Tag: sport

They took You’ve Been Framed from me. They can’t take the Six Nations.

The future of the Six Nations is uncertain. That is, if you’re a UK television viewer.

There’s been some back and forth recently with regards to who should broadcast the cherished rugby tournament. The Six Nations has always been on free-to-view channels (either BBC or ITV), but is not among a group of ‘crown jewel’ sporting events like the Olympics or Wimbledon which are locked into public broadcasting. Back in November, the government refused to upgrade the Six Nations to this category, in turn raising the possibility of it being snapped up by a private broadcaster when the current rights deal is up in 2025.

Who’s happy or sad about this? Who feels anything at all?

I certainly didn’t feel much until the Welsh Rugby Union expressed its fear that upgrading the Six Nations to a ‘crown jewels’ free-to-air TV event would spell disaster for Welsh Rugby.

‘Short-sighted’, ‘illogical’ and ‘pathetic’ were all words that sprung to mind when I read this. I suddenly felt enraged, despite having little reason to be. I’m no rugby fanatic. In fact, I’m probably a rugby fan’s worst nightmare. I care much more about the future of football and cricket, even (or indeed, especially) if that comes at the expense of a sport watched by Top Gear fans and played by Saltburn extras. In international rugby, my support is divided between England and Ireland. This would irk anyone. It even irks me a little.

I suppose what’s really annoyed me about the Welsh RFU’s position is this: it takes for granted how a tournament riddled with design flaws sustains Welsh rugby more than anything else.

When you break it down to its fundamentals, the Six Nations is actually quite shit. Besides the Ryder Cup in golf, the Six Nations’ format doesn’t really have an equivalent in any other major sport. That’s rarely a good sign, given that sporting events are market products – the best ones are often replicated. Football had a Home Nations Championship that was discontinued in 1984 due to hooliganism. The Davis Cup in tennis started as the United States versus the British Isles, but is now more of a de facto world cup.

So here’s how my cynical eyes view the darling of rugby tournaments. Every year, six teams – none of which can claim to be the best in the world – compete in a round-robin league. You can tell who will win the whole thing by the halfway point. The same goes for the recipient of the ‘Wooden Spoon’ (clue: it’s Italy. In 18 of the 24 editions of the Six Nations, Italy have come last). The matches – not quite weekly, not quite biweekly – diminish in significance and excitement with each round. But for two rare outcomes: an Irish Grand Slam on St. Patrick’s Day, or a rare final showdown between two contenders, the victors tend to enjoy a leisurely coronation. It’s even better if their last game’s against Italy; the two can just scrap the pointless trouncing and skip to the trophy ceremony. Can I be more petty? You could argue it messes with the weekend TV schedule…

Of course I don’t mean all of that sincerely. Even I am feeling a buzz of excitement ahead of the tournament’s curtain raiser on Friday 2nd Feb when Ireland and France – the top two teams in 2023 – lock horns once again.

The first day of the tournament is like Christmas for any fan of the ol’ ruggers, all the more so for how the Six Nations finds definition in tradition. Cold winter weekends. Pints of Guinness. Crowds bursting with colour. Flags and face paint. Singing the national anthem without it feeling racist.

The Six Nations is actually how an international sports tournament should look and feel in many respects. The French and Irish fans won’t be segregated within the confines of the Stade de France, nor will any set of supporters over the 15 matches of the competition. They don’t need to be, which might not compute with football fans who are so used to V-signing over a line of stewards. Many team sports have rivalry at their core, yet rugby’s version is arguably the most respectful without losing its edge. Why shouldn’t other sports follow suit?

Then there’s the cups within a cup. Calcutta, Millennium, Centenary Quaich, the Giuseppe Garibaldi Trophy. This Russian doll effect means that there is more at stake than just the league table. Scotland will host England at Murrayfield this year hoping to retain the Calcutta Cup for the fourth year on the trot. Their previous four before those took eighteen years to get. It’s always a captivating grudge match, regardless of either team’s fortunes in the wider context of the competition.

The charm of the Six Nations hits me from a distance. I’ve never attended a match. I don’t make plans around it. My admiration for it is therefore only possible through the medium of free-to-air TV. As a kid, I watched it because it was on before You’ve Been Framed. Then it was on at whichever pub – they didn’t need a licence to show it. Now, if I am free on the first Friday of February then, well, I guess I’ll stop by a television for a bit to watch the rugby.

Move it over to a private broadcaster or, worse still, one of the many streaming services in our lives, and the Six Nations becomes to me what The French Open is, or Serie A, or Keeping Up with the Kardashians. I’ve already had to rely on the charitable donation of a TNT login to watch England’s Test tour of India. Not everyone can justify paying for Sky Sports either. Ultimately, I wouldn’t have the money or the desire to keep watching the Six Nations if it left free-to-air. For thousands of other undevoted followers, rugby would effectively be kicked into touch.

So let’s circle back to the Welsh RFU. It’s easy to sympathise with their predicament. They’re broke. And in recent years, Wales has fallen behind their home nation rivals in pretty much all aspects. There’s little cohesion within their domestic structure, attendances at Welsh clubs are low, and player development lacks the organised effort generated by the larger private education systems in England, Scotland and Ireland.

It sucks, because the Welsh are ultra passionate about rugby. But passion doesn’t necessarily generate investment, whereas TV rights deals definitely do. With survival in mind, the Welsh RFU wouldn’t turn down a round-table with the top brass at Sky, Eurosport or TNT. The danger in following short-term windfall though is cutting off the next generation of rugby fans and players. There is no doubt that English cricket has suffered from putting the Ashes behind a paywall. Nor would I receive so many odd looks from my friends if I spent three days watching the Ryder Cup on the BBC instead of Sky Sports.

The Welsh Union might point to a more favourable example: Formula 1, which has exploded on the global scale and continues to attract large UK audiences despite it moving from the BBC to Sky Sports (note: you can still view F1 on Channel 4 in highlights form).

Formula 1 can entice new audiences by virtue of it being, for want of a better phrase, a sport for nerds. There’s a large, rich, slice of the pie for those interested in engineering and mathematics. That’s half of the sport’s narrative, and it compliments the more stylistic appeal of F1 which Netflix cameras can capture: the brands, the drivers’ personalities, the circuits.

Rugby deals more in intangibles. Ask ten rugby fans what pulls them into the sport, and at least nine will cite some sort of emotional attachment. There may also be one anomaly, rambling about an effective kicking game or some other tactical component. But in the end, rugby cultivates its swathes of followers through sadomasochism. Through the blood, sweat and tears of a bruising victory. That sort of emotion has to be learnt from a young age. Introduce rugby to a fully-formed adult and they’d run off in fear.

The best way to ensure the long-term survival of rugby is to keep it as accessible as possible. Keeping the Six Nations on free-to-view, or even enshrining it like the FA Cup final or Wimbledon does just this. Flogging the sport’s second biggest tournament to a private broadcaster does the exact opposite. I can see why Wales RFU might want to kick for 3 points. But as is often the case in rugby, protecting the ball is a better way to win the game.

Can sport ride a second wave of coronavirus?

Like most industries, the world of sport plunged to the depths of uncertainty at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. By the end of March this year, nearly all sporting competitions had ground to a halt. One by one, major events were postponed. Grand slams, world cups and grands prix, once the first things noted in the calendar at the start of the year, were no more. The biggest casualty of them all was the Olympic Games in Tokyo; its postponement at the time feeling like the final nail in the coffin, the death of sport in 2020.

Perhaps that sounds melodramatic. After all, no matter how much we love sport, it could obviously never equate to life and death. The figurative death of sport this spring was no where near as important as the very real number of deaths reported to us every day during the same period. In retrospect, sport never actually died. Just six months on and a lot of postponed competitions have returned and are either completed or underway. We already have league and cup winners in football, and major champions in golf. In the coming weeks we’ll know grand slam winners in tennis, and the owner of the yellow jersey in the Tour de France. 2020 wasn’t the ghost year that many anticipated.

Yet it’s important to remember the significance of sport’s brief but palpable absence. For many, sport is a livelihood, be it as an athlete, an organiser or an employee at a club. In this instance, lockdown had very real implications. Take the example of an athlete’s career, which is notoriously short even before factoring in one’s physical prime. A gold medal winner in 2020 could – for a whole number of reasons including injury, plateau or the rise of another star – be knocked off the podium in 2021. As such, athletes had to cope with tremendous difficulties – not only of maintaining their fitness at home but also of not knowing how they would perform when they did return.

For others, namely the avid follower, sport takes on a meaning that a job could never provide. Whether it’s a social life, a means of escape, or simply a reason to get up on weekends, the hole that was left when sport was taken away was a huge one. Even if it wasn’t a necessity, it sure felt like a craving that had become agonisingly unavailable.

And it is for this reason that the dawn of a new sporting season this autumn holds a very new and unique feeling. It’s an uncertainty that is usually associated with what will happen on the field. But now, perhaps for the first time ever, most of the uncertainty lies with what will happen off it.

Unfortunately, the wider context of Covid-19 is completely out of the hands of sport organisers. In recent weeks the daily confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK and a lot of Europe has crept back into the thousands. Crucially, the numbers now are higher than they were when sporting events resumed. The trend is clear, hence the government’s recent decision to limit social gatherings in England to six people.

As the numbers become more ominous, so do the prospects for sport to continue in full for the rest of the year. What perhaps aided the return of sport this year was the clarity of plan across the board. We knew in football that there was a set number of games to complete, all behind closed doors. Cricket has pioneered the ‘bio-secure’ bubble. Other sports like athletics, golf and snooker have also enforced strict regulations and social distancing. It may not have been a golden summer of sport, but there were clear rules which were followed well enough to ensure sports fans were more than satisfied.

Looking forward however, we now need to plan ahead for whole seasons of sport – not just a couple of months. Having facilitated sport in a rather clinical fashion over these past few months, we may now witness widely-held expectation of a close return to normality by next summer. From a purist standpoint, the welcomed return of sport has perhaps been blunted by its alien appearance. Whether it’s a Champions League final winning goal, a new 100m world record or a match-winning boundary, it seems wrong for these things to occur without a crowd of thousands to celebrate it. And so the objective of getting fans back into stadia is extremely pertinent, as well as the return of other norms: relaxed distancing, the pre-match handshake, or simply not having to endure artificial crowd noises on TV. But how can sport achieve this while adapting to ever-changing circumstances? Is it plausible to have the same COVID rules in September 2020 as in May 2021?

There are numerous questions like these for which answers seem impossible to give. Would matches be postponed if multiple members of a team caught the virus? Will fans be allowed back into stadia as planned if the trend of rising cases continues? Could localised lockdowns mean some games are played behind closed doors but others are not? In the worst case scenario, could a second national lockdown put an end to sport again?

A problem reflected in both sport and the rest of society is the conflict between biological safety and economic security. It’s a conflict that has meant we have had to send children back to school and encourage dining out, despite knowing that it may nudge the R rate up. Naturally, no one in sport wants to put people’s lives at risk. But the longer games are played in empty stadia, the more clubs suffer from a lack of matchday revenue – an issue which disproportionately affects smaller clubs and organisations who don’t have the luxury of large sponsorship opportunities and commercial deals. We’ve already seen multi-million pound clubs lay off staff and players to balance the books. Any further disruption could spell financial disaster.


All things considered, post-lockdown sport has until now been a tremendous success in very challenging circumstances. The precedent that has been set for safeguarding bodes well for what will undoubtedly be a worrying few months. But all sports need fans to be present. Not just for financial prosperity, but also to enrich the magic it so often serves up. What is absolutely clear is that the last thing sport needs at the moment, just as it starts to thrive again, is a second wave of coronavirus. If this wave does come – and signs show it will – it will take a monumental effort to ride it.