We need to talk about Amazon

One notable thing about Saturday’s Autumn Nations Cup games is that, for the first time that I am aware of, rugby was shown on Amazon Prime Video.

The coverage was fine – certainly no worse than what we’ve seen previously via Sky or BT, for instance.

What is getting some people riled up, however, is the fact that Saturday’s games were not available on free-to-air TV.

For the most part I do sympathise. I’m a big believer in international rugby being available to as wide an audience as possible (and, indeed, the England Women’s match vs France on Saturday was shown live on BBC2).

However, these are extraordinarily unusual times and the Autumn Nations Cup is – or at least we think it is – intended as a one-off tournament, designed to replenish to a limited degree the coffers of unions who have lost tens of millions of pounds during the Covid-19 pandemic and who are unable to recover such losses via paying spectators in the stadia.

So, for once, in such circumstances I am relatively happy to see some matches disappear behind a paywall, especially when you bear in mind that England’s November internationals are usually only accessible via Sky anyway and given that – from an entirely selfish perspective – I am already an Amazon Prime member and so it costs me nothing extra! 😜

Total Flanker – the older I get, the better I was