The 129th Six Nations rugby tournament kicks off this weekend with three matches in Cardiff, London and Rome, where Italy kick off holders France on Sunday afternoon. The tournament will last more than a month and is highly anticipated because it inaugurates the year that will lead to the World Cup, but also because will be told with a series coming to Netflix in 2024.
The importance of this year for the European rugby national teams has already begun to be seen for some months. England and Wales, for example, sacked their managers in December because things were not going their way. They will therefore present themselves at the Six Nations with two new coaches and little time to settle down: England with their former captain Steve Borthwick, Wales with New Zealander Warren Gatland, who had already been their coach between 2007 and 2019.
The other national teams, including Italy, instead continue with their projects started some time ago, with the hope that they won’t run out before the World Cup next autumn.
France has the declared objective of winning the World Cup which they will host at home and wants to get there by possibly defending the title won in the Six Nations last year with the Grand Slam, that is without ever losing. But in a sport as exhausting as rugby, where players are often subject to injuries, it is always difficult to arrive with a completely healthy team to important appointments. It also happens that certain great national teams reach their peak form too early, only to arrive exhausted at the decisive appointments. From this point of view, France already seems to be at its best for some time: in addition to winning the Six Nations after twelve years, they have not lost a match since July 2021.
For at least three years, however, Ireland have rarely lost, and only against two teams: New Zealand and France. In the last Six Nations they finished second, losing against France in the direct match that decided the tournament. But she went to New Zealand last autumn and beat the All Blacks twice out of three at home, as only a handful of teams have managed in over a century. In a World Cup year, then, everyone knows her goal: to get through the quarter-finals, which she has never achieved.
I sei capitani (David Rogers/Getty Images)
For Scotland and Italy, this Six Nations will instead be an opportunity to consolidate the results obtained recently and possibly improve them. Scotland have won at least two games in the tournament for three years, or three when they do very well. It cannot be considered among the favorites but it is constantly growing.
For Italy it is a different story. After 7 years of only defeats that exposed the flaws in her movement and alienated a substantial part of the public, in 2022 she was able to at least get back on track with two significant victories. The first ever in Wales, on the last day of last Six Nations, and then in the test match autumn, beating Australia — one of the greats of world rugby — for the first time in its history.
It is true that these two victories came against two national teams in crisis and far from their best moments, but unlike in the past, Italy has been able to take advantage of them, which in a sport like rugby, where the one who proves to be the best always wins on the pitch, he makes all the difference in the world. There is therefore a bit of enthusiasm again: on the team, which is young and bodes well, and on the movement in general, whose new management is trying to remedy the impoverishment suffered by the system in past years.
All these themes, and what will happen later during the tournament, will finally be taken up and told in a Netflix series that will have the same producers as Drive to Survivethe series that was the driving force behind the great moment of popularity of Formula 1 and which has already had a following in other sports: in tennis with Break Point and in golf with Full Swing. In the case of rugby, and in particular of the Six Nations, the arrival on Netflix will be another way to reach new fans and stay close to the younger audience after the collaboration with TikTok, the social network which until 2025 will be one of the official channels of the tournament.
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