The northern hemisphere is in the middle of another six nations right now. Not that you would know about it in NZ. A small blurb might appear in the paper on Tuesday morning about who won what, but generally New Zealanders in this alleged rugby mad country wouldn’t know the first thing about who is playing who or winning what in the major northern hemisphere international rugby tournament.
The reasons? Well, the tournament isn’t screened on free-to-air or sky sports (on any of Sky’s three sports channels for that matter). If you are a hard core rugby fan and have money flowing in these tight economic times, you might be able to fork out an extra $10 a week on top of all the other sky goodies to get the rugby channel.
The rugby channel does show the games – at about three o’clock in the morning. It also shows a whole load of other rubbish (third division slog fests between King Country and Waitaki old boys and rugby panel discussions lead by right winger Wanganui mayor Michael Laws - a reactionary sort of block who really doesn’t need another soap box to start preaching on – especially considering he’s a politician - yeuch).
I’ll give the rugby channel a miss thanks. But I think it’s pretty crap that this supposed rugby nation of the world can’t cast it’s myopic eyes north occasionally to see what’s going on in another part of the world.
But that’s the state of NZ television unfortunately.
1 comment:
It's odd to think, Ferdy, that where I live in the US, we could see all of the Six Nations games(a day delayed, but who cares) and yet in rugby-mad Kiwi-land, you were not able to follow it. There were three games that I think even a hardened Super 14 fan would have enjoyed: Ireland-France, France Wales, and Wales-Ireland were all really good matches to watch.(of the three, I think France-Wales was the best)
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