Hughes vows to down big French

NATHAN Hughes has outlined England’s intent to crush French will in Paris by exploiting their pack’s lack of mobility to build an unassailable lead.

Eddie Jones’ men head across the Channel with the aim of revitalising their NatWest 6 Nations title defence following a comprehensive loss to Scotland.

France will possess their customary giant presence up front, but that size comes at a cost to manoeuvrability and conditioning and it is here that England see a weakness to be exploited.

“Our mentality this week is to have a big start. France have some big boys and if we can move them around early in the game, that will be a big bonus,” Hughes said.

“We need to keep the scoreboard ticking and create a big mountain for them to climb, so it will be quite hard for them to come back.

“So we need to focus on that big start and we keep talking about that for this weekend.”

England understand the difficulty of being confronted with a hefty deficit after falling 22-6 behind at half-time of the Calcutta Cup showdown at Murrayfield.

Scotland’s ambition in attack was matched by their dominance at the breakdown and Hughes accepts that adjustments must be made more swiftly when confronted by unforeseen challenges in the future.

“We recognised it too late and had left ourselves with a big mountain to climb. A 22-6 deficit is a big score to catch up in Test rugby,” Hughes said.

“We’ve identified that we need to see what’s happening there and then and not wait for the break. By the time you wait for the break it’s too late.

“When we know things aren’t going our way, we need to pull it together. We talked about starting big, but we allowed Scotland to do that and by the time we started playing it was too late to get momentum.

“As a group we are tough on ourselves and we can’t j ust accept things. We have to be tough and everyone is looking forward to France.”