They keep telling us it is the biggest annual rugby competition, but the Six Nations this year might also be billed as a chance to see how six tired teams respond to the disappointment of their World Cup. If someone were looking to re-engage with any of the feel-good successes of last autumn, this weekend they might choose to head a little further east to Tbilisi, or more specifically the northern suburb of Avchala.

There Georgia, one of the revelations of the World Cup, will play Germany in the first weekend of the Rugby Europe Championship, the latest name for what is sometimes referred to as the Six Nations B. The stadium in Avchala will be packed to the highest seat (it doesn’t have any rafters), but there are only 3,000 of those. And Georgia will win by a lot. Amid all the Six Nations hype, you may find references to it somewhere downpage on a specialist rugby website. After the rugby world clasped them to its bosom so warmly at the great party, Georgia must now feel as if they’ve been shown the back door the morning after.

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But they continue to strive and the momentum is palpable. “The game’s really taken off here,” says Milton Haig, Georgia’s New Zealander coach. “Rugby’s the most popular sport in Georgia.”

That claim will be better put to the test later in the competition, when they host Spain in round three at the Lokomotivi Stadium, capacity 27,000, then Romania in the final round at the Dinamo Arena, capacity 55,000. Haig is adamant that European rugby, for all its development in the west, is sitting on a gem of a nation in the east. Georgians were born to play rugby. Genetically and culturally, the sport strikes the perfect chord with them, even if economically they are at a disadvantage. They are the Pacific islanders of Europe.

“That was the first thing I identified when I came over here. These guys put some extraordinary numbers out in the gym. What we soon learnt was that it was the skills, in terms of catch-pass, that needed work. From there you work on the understanding of the game and how to make the right decisions under pressure. These are basically Pacific island boys in eastern Europe.”

Georgia have long supplied fearsome forwards to French club rugby but it was notable at the World Cup how much success Haig has had in developing a more expansive game. Club rugby in Georgia at the highest level is semi‑professional and Haig has two sessions a week with those based at home, working on the finer aspects. “Our local boys’ skill sets are probably better than the French boys’, because that’s what we do.”

Success is soon to be reinforced by the next generation. Georgia won the Junior World Trophy last season, which means they will replace Samoa in the Junior World Cup this year. Meanwhile, their success in England last year means they have already qualified for the senior event in 2019. Which actually creates a new problem, the crux of the matter for Georgia and any team like them. Who will give them a game?

They will have no qualifying matches, so they will go into that World Cup on the back of their Rugby Europe fare and perhaps the odd fixture offered by those with November slots to fill. Scotland are obliging this year. More must do the same. At the end of the World Cup, Octavian Morariu, the president of Rugby Europe, called on the Six Nations teams to play Georgia and Romania more often, “whether they like it or not”.

There appears no chance of the tournament itself countenancing an expansion in numbers and certainly not promotion and relegation. Last week, John Feehan, chief executive of the Six Nations, went so far as to suggest: “It is not [our] job to provide solutions for Georgia, Romania or anyone else.” Economically, even if not so much on the field, the Six Nations are doing fine, thanks very much. It’s the sort of contemptuous attitude that can give a sport a bad name and is at odds with World Rugby’s mission to grow the game.

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Morariu knows what the poorer relations are up against. “We must not forget,” he says, “that the Six Nations is first of all a commercial company, more than it is a sports entity. What rugby needs to do – and we might get some help from the Six Nations on this – is to raise the profile of the Rugby Europe Championship. There is potential, also, in other countries. If you think of Germany – that’s a huge market. If you think of Poland, it’s huge too – and there is tradition in Polish rugby.” So too in Morariu’s native Romania, where the population of 20 million is more than Ireland, Scotland and Wales combined. Georgia’s is four million – think New Zealand. Both have beautiful, historic capital cities with 50,000-seat stadiums.

Rugby is heading for an impasse, whereby the monolith of tradition butts against a newer force in the shape of energetic, talented nations such as Georgia. Argentina have shown what can be achieved with only a few years of regular competition but they are an attractive economic proposition for a younger tournament like the Rugby Championship. It is Georgia’s lot to find themselves on the edges of the oldest competition in the world. Talented they may be but they are up against more than just the opposition on the field. Pacific islanders indeed.