Planet Rugby has named its top 10 hookers in the world right now, and it is the World Rugby Player of the Year who sits clear at the summit.
Here are our top 10 hookers.
Top 10 hookers
10 Giacomo Nicotera (Stade Français, Italy): He is here because of the scrum. Nicotera is a monster in there, 108 kilos of him anchoring the Italian eight and giving Danilo Fischetti and whoever is at three a platform to work off. Italy’s set-piece has gone from a liability to a weapon in three seasons with him in the middle of it.
36 caps at 29, the captaincy of the Azzurri on the 2025 tour of Namibia and South Africa, and a try against Ireland in Dublin. He also threw more lineouts than any hooker in the championship, because Italy used the lineout more than anybody, though the accuracy is the bit of his game with room for improvement, and he knows that.
The Nations Championship passed him by entirely. Stade Français were still alive in the Top 14, so Gonzalo Quesada could not consider him, and that is the only real hole in his year.
9 Dewi Lake (Ospreys, Wales): Captaincy is not usually a reason to put anybody in a world top 10, but with Lake it comes close to being one. He has led Wales through the grimmest stretch in their history, fronted up at the press conferences after the beatings, captained the tour to Japan in 2025, and never once looked like a man protecting his own reputation whilst the thing went down around him. Doing that badly would have been easy, and nobody would have blamed him for it.
The rugby stands up on its own anyway. He threw 48 lineouts in the Six Nations at 90 per cent, and Wales gave him the hardest brief in the tournament, hitting the back of the lineout more than any side and going long over the 15-metre line more often than anybody. Nine out of ten on those throws is serious work.
His best afternoon was the win over Italy in Cardiff: 13 carries, heavy involvement at the set-piece and a try off the catch-and-drive, and he took the Team of the Week slot ahead of Dan Sheehan for it.
Ninth is where a hooker ends up when his side has spent two years losing. Give him a successful Wales team, and he is several places higher.
8 Samisoni Taukei’aho (Chiefs, New Zealand): The most destructive carrying hooker in the game outside France. Taukei’aho is 115 kilos, a Chiefs centurion, and he has been scoring tries since the afternoon he came off the bench against Fiji on debut in 2021 and got two.
He is right in the middle of the argument at the moment. He started against the Stormers on 7 August and scored twice in a 38-21 win, and he is one of four hookers in the 44-man squad for the South Africa tour alongside Codie Taylor, Asafo Aumua and Bradley Slater. Dave Rennie is rotating that squad through the provincial games before the first Test but he’s more than nailed down a spot in the All Blacks 23.
Tongan-born, schooled in Hamilton, and he stayed put when plenty of others took the money, re-signing with Waikato to 2027. New Zealand Rugby also wrote a late start into his contract this year to keep him fresh for the back half of the season, and unions do not go to that trouble for players they can replace.
He is behind Taylor here because the older man’s accuracy and support lines still edge it over 80 minutes. On damage done with ball in hand there is nothing in it whatsoever.
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7 Jamie George (Saracens, England): Captain of England again at 35, with retirement already announced for 2027, and there is nothing sentimental about it. Steve Borthwick handed him the armband for the Nations Championship squad in June and he led the side out at Twickenham during the Six Nations.
The career needs no help from me. Six Premiership titles and three Champions Cups at Saracens, three Six Nations including the 2016 Grand Slam, a World Cup final in 2019, and all three Tests for the Lions against the All Blacks that summer. Very few forwards in the professional era have that spread of silverware in the cupboard.
He is not the most explosive hooker in the championship any more, and Luke Cowan-Dickie has taken a share of the starts. What he has kept is a set-piece that never wobbles when the game is tight, and a reading of a match that England fans have watched them fail to find anywhere else in the position.
There is something pleasing about him and Julien Marchand sitting next to each other in here, because they are the two purest throwers of a ball in the game. You can see the pair of them in 10 years, retired and thickening, in a quiet pub with the arrows out and nobody else getting near the board.
6 Julien Marchand (Toulouse, France): The technician. Marchand’s scrummaging is the most precise in the game, all angles and timing where other men use mass, and Toulouse have built front-row dominance around a bloke who never once looks like he is straining. The throwing is metronomic, and his work at the maul is as good as anybody’s. That pub match with George finishes on a nine-darter and neither of them raises an eyebrow. His two 22 metre throws to Francois Cros in the Top 14 final in 2025 saw Jack Willis score one try and Marchand himself fluff another from the follow-up, and he hit an incredible 94% in the French domestic season.
What has kept him off the top of lists like this is a lower ceiling in the loose than the men above him. He is a superb hooker doing the hooker’s job at the highest level, in a country where doing that job superbly no longer guarantees you the shirt, which tells you plenty about France.
5 Julián Montoya (Pau, Argentina): Argentina’s captain, and the tone of the whole side comes from him. Montoya makes tackle counts that back-rowers would claim as their own, hits rucks he has no business reaching, and has led the Pumas through the best period in their history without his form dipping far enough to make the captaincy a question anybody bothered asking.
The set-piece is good without being frightening, which is what holds him at fifth, but nobody in the position works harder across 80 minutes, and no side in the world draws more from the man in the two shirt. Argentina’s pack has become one of the best on the planet with him at the front of it.
4 Codie Taylor (Crusaders, New Zealand): The longest-serving man here and the one who has aged best. Taylor’s support lines are still the finest in the position, and nobody in world rugby reads a break and arrives at the right shoulder as consistently, which is why a decade of All Black tries have ended with him on the end of one.
He has never been the biggest carrier, and he does not need to be. The value is in the accuracy of everything else, the throw, the scrum, the timing of the arrival, and in the simple fact that New Zealand have built their attacking shape with him in it for so long that they have never had to work out what it looks like without him. They maybe about to find out, mind, with Taukei’aho breathing down his neck.
Top 3 hookers
3 Peato Mauvaka (Toulouse, France): The most destructive hooker in the game. Mauvaka carries like a back-rower, offloads out of contact, and scores tries at a rate no other front-rower in the world gets close to. France start him some weeks and save him for others, and either way something usually breaks.
He is not the technician Marchand is, and his discipline has cost France on occasion, which is the only thing keeping him behind the two above him. But when a game goes loose, and the margins turn physical, there is no hooker on earth you would rather have out there.
2 Dan Sheehan (Leinster, Ireland): The best carrying hooker in the Northern Hemisphere and, on his day, the best anywhere. Sheehan plays like a flanker who happens to throw, and Ireland use him as a genuine attacking option instead of a body to be worked around.
The 2026 Six Nations was a shade below his own standards, and he would tell you so himself. There were flat afternoons against France and Italy before he found his rhythm, but the tries against England and Scotland both came off that explosive split from a catch-and-drive that has become his signature, and against Scotland he threw ten from ten.
That is him all over. Even in a championship that people were calling quiet, he scored twice and hit every throw in the game that mattered.
1 Malcolm Marx (Kubota Spears, South Africa): The reigning World Rugby Men’s Player of the Year, and the second hooker ever to win it. That would be enough on its own, but the numbers underneath it are the real argument.
Four tries in the Rugby Championship made him the joint leading scorer in the competition. Five Test tries across 2025 took him to 26 in 87, which makes him the only forward in South Africa’s all-time top 10 scorers. He has the best jackal in the front-row by a distance, a carrier who wins the collision more often than he loses it, and the man the Boks trust to start or to finish depending on which 20 minutes they want destroyed.
The thing the television never conveys is the size of him. Standing next to Marx is faintly unnerving, because he is broader across the chest and shoulders than a man who moves like that has any business being, and it explains most of what happens to opposition forwards who arrive at a ball he has decided to keep.
The bicep injury in the Japan Rugby League One play-offs threatened his whole Test season and had South Africa openly fretting about what sat behind him. He came back for the Nations Championship, scored against England at Ellis Park and made more tackles than anybody on the field in a 45-21 win, then wore two again against Wales in Durban.
He says himself that he is not a first-choice player and cannot live off last year. Everybody else in the game knows better.