Welcome to the pressure dome: The Six Nations is back, but not as you know it...

New faces, old rivalries: Six Nations stalwarts Dan Biggar, Antoine Dupont, Johnny Sexton, Stuart Hogg and Owen Farrell have hung up their boots or won’t feature, so it’s time for the next generation of rugby stars to light up this year’s tournament, writes Jim White

Six appeal: (from left) Italy’s Tommaso Menoncello, Dafydd Jenkins of Wales, Scotland’s Finn Russell, Ireland captain Peter O’Mahony, England’s George Ford, and Jonathan Danty of France ( Getty/PA)

This Friday, it is back. The Six Nations returns and with it comes a mix unique in sport. Nowhere else can you find such an intoxicating cocktail of ground-shaking collisions, astonishing athleticism, reckless courage and... grown men dressed up as giant leeks.

More to the point, nowhere else in the sporting calendar offers up such a regular feast of partiality. In the Six Nations, it is not the taking part that counts. It’s the beating them, it’s the rubbing their noses in the mud, it’s the joy of seeing the other lot defeated.

This is the competition that provides an annual opportunity not just to watch the finest rugby players in Europe batter the living daylights out of each other, but for the thousands flocking to the live event, and the millions more watching the titanic smashes on television, to indulge their inner nationalist. It means that Friday evening is one of those rare occasions when, as they head to the Stade Velodrome in Marseille for the tournament opener, French fans can cheerfully tuck a live cockerel under their arm, passing on the way Irishmen decked out in those Guinness hats that pubs hand out on St Patrick’s Day. On Saturday, Scots in their hundreds can dress up in a kilt, sporran and tam o’ shanter and mingle in a Cardiff pub before the game with Welshmen in full-face daffodil crowns. As for the English, off to Rome in their uniform of Barbour and red corduroys, well everyone can cheerfully hate them.