequins, who stepped in to offer him a deal when his move to Bayonne fell through.

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Jones, who helped Quins to reach the 2022 Premiership semi-finals, can play in almost any position in the backline and he isn’t likely to be the last big-name arrival at the French club this summer.

After completing the Jones signing, Montpellier will switch their attentions to landing former Springboks fly-half Curwin Bosch from the Sharks. Sources in South Africa indicate that a move is very much on the cards.

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The 26-year-old has seen his career stall in Durban and a move to France could breathe new life despite being under contract to the Sharks until 2026.

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Franky 298 days ago

Taylor or Jones?

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JW 2 hours ago
Does South Africa have a future in European competition?

I rated Lowe well enough to be an AB. Remember we were picking the likes of George Bridge above such players so theres no disputing a lot of bad decisions have been made by those last two coaches. Does a team like the ABs need a finicky winger who you have to adapt and change a lot of your style with to get benefit from? No, not really. But he still would have been a basic improvement on players like even Savea at the tail of his career, Bridge, and could even have converted into the answer of replacing Beauden at the back. Instead we persisted with NMS, Naholo, Havili, Reece, all players we would have cared even less about losing and all because Rieko had Lowe's number 11 jersey nailed down.


He was of course only 23 when he decided to leave, it was back in the beggining of the period they had started retaining players (from 2018 onwards I think, they came out saying theyre going to be more aggressive at some point). So he might, all of them, only just missed out.


The main point that Ed made is that situations like Lowe's, Aki's, JGP's, aren't going to happen in future. That's a bit of a "NZ" only problem, because those players need to reach such a high standard to be chosen by the All Blacks, were as a country like Ireland wants them a lot earlier like that. This is basically the 'ready in 3 years' concept Ireland relied on, versus the '5 years and they've left' concept' were that player is now ready to be chosen by the All Blacks (given a contract to play Super, ala SBW, and hopefully Manu).


The 'mercenary' thing that will take longer to expire, and which I was referring to, is the grandparents rule. The new kids coming through now aren't going to have as many gp born overseas, so the amount of players that can leave with a prospect of International rugby offer are going to drop dramatically at some point. All these kiwi fellas playing for a PI, is going to stop sadly.


The new era problem that will replace those old concerns is now French and Japanese clubs (doing the same as NRL teams have done for decades by) picking kids out of school. The problem here is not so much a national identity one, than it is a farm system where 9 in 10 players are left with nothing. A stunted education and no support in a foreign country (well they'll get kicked out of those countries were they don't in Australia).


It's the same sort of situation were NZ would be the big guy, but there weren't many downsides with it. The only one I can think was brought up but a poster on this site, I can't recall who it was, but he seemed to know a lot of kids coming from the Islands weren't really given the capability to fly back home during school xms holidays etc. That is probably something that should be fixed by the union. Otherwise getting someone like Fakatava over here for his last year of school definitely results in NZ being able to pick the cherries off the top but it also allows that player to develop and be able to represent Tonga and under age and possibly even later in his career. Where as a kid being taken from NZ is arguably going to be worse off in every respect other than perhaps money. Not going to develop as a person, not going to develop as a player as much, so I have a lotof sympathy for NZs case that I don't include them in that group but I certainly see where you're coming from and it encourages other countries to think they can do the same while not realising they're making a much worse experience/situation.

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