Rather than patrolling the sidelines with microphone in hand, Martin Bayfield enjoyed this year’s Guinness Six Nations Championship as a punter rather than a broadcaster for the first time in more than a decade.
The former England and British and Ireland Lions forward has become a regular and powerful presence on our screens since joining ITV’s rugby team for their World Cup coverage in 2007.
Having also worked at the BBC and since 2013 in the world of pay TV (first as a presenter and reporter for BT Sport, and now for TNT Sports covering Premiership and Champions Cup rugby), Bayfield’s judgment has a foot in many areas benefits from it. camps.
His view therefore adds a new perspective to the debate over the championship’s broadcast future, which was restarted last November when the BBC’s former director of sport Barbara Slater admitted that the BBC may not be able to continue to acquire broadcast rights to the Six Nations. currently sharing it with ITV in a deal that runs until next year.
Bayfield, who played 31 times for England and three for the Lions on the 1993 tour of New Zealand, has a firm opinion on this matter. He believes Six Nations should remain on terrestrial television but its coverage requires a seismic overhaul.
Rather than continuing to split it between the BBC and ITV, Bayfield believes viewers will be best served by bringing the championship under one roof, allowing the broadcaster to create a coherent narrative across seven weeks.
“Rugby hid and jumped out from behind a tree and shouted, ‘Here we are!’ cannot say. Then I disappear again. It needs oxygen, otherwise it will fail,” Bayfield said.
“Six Nations should be free to stream and be a single platform, so you can have a single focus, a single message, a single tone. I don’t know if I’m too old-fashioned, but I want to be able to hear the theme tune and think, ‘There’s the Six Nations’ and then walk in from the other room and watch it. Rugby Special The music started and everyone sat and watched.
“I know people see things differently and I know the ‘blind date’ is almost over, but live sport is the only thing people can sit down together and watch live.
“I work as a freelancer so I don’t have a drum to beat at ITV. Either way, it doesn’t bother me. My opinions are based on the good of the game, not who I want to work for. If the game is strong, the rest of us benefit.
“You’ve got to prepare well, but what’s more important is good analysis afterwards and access to the game throughout the week. Every Six Nations game should be like a mini Super Bowl. “You’ve got press conferences, you’ve got interviews with the players and the superstars who love rugby.
“We also need to embrace new media to capture every age group because that’s what rugby is about. The only people who seem to be doing this at the moment are podcasters. They have access to these people, why aren’t the television companies doing this?”
Watching Ireland’s victory over Wales on ITV, followed by Scotland’s Calcutta Cup victory on the BBC last Saturday, highlighted Bayfield’s frustration with the lack of cohesion in the coverage.
“This had nothing to do with the pundits or the presenters, but in the build-up to the Kolkata Cup match the BBC carried out an hour-long uninterrupted build-up of the game which was absolutely brilliant,” he added.
“Ugo [Monye]Sam [Warburton] and John Barclay were outstanding in the build-up and the post-match analysis was some of the best you’ll ever see. By comparison, the Ireland-Wales game on ITV also had really good pundits – Drico [Brian O’Driscoll]Jamie Roberts and Rory Best.
“But they were looking at it in three- or four-minute chunks, and then an ad came on. Then another three or four minute piece and another commercial. So the quality is on uneven ground due to the amount of time you can devote to it. That’s what really struck me there, and that’s what people wanted.
“Of course, if you go behind the paywall, you can always treat them like Netflix. Drive to Survive They could dedicate a series or an entire channel on F1 to this. If it was on Sky Sports they would probably have the Six Nations channel for seven weeks.
“There are advantages and disadvantages, but ultimately you want as many eyes on it as possible and of course that only comes from terrestrial TV which can broadcast in the millions rather than hundreds of thousands.
“But if it stays on terrestrial TV they need to do not just a brief preparation but all the work before they announce they’re going to the Ant and Dec show five minutes after the end of the match. There needs to be a continuous narrative from start to finish so it would be much better to have it on one channel.”
When it comes to rugby coverage, in-house TV’s mantra of being a ‘broadcaster’ and not a ‘narrow broadcaster’ is another Bayfield bogeyman. He believes it should promote the complexities of the game rather than simplifying content and analysis to appeal to a wider audience.
“I hear it all the time, ‘Oh, we should broadcast down to the lowest common denominator,’” he said. “We have to assume people watching don’t know anything about rugby.
“I would turn that on his head. I can still remember watching Rhona Martin throw her ‘stone of fate’ to win the gold medal in the Winter Olympics curling final in Salt Lake City in 2002. I didn’t know anything about curling. Nobody did either. But when we went to work the next morning, our eyes swollen from staying awake, we were all experts.
“What we want is for people to try to talk about Thomas Ramos’ striking style and how he likes to have the ball valved towards the outside of his boot. “We need to get the best analysts in there, not just the big names but people who can get the message across and sell the game.
“It’s not just about 80 minutes on Friday, Saturday or Sunday. We need coverage throughout the week, previews and reviews of games.
“We need to find ways to tell people how great the Six Nations are. This is a tournament that every rugby-playing country would want to be a part of.
“The Rugby Championship in the southern hemisphere would love to be like the Six Nations but it will never happen. Let’s grow the Six Nations. It should be on a single channel and in a properly structured calendar where every game is given importance.
“We have to make people fall in love with our game, and to do that we have to have some fun.”