The long-term costs of pay-per-view

GERRY THORNLEY/ON RUGBY:  It's a sad state of affairs when the sector of the public which any sport should be striving its hardest to reach, namely the young, the players of tomorrow, denies vast numbers of them access to one of the showpiece events of the year.

The anger over Sky's exclusive rights to this Saturday's Twickenham encounter between England and Ireland is palpable. Quite where this anger should be directed is another question, however, and the more you scratch the surface the more disparate become the targets.

For the third time in five years (this being the last year year of Sky's five-year deal with the English RFU), the game will be shown live only on the subscription channel. It will, admittedly, again be shown - re-heated, as opposed to raw product - as a deferred, full recording on ITV. However, once more it has been denied to RTÉ television (though it is on RTÉ radio).

Ireland's national broadcasting station made, according to the head of television sport, Niall Cogley, "a very substantial offer (to Sky) from our point of view to which we were told we weren't even in the ball park. That's tradespeak for 'you're not getting it'." Nor, says Cogley, can he particularly blame them.

On the face of it, this is solely the fault of the English RFU's self-interest, arrogance and greed when they went their own way with regard to television coverage of home championship games almost five years ago. Admittedly, they were facing with crippling bills for the redevelopment of Twickenham while the English club owners were at their most stridently confrontational at the time.

So they took the estimated £85 million and also took the championship to the brink of collapse in the ensuing political fall-out before a redistribution of the Sky monies was agreed.

For short-term financial gain, the damage this has done to the long-term development of rugby union in England can only be imagined. After all, the failure to reach out to a wider audience, and especially future generations of supporters and players alike, happens for every Twickenham match.

The sport is no longer watched by anything like the general sporting public in the way it used to when the Beeb and the game's most effective public relations agent, Bill McLaren, were in their pomp.

What has happened to rugby in England is not unlike the death of boxing as a populist sport in this part of the world, and which assuredly can be traced to that sport selling its soul to pay-per-view television.

According to the trade magazine TV Sports Markets, the top 69 sports events which were broadcast on satellite television in 2001 in Britain were all football matches. The third Test between Australia and the Lions was 70th, with an estimated audience of 853,000; in 76th place was the second Test, at 793,000, and in 77th place came the England-Scotland game, which was credited with 776,000 viewers.

By comparison, in the top 100 sports events on British terrestrial television last year, the Wales-England game on BBC1 was placed 39th with an audience of 5.98 million. Even the Ireland-Wales game last week was watched, RTÉ believe, by around 380,000, and so it's safe to presume that 400,000-plus would have tuned in next Saturday for the Twickenham game had it been on RTÉ.

While there are estimated to be 194,000 Irish subscribers to Sky Sports - and many of these will include bars and rugby clubs - the audience figure, and especially the age profile, is sure to be affected.

HOWEVER, for all Twickenham's arrogance and self-interest, there is a feeling that more could have been done to ensure this Saturday's game was shown on Irish free-to-air television.

Senator Jim Glennon, the former Irish second row and a Fianna Fáil candidate in the next election in Dublin North, echoed the anger of most Irish rugby supporters who would not be travelling to London this weekend by condemning the absence of live terrestrial coverage from Twickenham.

He has also broken party ranks by criticising the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaelteacht, Síle de Velera, for not enacting European law by nominating the match as a cultural event. Glennon maintained that had the Minister done so, RTÉ would then have been entitled to cover next Saturday's match.

After all, the British government and other European governments have listed the World Cup final, semi-finals and opening games among lists of "cultural events", effectively ring-fencing them from subscription or pay- per-view television.

This greatly angered the selling agents, Kirch, who bought the rights from FIFA to sell the World Cup in Europe. As a result, Sky were effectively excluded from the bidding process and this has ensured that the BBC and ITV will cover the World Cup.

It has also been revealed that consultations were held between RTÉ and the Department regarding a potential list of sporting events to be retained on terrestrial television, and among those proposed were rugby internationals.

Despite this, Glennon yesterday felt obliged to revise his critique of the Minister. "I've been informed by the Minister's Department that the three main sporting bodies in this country, the GAA, the FAI and the IRFU, are all against any of the main events being listed. I am told that all three of them have difficulties, and particularly the IRFU, while the Sports Council has objections to it as well."

The Department reaffirmed this yesterday, and if it is true that IRFU officials have been reluctant to have major internationals included on a prospective list of "cultural events" which the Government would submit to the EU, then the union can't really complain when their Twickenham counterparts behave in the same manner.

However, the union flatly rejected this yesterday. Their press officer, John Redmond, stressed that they "want to see rugby games viewed by the widest possible television audience".

It is also clearly their view that the ball has been in the Minister's court for quite some time.

"The IRFU willingly and enthusiastically attended two or three meetings with the Minister and have been waiting for well over a year for her to come back to us," said Redmond. "We haven't heard anything from her."