You are moving to Cork.
If I ever meet you I’ll jeer the shit out of you
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Be outside Fennesseys Thursday night.
That’s a clamping
The T is bollix as they’re not a club
Sadly* given how the franchises have destroyed the clubs, they pretty much are now.
*or not.
God be with the simpler times when rugby was an amateur sport and you could have high jinx like the Racing Club team wearing pink bow ties in the French Cup final. 
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No more than your own Nigel.
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Omg such gentlemen
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JUST 12 DAYS had passed since Nigel Owens peep-peeped the final whistle on Rugby World Cup 2015 when the news broke that TV3 had won the rights to broadcast the Six Nations from 2018-21.
TV3 had been feeling pretty good about itself. Now it felt even better.
RWC 2015 had been an incredible tournament to work on as a broadcaster (my first day on duty included anchoring coverage of South Africa v Japan. Remember that?) and transformative for TV3 as a station. No Irish free-to-air channel had ever broadcast all 48 matches before (in 2007 and 2011 TV3 and RTÉ respectively had shown 13, Setanta the remainder), so it represented the biggest challenge TV3 had ever undertaken.
Six weeks, 541 All Black offloads and one hospital wing full of Irish players later and the sky had not fallen in. There were criticisms: some people didn’t like certain commentators and pundits, most thought there were far too many ads, but the response was largely positive.
Showing every game free-to-air meant that matches like South Africa v Japan reached audiences that otherwise may not have seen them. The greatest ever Rugby World Cup – the sport’s Mexico 1970 moment – was available to all. For weeks after Richie McCaw lifted the Webb Ellis Trophy emails, letters and cards arrived into TV3 from appreciative viewers.
A decent result and one which helped persuade Six Nations Rugby to allow TV3 possession of one sport’s most precious rights contracts.
But back to the viewers. It was expected that Ireland’s matches would deliver huge audiences, and they duly obliged: 1.16 million on average for the France match,
TV3’s highest ever ratings.
But it was the numbers for the less fashionable corners of the schedule that staggered. 277,000 for France v Canada on a Thursday night. 149,000 for Scotland v Japan on an early Wednesday afternoon. Almost 200,000 people watched Fiji play Uruguay. Fiji-bloody-Uruguay!
Major tournaments take on a life of their own, hooking mass audiences into an almost daily delivery of the latest twist in the narrative. In no other context would 200,000 Irish people sit down to watch Fiji play Uruguay in a rugby match; for some reason it made sense to do so on that Tuesday night in October
Great piece by Tommy Martin on the transformative effect of Rugby Football on TV3.
Ryle Nugent will be very cross about this, you feel.
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#bayshtmode
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Jamie Heaslip will be seething when he hears he hasn’t gotten the Irish captaincy
Lovely delusional piece here from Gerry Thornley in IRFU Pravda this morning. Leinster win a dead rubber and all of a sudden their under age system is the envy of Europe.
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#cullenscubs
The mood swings of the Irish rugby crowd remind me of yer man Tommy Tiernan in the back of the bus in Father Ted.
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Their PR machine is outstanding though, you have to hand it to them. Of course it has to be, any little slip and the house of cards that are the provinces could come crashing down. One mildly impressive weekend and all the cogs are in full motion, from Munster bigging up the support welcoming the team off the bus the morning of the game, to Leinster lauding their academy and
#cullenscubs
Its damn impressive.
It’s a house of straw
