RUGBY’S GREATEST CHAMPIONSHIP!
How they must laugh in the southern hemisphere when they hear the Six Nations marketing slogan.
The poor deluded fools, they must think, writhing about in the mud for weeks on end to no great purpose. Boozy hordes watching the rugby equivalent of primitive cave art.
This year the howls of derision are almost audible from all the way Down Under. After all, what was last year’s Rugby World Cup but a grand cuckolding of the north? The semi-finals — featuring all four Rugby Championship nations — were watched by the locals in an atmosphere of deep embarrassment.
Still, it’s Six Nations time again! Woohoo!!
While the southern folk have a point, in their usual desperately-overcompensating-for-something way, the dear, silly old Six Nations is still Rugby’s Greatest Championship™. It turns out that all the things that are bad about it are also part of what makes it great.
First, the charge that the rugby is just a sideshow to the beery bonhomie of an average Six Nations weekend. Well, duh.
The Six Nations emerges after January’s grey wasteland like a garrulous old friend. It bursts through the door and slaps you on the back and shoves a pint into your hand. It’s the rebirth of the sporting year, a time of hope and expectation and pullout supplements. It’s sport’s version of pagan spring festivals, celebrations of renewal and, ahem, fertility.
But stop singing ‘Bread of Heaven’ with your new friends from Llandudno RFC (gas men!) for just a second. Surely the Six Nations, in terms of fairness and sporting integrity, is a nonsense.
This is a competition where on a given year you will play more home games than some of your rivals, and where the pattern of who plays whom at home or away is different for every team. And yet it purports to give us the best team in Europe in any given year? Surely it merely provides us with the team with the friendliest fixture list?
It would, of course, make more sense to play on a home and away basis, nice and tidy, fair and equitable. But part of the charm of the Six Nations is that it is just the right side of the familiarity/contempt equation.
The teams play each other regularly enough to ensure rivalry, but not too frequently that it becomes boring. The Rugby Championship is fairer, but the big meetings are diluted in their significance because there’s another one just around the corner. Not so with, say, Ireland v England.
Okay then, the Six Nations is also elitist. I’m not talking about hedge fund managers and property magnates hoovering up precious tickets. Or the old notion about rugby being a toff’s game.
On the first point, it is very hard these days to find a top sporting event that isn’t smothered in corporate schmooze. And on the second, there’s plenty of evidence that, in this country at least, the rugby team belongs to a sort of general middle Ireland constituency rather than a ruling cadre.
The real elitism is toward their less glamorous European brethren. Aside from their troubles on the pitch, the other major takeaway for the Six Nations from the Rugby World Cup was the potential need to open up to nations like Georgia, whose performances represented a loud thumping on the door of Europe’s rugby establishment.
Four months on and the entrance to rugby’s most exclusive club remains locked.
“This is a closed tournament,” said Six Nations chief executive John Feehan last week.
“This is not a subject on our agenda and, frankly, it is not the job of the Six Nations to provide solutions for Georgia, Romania or anyone else.”
It’s blunt but to the point. Six Nations Rugby is a private company which is doing very nicely for itself thank you very much and does not share the obligation of World Rugby to develop the game elsewhere. Sorry Georgia.
Neither is it, in that context, too bothered about the quality of the rugby, which brings us back to the opening point.
Gregor Paul of the New Zealand Herald wrote about the Kiwis’ dismissive attitude to the tournament in the Irish Times preview supplement this week.
“The biggest reason the Six Nations kind of passes Kiwis by, is that they don’t much rate it.”
The thing is, that cuts both ways. We don’t take much heed of southern rugby either, for all its fantasy and spectacle.
There is a sense that, with its forgoing of bonus-point fireworks, the Six Nations gives us something earthy and timeless and quintessentially of these parts.
Yes, that means the odd Saturday afternoon watching Italy and Scotland fumble their way through the drizzle. But more often than not it provides gripping physical confrontation, lump-in-the-throat heroism and breathtaking drama.
So, the Six Nations: over-hyped, sozzled, insular, and sometimes not very good. Just the way we like it. Thank God it’s back.
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