There is a peculiar snobbery around kicking in rugby that has never quite made sense.
A back three move that goes through eight pairs of hands before a winger slides in at the corner generates noise that shakes the stadium. Yet a perfectly weighted cross-field kick that puts that same winger in exactly the same position of the field with three defenders scrambling generates polite appreciation, if that. Same outcome, but different currency. The running move gets the highlights package but the kick gets a footnote.
It has always been this way; kicking is somehow considered the lesser art, the pragmatic choice, the thing you do when the good stuff isn’t on. Supporters tolerate it, purists endure it, but coaches, the blokes that actually know their stuff, quietly, have spent the last two years building their entire attacking systems around it.
Six years of Six Nations data tells a story that challenges everything we thought we understood about how Test rugby gets won, and the central argument is this; the boot is now the most efficient attacking weapon in the game, more reliable than the line break, more productive than the phase carry, and the teams that have understood that earliest are the ones shaping this tournament.
The numbers from the first two rounds of 2026 suggest we are only beginning to understand the consequences of that shift, and the snobbery that has always surrounded kicking may be the reason it took this long for everyone to notice.
The stats are staggering
Kicks per game in 2026 are at their highest level since 2009, the second highest in the tournament’s recorded history, and the more revealing figure sits underneath that headline. 20 percent of kicks this year have produced a contest for possession against nine percent last season, and in two rounds alone teams have already generated 77 contestable kicks, just three short of the entire 2025 total of 80. The game is accelerating in one very specific direction, bad news for the fans that love a line break.
Kick selection has changed accordingly. Box kicks are rising, territorial kicks falling, chip kicks and cross-fields up because teams are prioritising regaining possession over pinning opponents behind the gainline. The bomb, contested high and hunted in the air, has become a primary play and whilst wingers who struggled under the high ball could previously be protected, under the new laws, that protection is gone, leaving aerial ability as a fundamental selection consideration rather than a nice-to-have.
It’s all about the drop zone
The tap-back has emerged as perhaps the most tactically interesting development in this new landscape, and understanding why it works so effectively comes down to one thing; control of the drop zone.
The smartest teams are not simply chasing the catcher, they are loading the area where the ball will arrive if the catch is imperfect, batted back or contested. Three players into that drop zone on every kick, runners already in position before the ball comes down, defenders scrambling to get onside and completely out of the contest by the time the ball arrives.
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France have turned this into an art form. Their system puts the back three plus Antoine Dupont into the drop zone as standard, and when one of the back three is the catcher, Charles Ollivon or another back-rower fills the space immediately. The result is that France are almost always first to the second ball, running onto it at pace against a defence that has just been broken by the aerial contest itself. Winning that situation creates the kind of attacking opportunity that phases alone cannot manufacture, and attacking catches have risen to 45 percent in the last two tournaments, up from 38 percent previously, whilst defensive catch success has dropped from 85 to 79 percent. Those numbers are moving in one direction because the drop zone system is working — and they’re the absolute grand masters of it.
France: Precise, disciplined, devastatingly effective
France are the most instructive case study and in some ways the most surprising. They have kicked more than any other team in 2026 yet fewer than three percent of their kicks are bombs, the lowest share in the competition. Of seven aerial contests attempted they have won five, a 71 percent success rate, and beyond those direct duels they are retaining nearly a quarter of all kicks through smart chip kicks over aggressive defensive lines, regathering without a direct contest at all. The efficiency is the story, and the drop zone system is why that efficiency is possible. Their return yardage is quite remarkable and six tries have come from kick/catch transition. In simple terms, kick to their back three and you’re handing them a loaded revolver and saying ‘shoot me’ at the same time.
England: The autumn is a different country
England have played for territory more than any other team in 2026, averaging 29.8 metres per kick, the highest in the competition, but the contrast with what they produced in the autumn is stark.
George Ford kicked 412 metres against Australia alone, Alex Mitchell added 198, and the back three saw Freddie Steward and Immanuel Feyi-Waboso anchoring the aerial system throughout, and with Tom Roebuck, Tommy Freeman and Elliot Daly rotating alongside them, and England dominated the airways across all four wins. Feyi-Waboso was so dangerous as a chaser and catcher that Fiji’s Selestino Ravutaumada was sin-binned specifically for taking him out in the air, and that aerial system was the spine of England’s 11-match winning run that ended last weekend in Murrayfield.
England in the Six Nations has looked different for two reasons, not one. Feyi-Waboso is out for the entire tournament with a hamstring injury, but the deeper problem is what has happened to the players left behind. Steward’s entire reputation is built on being the safest hands in rugby, yet in 2026 he looks like a man waiting for the ball rather than attacking the apex. In the autumn he was proactive, hunting work, putting himself into collisions. Now he is standing and hoping, and when your full-back stops hunting the opposition back three stops worrying. They are not bracing for contact, they are just waiting for the drop. Roebuck was supposed to provide the high-octane replacement energy in the chase game but a world-class Test winger finds work, he does not wait for it. Feyi-Waboso’s value was never just the leap, it was the GPS data; he was everywhere, constantly, making the drop zone genuinely dangerous. Without that frantic energy the chase line goes flat and defenders can mark England’s chasers out of the contest before the ball even comes down.
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Borthwick has read the room. The 29.8 metre territorial average is an acknowledgement that his chasers are not currently hungry enough to win the ball back. At Murrayfield, with those options unavailable, England lost the aerial battle and the winning run ended.
Ireland’s calling
Ireland arrive at Twickenham having retained just five of 16 contestable kicks across two rounds, practically an invitation to be bombed, and yet the picture shifted the moment James Lowe returned from absence to start against Italy. He changed the kick return dynamic immediately, bringing the aerial aggression and work rate that Ireland had been missing, and Andy Farrell will have noted exactly what the numbers looked like with him in the team versus without him. England’s ability to exploit that invitation depends entirely on whether Steward and Freeman rediscover what made them dangerous in November. The opportunity looked enormous on paper, but Lowe’s return has made it considerably more complicated.
The rest of the field
Italy have embraced the bomb more than anyone, fewest territorial kicks in the competition and a strategy built entirely around aerial contest from the front foot, and for a team rebuilding its identity under a new coaching structure there is real coherence to that approach. Scotland, which is baffling given what Finn Russell can do with a cross-field kick or a well-timed grubber, have used neither so far in 2026. Both will arrive when the moment demands them, which is exactly what makes Russell so hard to prepare for.
Wales have gone broadest of all, leading the competition for cross-fields and second for both box kicks and bombs, a strategy built around wide aerial contests that makes sense given the personnel available.
The competition is being decided in the air
The Six Nations title race in 2026 is being shaped by a battle the scoreline alone cannot fully capture. Teams winning the aerial contest, loading the drop zone, retaining the second ball and converting regains into quick attacking opportunities are generating a form of pressure that phases of possession cannot replicate at the same speed, and France have found the balance most effectively; precise in kick selection, efficient in the air when they compete, intelligent enough to use the chip and chase when the defence loads for the direct contest.
The remaining four rounds will be decided, in significant part, by who can disrupt that aerial edge. Ireland need to fix their retention numbers before Twickenham or England will hunt them from the first whistle. Scotland have weapons still unused. Italy are building something real.
The boot is deciding the 2026 Six Nations and the data has been telling us that since round one.