A ringside seat as entertainment eats sport

Imagine a football match that starts not with the two team captains tossing a coin but with the fastest members of each side sprinting from the goalmouth to the halfway line to grab the ball.

A football match in which the half-time entertainment is provided by a team of scantily-clad women from Stringfellows. A football match in which offside has been abandoned to speed up the goal action and in which the half-time dressing-room talk is broadcast live.

Add a touch of extra violence and a bucketful of hype and you have XFL, the new form of American football launched at the weekend in the United States and currently dividing sports commentators and fans alike.

One of the great phenomena of televised sport in the United States of recent years has been the remarkable success of professional wrestling. When one wrestler, The Rock, has a book on the bestseller list and another, Jesse Ventura, is the best-known governor in the country, you know that someone has tapped into a particularly lucrative cell of the American psyche.

So when Vince McMahon, the debonair billionaire head of the World Wrestling Federation which stages - or stage-manages - the bouts, was looking to expand his empire, he did so with the aim of bringing all the hype and blood and guts of wrestling to the football field, even including Ventura as a commentator, to the outrage of some of the governor's more conservative Minnesota constituents.

One of the big networks, NBC, liked the idea and both organisations put in $100m (approximately £85m) to launch the XFL league.

Last weekend saw the first live game, with the Las Vegas Outlaws taking on the New York/New Jersey Hitmen. The rules are different: there is no such thing as "safe catch", which means that players can clatter into one another and risk even greater injuries than in the standard football game.

Players have their nicknames - Ox, Big Daddy and so on - rather than their names on their shirts. And, most important, everyone is wired up - the players, the coaches, the cheerleaders - giving the games a "reality television" feel at a time when such programmes as Survivor and Temptation Island are winning ratings wars.

Since XFL had been heavily hyped as more brutal than the NFL - the Extreme Fun League versus the No Fun League - there was some disappointment that the opening games did not deteriorate into bloody brawls.

Here's how the LA Times television commentator Howard Rosenberg saw it: "No blood! No gore! No broken noses! No gouged eyes! No knees below the belt, not one homicide, not even a bodyslam! Las Vegas acted less like outlaws than in-laws." The LA Times's sports writer Mike Penner attacked McMahon's "twisted vision" and described the players as "NFL rejects and never-beens", suggesting that X stood for "Xceptionally Xaggerated Xpectations."

Certainly the promised mayhem did not really materialise. The ugliest sight was the hurt expression on the face of one of the commentators when he tried to snatch an on-field word with a player, who snubbed him and ran off to his colleagues. In the first game the Outlaws were soon so far ahead of the Hitmen and the game so boring that the television switched to the other game of the day between Orlando Rage and Chicago Enforcers.

One of the main sales points had been that the cheerleaders would be raunchier and more risque than their official counterparts. But there have been so many films recently about cheerleaders - the latest is Sugar and Spice in which the cheerleaders become bankrobbers, and last year The Replacements featured cheerleaders who had all been recruited from a strip joint - that the target audience is clearly a bit jaded.

Not that this deterred the commentator at the Rage v Enforcers game from trying to inject some excitement by announcing that "the cheerleaders were lovely - they had their backfields in motion all night".

The NFL's administrators have reacted much as one imagines Lord's did on hearing of one-day pyjama games. They reckon that XFL will soon be Ex-FL. And who needs mayhem and violence when Ray Lewis - the most valuable player in the Super Bowl - was finally cleared last week in a murder case and 15 of the players competing in the nation's biggest game boast records of the criminal rather than the sporting kind?

Still, despite the disparagement of the traditional sporting world and the mockery of the television critics, the game posted a very respectable ratings total for its weekend. Viewers tuned in by the million to take NBC to the top of the network ratings with almost twice as many people watching as predicted.

A gratified McMahon said: "This is our very first year. We might make some mistakes along the way. If we do get knocked down on our keister we'll get right back up and dust ourselves off."

This weekend Los Angeles will host its first XFL game with the LA Xtreme. The city does not have its own football team, for reasons that only a psychologist and an urban planner could explain, but as from this Saturday it will have a chance to watch its own heroes taking lumps out of the Demons, Outlaws, Rage, Hitmen, Maniax, Thunderbolts or Enforcers who make up the seven other teams so far in existence. If it doesn't work out, then at least they know where to start recruiting. Vinnie Jones is now a Hollywood fixture, and who better as an ambassador for a game that wants to mix crunching violence and showbiz charisma? After all, if Gladiator is going to win the Oscar for best picture, as many now predict, why shouldn't XFL establish itself in the nation's heart?

One sad note. Hassan Shamsid-Deen of Orlando Rage suffered a dislocated shoulder in the charge to reach the ball to decide who kicked off in last weekend's opening game. At least no one gets hurt tossing a coin, even at Highbury.