How do you stop a wrecking ball?

Mathieu Bastareaud has always stood out in a crowd, never more so than when surrounded by some of the most famous players in the world.

There is so much of him that finding a way around the largest of French centres requires undertaking a tricky exercise in logistics — hazardous by nature but infinitely more sensible than trying to go through him.

At 6ft and more than 17st he is formidable enough to create the optical illusion of being almost as broad as he is long, a terrestrial version of the amphibious cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants except that the Toulon captain comes kitted out with the square jersey to boot.