Friday night is rugby night?

[Ray de Galles]

What happened last night? How come suddenly I had the choice of 4 live televised rugby games at (3 Union, 1 rubbish) at the same time? English Premiership and Super League play-off on Sky, Magners League on BBC Wales and French Premiership on Eurosport 2.

Did someone suddenly decide that Friday night was the new Saturday afternoon for rugby?

[ursus arctos]

Friday night is rugby night?

I think it started in France (and was key in their getting the Eurosport contract). We now have a "Friday Night Game of the Week" in Italy as well (when I stumbled across it last night, I thought it was a replay from last season).

[Ray de Galles]

Friday night is rugby night?

An Italian game or from another league?

[Gambrinus]

Friday night is rugby night?

There's been Welsh games televised on Friday nights for years and years. Invariably, they tend to be a chore to watch.

[ursus arctos]

Friday night is rugby night?

Treviso-Viadana, Harry.

What passes for a big match here.

[Eggchaser]

Friday night is rugby night?

Sale almost always play their home matches on a Friday (and Newcastle never play at home on a Saturday), but this season, they're packing the matches in on a compressed timetable because of the Lions Tour.

Quins have a match coming up on a Thursday bloody night. It's getting as bad as football, I tells ya.

I am very pleased that ITV4 shows all the GP tries, though. Even if we fucking lost a match we should have buried by half time for the second week in a row. 20-8 at half time (which in itself should have been 20-3 if we'd have not gone to sleep with thirty seconds left) to losing 27-28. Grr!

[Ray de Galles]

Friday night is rugby night?

This seems as good a place as any to put this ;



Prick. I can only hope that this is an indication of how he's going to handle the rest of his career.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Friday night is rugby night?

Leinster started doing it about ten years ago. It was very new and unusual, but was hugely popular in terms of crowds attending, which still matters a whole hell of a lot more than TV money in rugby.

I don't know if we were first, but it seemed to catch on pretty quickly elsewhere afterwards.

[Ray de Galles]

Friday night is rugby night?

It's not the concept of Friday night games I was commmenting on, they are commonplace. It's the multiplicity of telvised games at that time across many channels.

I can't recall a time when I have been able to watch three union and one league matches at the same time and even in a more televised sport like football I can't recall the same occurring.

[ursus arctos]

Friday night is rugby night?

Though contemporaneous "invention" is rather likely in cases like this, I actually think the trend started in League/Jeu a XIII in France.

That Cipriani thing is unspeakable.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Friday night is rugby night?

I'd rather that than the sight of a middle aged John Berger trying to chat up feminists which was on last night.

What's wrong with being sexy?

[Eggchaser]

Friday night is rugby night?

I see lil' Jonny has but himself again. Jesus, Charles VI of France only thought he was made of glass, Wilkinson appears to be actually made of it.

Plus, would you rather see Danny Cipriani on the cover or this?

[Ray de Galles]

Friday night is rugby night?

More Cipriani-related bullshit ;

Wasps gamble on Cipriani pulling bumper crowd to Twickenham for Leinster match

Robert Kitson The Guardian,

Thursday October 16 2008

Wasps have hired Twickenham for their key Heineken Cup pool game against Leinster on January 17. The move represents a nakedly ambitious bid to cash in on the rising profile of their England fly-half Danny Cipriani. "He's a celeb foremost and almost a rugby player second," said the club's chief executive, Tony Copsey, yesterday, sounding distinctly like a boxing promoter with a lot of tickets to sell.

There are a number of people within the game who believe Cipriani could do with a week or two of relative anonymity but Wasps clearly sense there is capital to be made out of the reaction to last week's much publicised training-ground fight between the No10 and his team-mate Josh Lewsey. Despite failing to sell out their 10,000-capacity Adams Park home this season, Wasps aim to attract a crowd of 33,000 at Twickenham, four times higher than the attendance for last weekend's home win over Castres.

If Wasps reach their goal, Copsey believes the Cipriani factor will rank among the major explanations.

"We've been very fortunate at Wasps to have a lot of big-name players," he said, "[like] Lawrence Dallaglio, Josh Lewsey and a number of others. Danny is one of those and we're fortunate that those players get a bit of press. He is taking rugby to new heights. Obviously in the weeks leading up to the game we'll be sending Danny fighting in the clubs and streaking in the streets to give the club some more publicity."

[Guest]

Friday night is rugby night?

Hmph. Huddersfield players are always thumping folk, and it never adds anything to the gate. Perhaps if they sent big Eorl round to thump Cipriani?

[Eggchaser]

Friday night is rugby night?

In the spirit of the charity wrestling matches of yore?

Tony Copsey used to be managing director at Quins. Whilst he did some very good things for the club, he didn't half piss off fans when, faced with some unofficial message board criticism of something or other, he logged on and told us "If you don't like it, you can always go to Vicarage Road" (to watch Saracens). Although this was no doubt intended as a jest, Christ, it backfired and he got flamed to death.

Although I read that article as being sarcastic, especially his last comment about punch ups in clubs.

[Guest]

Friday night is rugby night?

In the spirit of the charity wrestling matches of yore?

I was thinking more of giving him a well-deserved twatting, but I think Lewsey has that angle covered.

Although I read that article as being sarcastic, especially his last comment about punch ups in clubs.

That's how I read it, but irony is pretty much wasted on sports journos. Has Stephen Jones had a good fulminate about it yet?

[Eggchaser]

Friday night is rugby night?

The Walrus is still annoying Kiwis and anyone who thinks Mike Tindall is a fucking donkey.

[Me Old Flower]

Friday night is rugby night?

Does anyone ever have anything good to say about Stephen Jones? Hated in RL circles and a lot of RU fans seem to think he's a cunt as well.

[Eggchaser]

Friday night is rugby night?

Any England player who's either old and preferably very musclebound likes him, because he continually bangs the drum for their inclusion over younger players who can do that fancy stuff like, you know, pass, run around (possibly at speed) rather than into a player and - God forbid - offload out of a tackle. He was an advocate of a Noon/Tindall midfield axis to overpower the weedy foreigners for some time.

[Guest]

Friday night is rugby night?

I get the impression that in Jonesworld, the ideal rugby match would consist of nothing but one continuous rolling maul.

[Ray de Galles]

Friday night is rugby night?

Eggchaser wrote:

In the spirit of the charity wrestling matches of yore?

Tony Copsey used to be managing director at Quins. Whilst he did some very good things for the club, he didn't half piss off fans when, faced with some unofficial message board criticism of something or other, he logged on and told us "If you don't like it, you can always go to Vicarage Road" (to watch Saracens). Although this was no doubt intended as a jest, Christ, it backfired and he got flamed to death.

Although I read that article as being sarcastic, especially his last comment about punch ups in clubs.

Copsey's last comment definitely is sarcastic but the first one I higlighted isn't.

Shaun Edwards isn't happy with all the hype;

Wasps' venue switch is more like a shot in the foot than one in the arm

Our move to Twickenham in January is to bring in extra funds, not to capitalise on Danny Cipriani's appeal

There are two ways of looking at this. There is the view of the money men, the chief executives, the guys who have to balance the books and find the money needed to keep a club going. The guys who pay the wages. And then there's the view of the coaches and the players - the guys who have to be totally focused on producing the best team possible. Sometimes they don't sit easily together, although both would probably argue that their goals are the same.

This week, though, in the selling of a game, there has been a glitch. For those who don't know, and there can't be many, Wasps are moving the venue of the Heineken Cup game against Leinster on January 17 to Twickenham in the hope of increasing the gate and getting some much-needed funds by expanding the available capacity from about 10,000, which it is at our home in High Wycombe, to 33,000.

For a match between the champions of the Guinness Premiership and the Magners League that makes sense and we have done something similar before - last season, against Munster we played at the Ricoh Stadium, doubling the gate. Giving up "home" advantage was a risk then as it is now, but our record at Twickenham is pretty tasty and the ground is only just down the road for most of our London-based fans, rather than a drive up the motorway to Coventry.

So far so good. But it's the way the news was announced and the way, intentionally or inadvertently, that the game was sold on the back of the "Cipriani factor" that is upsetting.

I'm prepared to believe our chief executive, Tony Copsey, was attempting to be light-hearted when he said: "Obviously in the weeks leading up to the game we'll be sending Danny fighting in the clubs and streaking in the streets to give the club some more publicity" - but it came out wrong and is perpetuating a myth. And it is a myth.

The fact is that Danny is a serious and seriously good rugby player. But he is 20 and happens to have a well-known girlfriend, a relationship which is appealing to tabloid newspapers and plays well in a celebrity culture where even a throwaway remark only enhances the distortion that he is something of a good-time Charlie.

As I say, the truth is that he is 100% a serious rugby player and a guy who is treated no differently than any other player at Wasps. If he's late for training, he gets his backside kicked. If he plays badly, he gets dropped. He got where he is by serious application. He's dedicated.

That horrid injury to his ankle last May didn't mend quickly by accident. Initially it was thought he could be out until the new year, but a combination of work ethic and belief got him back months early and potentially better than before. He's stronger because of the time he spent in the gym and quicker because of the extra sprint coaching he undertook.

It's hard to suggest there was a downside to his recovery, but if there is, it's because it only burnished the very visible image of growing rugby celebrity. Even a training-ground bust-up became front-page news, when anyone who knows the game will understand it's in the nature of the sport that tempers do flare - and particularly in training and more so before a big game like the opening round of the Heineken Cup.

Now after coming together as a team to beat Castres and ahead of a trip to Dublin for one of the matches of the second pool round, we go and shoot ourselves in the foot when all we want to do is make the game more available to the fans. If 33,000 come to Twickenham in January it may, in part, be because of the "Danny factor" but I'll bet that the majority will be there because the team will have "sold" itself by playing well against sides like Leinster tomorrow and then Edinburgh (twice) and that qualification for the knockout rounds depends on that January 17 result.

That's what I would have preferred to have concentrated on this week. That and two performances last weekend - by Sale in getting a try bonus point in Clermont Ferrand ahead of Sunday's game against the holders, Munster, at Edgeley Park, and by Bath in Toulouse, getting to within 30 seconds of making it a perfect weekend for the English Heineken contingent in France.

Both performances were a fantastic advertisement for the Guinness Premiership and didn't go unnoticed across the Channel. Yesterday I had a look at a French website that was running a poll on the most impressive sides after the weekend. By lunch nearly 8,000 had voted, 29% for Sale, 24% for Bath, the same for Stade Français and 16% for the newcomers Montauban.

[Guest]

Friday night is rugby night?

Of course, Shaun knows all about celebrity girlfriends, but nobody ever accused him of being a good-time Charlie.

I dunno; rugby of both codes needs to sell itself as hard as it can to grab those bits of the leisure pound that the soccer juggernaut leaves by the wayside. If Wasps get their 33,000 at Twickers, nobody's going to care why they turned up. But I can see where Ciprianimania would get up Edwards' nose.

[Eggchaser]

Friday night is rugby night?

The Wasps fans seem divided on this Twickenham match - some think it's good for the money, others think that club rugby in HQ which isn't a final still tends to be well attended, but not so that you fill the 82,00 capacity and so it's feel a bit crap.

I'm inclined to fall into the "it's crap" column. We at Quins can play there and did so against Munster a few years back and are doing so again for our 27th December match aganist the forces of evil that are Leicester. I'd rather be in the small (12k) but packed to the rafters Stoop in my regular seat that rattling around a half/three-quarters empty Twickenham.

I just hope we beat Ulster this weekend.

I would also like to see the "London" clubs back in London, or at least some of them, but where they fell down when rugby went professional was that their home grounds were just classic rugby clubs, but Quins had the Stoop - a small athletics track converted to a rugby pitch where we had room to build the stands needed to have a decent crowd. The others had to go a wandering to the football grounds.

[Guest]

Friday night is rugby night?

Very fine ground it is, too, The Stoop. Seen Giants play there a couple of times. RL fans whinge about it not being on the Tube, but it's not like trains from Waterloo are terribly scarce.

There has been talk of Saracens moving to the 'legacy' Olympic stadium. It is a bit ridiculous that there is only one top-flight club rugby ground in London. Perhaps Wasps and Irish could join forces and build a new one somewhere, or do like Sale did and take over an ailing football ground.

[Eggchaser]

Friday night is rugby night?

RL fans whinge about it not being on the Tube, but it's not like trains from Waterloo are terribly scarce.

Because St Helens, Wigan, Leeds etc are just a stop away on the Circle line!

The Stoop's changed out of all recognition from the old days. What I like about it is that it's a proper rugby ground where the fans can walk all the way round, mingle and watch the players warm up yards away from the advertising hoarding whereas places like Adams Park, because they're football grounds, just aren't condusive to this.

You see a good sprinkling of the RL shirts at the Union matches, too.

Wasps were thinking of moving back to Greater London but can't get planning permission because their chosen site is on Green Belt land.