The Six Nations tactical breakdown - expert Fraser Brown runs rule over every team

Our columnist and former Scotland hooker Fraser Brown identifies each team’s strengths, weaknesses and how they may play their tactics.

Scotland

There is a very, very good squad there, and there’s a good coaching team. If they can get the bounce of the ball – which every team need – Scotland have the ability to compete and win each of their five games.

That is all they can do. Talk of the championship is nonsense; all they can focus on is winning what’s in front of them and performing week to week.

There is no escaping the fact that this Scotland team still have alarming mental frailties (what Scotland team haven’t?) and that the capacity for a ten, 15, 20-minute implosion always looms.

In a championship as competitive as the Six Nations, those lapses are punished, and if Scotland succumb to even one or two across the championship, then, with the quality of opposition, they could quite easily find themselves in the bottom two.

France, England and Ireland will more than likely fill the top three positions, probably in that order. On paper, Scotland are the fourth-best side in the competition, but with the ability to outplay, if not outmuscle, the top three. With both England and France at home, and Italy and Wales (who Scotland should beat) in the first block of fixtures, there is a very real possibility of Scotland heading into the final two weekends competing at the top of the table.

At the other end, it’s likely Wales will be bottom, with Italy also in the mix for the wooden spoon. The Italians are a good team, and the opening weekend fixture in Rome against Scotland could sink or swim their championship, but I think that losing the extra rest week will test their depth. Can they cope with five games in six weeks?

Italy

Ange Capuozzo and Sebastian Negri are two big omissions from the Italy squad. They’re pretty significant injuries but perhaps their absences will not be felt as keenly as they would have been a couple of years ago.

Capuozzo is a fantastic player but his brilliance can be fleeting, and games can pass him by.

Negri is a bigger loss. He does a lot of hard yards for Italy. For a long time, he’s been one of the main ball-carrying options, and he would get you over the gain-line almost every time. He also posts high tackle numbers, really high tackle dominance and is a good lineout forward.

There is more depth coming through now and Italy are starting to put together a really, really good squad of 23, not just 15. They obviously beat Scotland two years ago and I think since the appointment of Gonzalo Quesada as head coach, they’ve had a lot more structure to them. They’ve long had the ability to be a brilliant attacking force, but now they are better at exiting and in their attempts to get higher up the pitch.

A change to a more pragmatic style, a more structured gameplan in terms of their exits and territory management, and a shift towards percentage rugby has reduced the cost of errors. They’ve still got the ability to attack from their own half but it is the balance of risk/reward which has been the biggest shift in their playing style over the last few years.

There’s a lot of young, powerful talent in the squad, and it’s hard to tell if that’s down to the coach or just good timing because there are Italy players at some of Europe’s top clubs now where before the squad would be made up almost entirely from Benetton and Zebre.

It should also be noted that Benetton are very competitive in the URC and they’ve got a really good coaching structure. Everything around the Italian set-up is on an upward trend.

England

England, unfortunately some might say, are looking really bloody strong! This is the best they’ve been going into a Six Nations for a long, long time.

There is a real sense of optimism which comes with winning 11 games in a row, and they are rightly a short price in the betting, just behind France as second favourites.

I think they’ve got some brilliant players and they’ve got a lot of tried and tested combinations. They are powerful up front and the only issue will be around the props because of injuries in the front row and it will be interesting to see how they manage that.

They look a little bit stretched in the second row. Maro Itoje is obviously still there but he’s not the presence that he was five or six years ago. I think anyone who watched the Glasgow-Saracens game would have seen that he’s not having as big an impact as he used to. He’s probably going to have one or two big games for England but can he back it up across five games in six weeks?

Many of the England players have had a lot of rugby in them over the last 18 months. They came straight off the Lions tour into the domestic season where they play every week for their clubs.

There are obvious strengths in their squad. They look very dangerous in the back row where they have so many options. They’ve got a couple of new players in there, too, including Greg Fisilau, the Exeter Chiefs back-rower.

Nine and ten will be interesting. Fin Smith is injured, so what will Steve Borthwick do? Marcus Smith has been good for Quins in Europe but awful in the Premiership. They’ve got options, probably more than any other team.

Do they need a creative spark at halfback when they’ve got so much creativity in the centres? Probably not but they have come unstuck in the past because they have lacked creativity at nine and ten.

The bottom line is that they’ve got some of the best players in Europe. They’ve got a lot of power up front, are very good at the set-piece and they kick more than any other team in the Six Nations. They rely on kick contests, not on slowing the game down but trying to get into transition because they’ve got some brilliant back-three players.

Wales

The new coaching team makes Wales a fascinating proposition – and Steve Tandy and Danny Wilson are very familiar to Scottish rugby fans.

Unfortunately, with the quality they have in the squad, I can’t see anything other than sixth spot for them so it will come down to how much impact those coaches can have.

Tandy, who was Scotland’s defence coach, took over as Wales boss in the summer so he’s now had a bit of time with the players and I’d expect them to be much better organised defensively than they were in the autumn. Their set-piece should also be better and Danny will have put a hell of a lot of work into their lineout.

I think the best opportunity they have to be competitive is to keep the game tight, play high up the pitch, be disciplined and organised. I wonder, however, if their mindset will be the opposite? With the wider political background of Welsh rugby, do they see this as an opportunity, or a responsibility, to inspire their nation, give them something to cheer, an attacking, exciting, carefree team to get behind and support?

It would be a massive risk, but the mood around Welsh rugby has been very dark for a number of years now. With the announcements last week around Cardiff and the Ospreys, I can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe their best hope is to give their supporters hope. Showcase the talent and brand of rugby that supporters want to see. It seems all too familiar a story to that of Scottish rugby before the arrival of Vern Cotter and Gregor Townsend. The only question is, do they have the players to be able to play that way?

France

France are favourites and it’s not difficult to see why. You look at their squad, and then you look at the people who didn’t make their squad. How on earth does Grégory Alldritt not get in? He’s been the mainstay of the French back row for the last five or six years.

It’s hard to imagine this time last year anyone saying Alldritt wouldn’t be in the French team, let alone the French squad. Damian Penaud and Gaël Fickou have also been left out and France can obviously cope without them, that’s the whole point.

This squad is so strong. They will kick in their own half to get high up the pitch, they’ll play off transitions that people kick loosely to them, they’ll look to be powerful.

I think they’ll go 6-2 or 7-1 on the bench in all their games and look to pulverise teams in the last 15, 20, 25 minutes. The forwards will play at tempo, there won’t be a lot of structure around some of their play at times. They will be picking and going from anywhere, picking one way, then the other. There’ll be offloads, all the brilliant things around French rugby that makes them irresistible.

Maybe the one question mark would be the nine-ten partnership. With Romain Ntamack injured and ruled out for the start of the championship, Matthieu Jalibert is back in the squad. How does Fabien Galthié manage that? Jalibert is very temperamental, famously walking out of the squad the last time he was in when Thomas Ramos was selected at 10 ahead of him.

There’s always a little bit of drama around the French squad but they are looking very, very strong, their spine in particular. François Cros is really important for them because he does all the work around the breakdown. He’s so consistent and so important to how they play and their speed of ball.

From a leadership perspective, they’ve got Antoine Dupont back in there, and the creativity they’ve got in the backline is just ridiculous.

Even when they are not going well, they have the individuals and the power to be able to turn games and that’s what makes them so dangerous.

Ireland

It’s hard to make a judgment on Ireland based on last year because Andy Farrell was not there. It was a different coaching structure – with Simon Easterby in charge – and they played differently.

I wouldn’t say they’re a team at the rebuilding stage but some of their older players have either left or are on the wane and they don’t have the same quality of talent pushing through.

Injuries have also hit them. They were already missing Andrew Porter, Robbie Henshaw and Mack Hansen but now Jack Boyle has been added to the injury list. Porter and Hansen in particular have been huge players for Ireland.

Porter’s influence at the set-piece has been significant although there have always been question marks around his scrummaging and his angles but it never really got exposed until the last year, spectacularly so against South Africa in the autumn. It was a real weakness for them but Porter was still a threat for his all-round game and his workrate. He’s going to be a big loss, although Farrell has hinted he could return towards the end of the tournament.

The lineout was an issue for Ireland in the autumn. They couldn’t get consistent clean ball to allow them to get on to the front foot. They’ve always been very creative with their plays and are hugely reliant on momentum and gainline to win games, but if they don’t have a set-piece platform they really struggle.

Their kicking game relies heavily on Jamison Gibson-Park and used to rely also on James Lowe but Lowe has been poor for the last 12 months. Do Ireland have a player of good enough quality to replace him?

So there are a couple of areas that are really creaking and it’ll be interesting to see if they can integrate some new players and get them up to speed. It’s also an ageing squad, so one fewer rest week will be a serious test of their depth and durability.

Bundee Aki is still an unbelievable player but he’s banned for the first three matches of the championship. Do they have the strength in depth to replace him?

There are definitely question marks around ten. Sam Prendergast has had the starting shirt but is less than convincing. I think Jack Crowley has been better and is a better ten, but Munster have struggled lately, and it is very obvious that the Irish management don’t see him as their first-choice No 10.