South Africa and England kicked the most, with Scotland and New Zealand the least; however, France are the most efficient at reclaiming. To put this in context, we’ve gone through the last 12 months of Test numbers to see precisely what the top six nations are doing with the boot.

The top line

Watching the game against Italy on Saturday, it became obvious that Rassie Erasmus, a man who leads the rugby debate in terms of innovation and rugby IQ, has picked up France’s cunning ploy that featured heavily in the last Six Nations for Les Bleus. Time and time again, we saw two big South African forwards or backs just stationed on the other side of the Italian contesting player, and on six occasions by the hour mark they managed to steal uncontrolled slapbacks from the aerial contesting players.

Springboks assistant coach Jerry Flannery has gone on record saying that “every second or third kick” now creates a chance, which goes a long way to explaining why the six best sides in the world have spent the last 12 months treating the boot as a key attacking weapon, albeit in six very different ways.

The headlines are simple enough numerically. South Africa put boot to ball 83 times in three July Tests and New Zealand just 57, but both won all of their games. The Six Nations tells its own story too, with the side with the superior kick metres winning 14 of the 15 games played.

The column to watch is the box kick, which is up 20 per cent in a Six Nations Championship where the total kicks fell by seven per cent; however, the focus should be in the patch of grass 20 or 30 metres beyond the ruck, where both France and South Africa have been up to something very cunning indeed.

The two men on the far side

With the crackdown on escorting now in effect, where the chasers are given a prescribed clear line to contest the ball, the traditional reclaim is a line with one man going up for the ball and the rest fanning out on his side of it.

What France did cleverly last year was to send one or two men to the other side of the contest, into the opposition side, so they have two players straight past the drop point, so any mistimed reclaim by their opponents arrives into the arms of the French support players. This is a role that coaching manuals have long kept for kick-offs, under the name of the hyena. A box kick needs more than four seconds in the air to be contestable, and any self-respecting wing or fast back-row can cover that ground from an onside start with room to spare.

Those two players have three jobs. They stand where the tap-back comes down, so a French hand that bats the ball into space finds a French body under it but, crucially, they cut off the catcher’s inside pass, which is the easiest exit strategy. They also will get amongst the retreating wing and full-back who would once have formed a protective glove around him. Since that crackdown on escorting, those retreating players can’t block anyone off, although the same obstruction law also applies to the spoilers, so the timing has to be perfect.

In Paris in February, Théo Attissogbé got above Jacob Stockdale and batted Antoine Dupont’s box kick backwards, with France already stationed with three players around the contest for scraps, and France, crucially, finished that night winning 14 of the 19 contestables.

Flannery talks openly about alignment and about retrieving the breaking ball, whilst Mzwandile Stick wants South Africa’s tight forwards taking space and hunting scraps, and that often means they will go past the catcher in order to do that.

How much they kick

One of the laziest tropes on social media these days is that kicking is boring, and it shows a lack of understanding of the strategy that is key to winning Test rugby. England’s reputation as a boot-driven side comes with proof. They averaged 35.7 kicks in open play in a game in 2025, the most in Tier 1, and after four rounds of the 2026 Six Nations they were still at the top with 30.75 kicks per game but only just, with Ireland close behind on 30 and France on 29.5. Scotland, meanwhile, on 23.25, were the most reluctant side in the championship, despite having both Finn Russell and Ben White as masters of kicking strategy.

Mind you, volume tells you very little in isolation. France and Ireland both kicked 39 times in Paris in Round 1; France got nine of theirs back to Ireland’s four and won 36-14.

Ireland, meanwhile, have spent the year kicking like a recalcitrant smoker trying to give up the darts. They got through 39 in Paris in Round 1 and 22 against Scotland in Round 5, then dropped from 28.4 a game in the spring to 19.7 in July, with only 14 in the 40-21 defeat at Eden Park, one kick for every 15.4 passes. Jamison Gibson-Park, who kicked 16 times in Paris, kicked only four times that day, a clear strategy to constrain the brilliant broken-field running and transition work of the All Blacks. Against Argentina last Friday, they lost the aerial exchanges 4-2 and then stopped kicking to record a 42-12 victory.

New Zealand, under Dave Rennie, kicked 16, 17 and 24 times in July and 78 times in four Tests against South Africa’s 94 kicks in Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry. The Springboks kicked 121 times across their three Tests and their match in Buenos Aires, and when they beat France a year ago it was one kick for every 2.5 passes.

How they kick

France’s numbers are the most interesting. Fewer than three per cent of their kicks in the early Six Nations were bombs, the lowest share in the competition. Where they opted to kick to grass, they often prefer chips over the top of aggressive defensive lines, regathering cleanly on the run without having to compete for it.

England play territory more than anyone, whilst Ben White box-kicked more than any other nine in the championship and had more kicks retained than any other player, which is a fair return for a Scottish side that kicked less than anybody in the championship.

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Ireland averaged 12.8 box kicks in a match in the spring, but after two rounds they got back only five of their 16 contested kicks, something that mirrors their performance against Argentina.

The Springboks remained the benchmark in terms of retention, with a massive 27.7 per cent of their kicks regathered in 2025, the best in Tier 1 Test rugby, against Ireland’s 20.5 and England’s 14, and across all four Tests against South Africa the All Blacks caught only 16 of the 52 high balls sent their way.

Kick metres and distance

Total metres and metres per kick measure slightly different things. France led the Six Nations with 4,034 metres, and after three rounds they were averaging 29.5 metres per kick to England’s 28.4 metres and Ireland’s 26.7 metres made, but distance on its own flatters. Ireland kicked 1,024 metres in Paris and lost 36-14. Wales finished top for metres per kick at 29.4 but only got back a measly 10.2 per cent of what they kicked, and by the last Test of the Rivalry series South Africa were winning back a massive 89 per cent of New Zealand’s long, deep kicks on the return.

In terms of contestables, which is a narrower measure than those overall retention figures, France retained 65.3 per cent of theirs and 12 of those regathers led directly to tries, when no other side managed to do this more than three times. That is where the arithmetic really highlights the strategy, because a retained kick is worth around 30 metres, it will take six or seven phases of carrying and rucking to match it, and a line break will only come every 15 to 25 carries on average. As my great friend Sam Larner told CapeTalk in March, the kick creates the moment when the defence is not set, “and that’s when you want to attack”.

Not rucking

Elite sides now keep 96 per cent of their own ball at the breakdown, so the contest for possession has largely moved off the floor and up into the air, and every ruck that you build, especially in your own half, gives the defence an opportunity to challenge, an opportunity for referees to penalise and another second or so to defend.

Scotland built 139 rucks against Italy in February, the rugby equivalent of a slow double hundred in the Test you go on to lose, and Italy, with only 58 rucks, won 18-15, a pointer to the importance of keeping the ball in hand or in the air. Ireland have come down from 110 rucks per game in the 2023 Six Nations to only 90 in 2025. In the early rounds this year France needed about three phases to score a try where Ireland and Scotland needed more than four and a half, and they beat England 48-46 at the Stade de France in March with only 88 rucks to England’s 97.

New Zealand are the great exception, and the most instructive one, in terms of body height and technique. They averaged 138 rucks a game in July and won all three Tests, but they then built 58 at Ellis Park with 19 kicks and won 33-16. It’s a strong tendency, an indicator, but no more than that.

Looking ahead

So, in essence, the key takeaway from this is how often you kick is becoming the least interesting number on the analysis sheet, and who is standing where and who is controlling the drop zone and the contest is singularly the most important metric.

South Africa arrive at the Stade de France on Friday having kicked 39 times to France’s 30 when they won 32-17 there a year ago, and given the disruption to the French backline it’s increasingly likely that we will see Dupont and Maxime Lucu as la charnière, the half-backs for France, with big wingers looking to contest in an aerial battle that will light up the skies of the Stade de France.