1. France
THAT A SIDE missing the likes of Antoine Dupont, Romain Ntamack, Anthony Jelonch, Emmanuel Meafou and Thibaud Flament still open as four-point favourites over Ireland is the perfect illustration of French rugby’s frightening depth of talent.
Naturally, much of their success in this year’s tournament will hinge on the performances of their deputy half-backs Maxime Lucu and Mathieu Jalibert, both of whom remain relatively untested at Friday’s level. However, as a pairing for Bordeaux, scrum-half Lucu and out-half Jalibert have formed the most electrifying tandem in European rugby this season.
With suggestions that France may park their recent data-driven, kick-heavy approach and look to play more from deep, and with Lucu and Jalibert’s clubmates Damian Penaud and Louis Bielle-Biarrey waiting on the wings, this French side has the hallmarks of a throwback. Keep an eye out, too, for sub scrum-half Nolann Le Garrec: the 21-year-old Racing man reeks of superstardom and may even overtake Lucu in Fabien Galthié’s pecking order before long.
As the Stade de France undergoes surgery ahead of the Paris Olympics, Les Bleus will spread their home games around this year and Friday night’s curtain-raiser in second city Marseille should go a long way towards deciding the eventual destination of the Six Nations trophy.
That Ireland game aside, France’s trickiest-looking fixture is a trip to Murrayfield, a ground at which they’ve lost on five of their last seven visits.
A Slam may prove a step too far given their enforced changes at core positions but France are justifiable favourites for the title.
2. Ireland
Along with Scotland, Ireland are the most settled squad heading into this tournament — and yet so many of the question marks surrounding them pertain to the absence of one player: Johnny Sexton.
Jack Crowley’s task as successor, meanwhile, will be made more difficult in the absence of another: wing Mack Hansen absorbed a lot of the weight in the role of second playmaker as Mike Catt and Andy Farrell worked to decentralise Ireland’s attack in recent years, and Hansen’s most likely replacements — Calvin Nash and Jordan Larmour — boast very different profiles.
And so, Ireland’s attack will be forced to evolve — or, at least, to adapt — straight off the bat in Marseille.
Their lineout, too, will face immediate scrutiny: it descended to farce during the World Cup and it is an area of the game in which all of the provinces have struggled at times this season.
The need to shore up the lineout could see an adjustment in the back five of the pack on Friday: a second row consisting of James Ryan and Joe McCarthy, and a back row with Tadhg Beirne at blindside, Peter O’Mahony at openside, and Caelan Doris at eight, would make sense on paper.
Otherwise, the vast majority of this Irish team recently won 17 games in a row until their World Cup quarter-final defeat to New Zealand. They’ve tasted defeat only once in their last two Six Nations campaigns — away to France in 2022.
If they can reverse that result this Friday, anything will be possible for the team of 2024.
3. Scotland
The Scots were blown out of the World Cup at the pool stage and yet they would surely have reached a semi-final had they found themselves on the other side of the draw.
An even year means Gregor Townsend’s side have both France and England at home. They’ve beaten France in five of their last seven home encounters and they’ve lost to England just once in their last six meetings anywhere. A dreamer might look at the final-weekend trip to Dublin as potentially having Grand Slam implications, or at the very least having a championship in play.
But Cardiff, where Scotland open their campaign this Saturday, has played host to some of the Scots’ worst nightmares for over two decades. Scotland have not beaten Wales away from home since April 2002, and failure to break that God-awful run against a severely depleted Welsh side this time around would make for the most ‘Scotland’ thing imaginable.
But if Finn Russell and co. can get over that first hurdle, Scotland will become title contenders just by dint of how their remaining fixtures are laid out in front of them.
They couldn’t, could they?
Probably not, if we’re honest.
4. England
As the team most affected by defections and injuries, this tournament feels like a total departure from England’s third-place finish at the World Cup.
Indeed, with the losses for various reasons of power-athlete frontliners like Owen Farrell, Courtney Lawes, and Ollie Lawrence, it’s difficult to envisage England being able to replicate their simplistic gameplan that proved so successful in France.
In some ways, 2024 feels like the first year in which Steve Borthwick will be able to truly mould an England side in his image, and the recruitment of Felix Jones as defence coach will surely aid him in that process. But the profile of player left available to England in the coming months would suggest that Borthwick may be forced to swing to the opposite extreme and look to cultivate a fast-moving outfit that seeks and exploits the edges in attack, which could lead to serious teething problems.
This may prove a transitional year for England and, whatever about trips to Edinburgh and Lyon, even Rome this Saturday is looking like a potential banana skin considering the extent to which English preparations have been railroaded by injuries.
5. Wales
For the second tournament in succession, this feels like the toughest turnaround of Warren Gatland’s coaching career.
To be fair to Wales, their World Cup made for a decent foundation on which to build — but the losses of Dan Biggar to retirement, Jac Morgan to injury and, most recently, Louis Rees-Zammit to American football, felt like three cornerstones being removed from beneath a flimsy structure.
That Gatland has appointed 21-year-old Exeter Chiefs lock Dafydd Jenkins as captain was shrewd in that it moonlights as an immediate call for patience. (It was a call not without merit, either: Jenkins once became the youngest captain in English Premiership history when he led Exeter to a victory over London Irish at 19).
But Jenkins and a raft of new Welsh frontliners will need time and reps as they adapt to test rugby, and the likes of Twickenham and the Aviva Stadium don’t tend to make for the most wholesome classrooms.
Wales’ opener at home to Scotland feels like it will be pivotal in determining whether they somehow pull a third-placed finish out of their backsides — which would be right up there with Gatland’s finest achievements — or they find themselves needing to beat Italy in Cardiff on the final day to avoid a belt of the dreaded wooden spoon.
6. Italy
Gonzalo Quesada could hardly have walked into a better situation. The World Cup was Italy’s nadir in the professional era and yet the very players that were trounced to historic degrees by both New Zealand and France at the pool stage had only months earlier tested the whiskers of all five of their Six Nations opponents.
Italy’s worst margin of defeat during last year’s championship was 16 points away to England. They missed a golden opportunity to repeat their 2022 success over Wales but, all told, they put together a solid championship by their lowly standards.
Fast forward a year and, while expectations will be lowered off the back of the World Cup, Quesada has inherited a squad which, for the most part, sits second in the URC table with Benetton.
So many of Italy’s star men are firing at club level, while they’ll also welcome back to their midfield one of their brightest talents, Tomasso Menoncello, who missed the World Cup after suffering an injury in the warm-up fixture against Ireland.
Add to the equation a handful of exciting new youngsters, most notably uncapped back rows Alessandro Izekor (Benetton) and Ross Vintcent (Exeter), and Italy shouldn’t be long banishing the memories of France.
Whether or not they’ll be able to avoid the spoon will probably still be decided in Cardiff on the final weekend, but Quesada’s Italy should at least be exhilarating in attack as they look to return to a positive trajectory.