The international Championship, or as it was renamed some years ago, the Five Nations Championship, has been on the rugby calendar for over 100 years. It has been contested on 104 occasions and this weekend, the current series will end.

Tomorrow at Wembley Stadium, Wales will be attempting to stop France from doing the Grand Slam, a feat the French achieved last season. The French have completed the Grand Slam on five occasions, but have never won it in successive seasons. So a great incentive tomorrow for the French, but they may well find the Welsh more difficult and resolute opponents than suggested by the bookmakers.

Ireland proved that the French can be vulnerable a few weeks ago and that lesson has not been lost on Wales. Like the French, England are odds on to defeat Ireland at Twickenham this afternoon when a win will give England the Triple Crown. Ireland's ambitions are more humble - to avoid a whitewash, an indignity that, for all our recent problems, has not been endured by the Irish for six years.

This afternoon, Ireland will need all their fighting qualities, attributes they revealed in Paris last month, against England in Dublin in 1993 and, famously, at Twickenham in 1994, when then, as now, the Irish were rated "no hopers".

Some English commentators would, of course, abandon the Five Nations series on the grounds that the Celtic nations can no longer compete with England and France. The arguments put forward are selective and take no account of the history of this series, which far from losing its appeal through the years, has in fact increased it. Those who advocate abandoning the series are very much in a minority and have been influenced only by what has happened over the last few years. They rather conveniently ignore many a losing sequence by England through the years when there was not a word about England's recurring failures or Welsh dominance. One of the more vociferous advocates of abandoning the championship, shortly and happily to include Italy, told us a few weeks ago that England had lost just one match in Twickenham in the series over the last six years, to Ireland in 1994. I seem to remember France winning there last season. Indeed, maybe France should now stop playing England as well seeing that France won the last four matches between the two countries, but not a word about that.

It seems to have been forgotten that two years ago, England stood on the brink of ejection from the championship after a clandestine television deal was done with Sky. We heard all the talk from Twickenham and the then secretary of the English Rugby Union (RFU) about deals with the Southern Hemisphere countries. But England came back cap in hand when the Celtic nations stood firm on the television deal. Unfortunately, the deal the RFU did with Sky was such that their exclusive rights to England's home matches could not be surmounted. The BBC got the live transmission rights of all the other matches in the championship, as, to their credit, did RTE.

But that deal between Sky and the RFU has been reflected in the current championship. With England's home matches now the exclusive preserve of Sky. ITV has deferred rights and RTE has also secured a similar deal for Ireland's match next Saturday.

And is it not ironic that it was a newspaper owned by Sky chief Rupert Murdoch that set up the two Newcastle United directors without a thought for the families who are so badly damaged as a consequence. Sir John Hall, who has resumed the chairmanship of Newcastle, has had some telling comments to make on the damage done to his family, and understandably so.

But bear in mind the company that runs Newcastle United also runs Newcastle rugby club. And was not Sir John Hall an advocate of doing television deals with Sky? Did he not tell us, with great regularity, what a collection of blundering idiots run the various rugby unions? Well, he scarcely chose very well in his own successors at Newcastle where he is now back at the helm in a salvation exercise.

Who helped sell the English club game down the river to Sky? The Celtic nations told Murdoch's minnows in Sky where to go when they tried to do a deal with them after they had the RFU and the English club owners in their pockets. The rest is history, albeit not very pleasant history.

There are, too, some revealing figures in relation to the number of viewers for Sky's live transmissions of international rugby and the authorities would do well to bear them in mind. For instance, the live transmission of the England versus Wales match was watched by only 700,000 on Sky. In contrast, nearly 3,000,000 viewers watched the deferred highlights of the match on ITV.

But there are even more revealing figures in relation to the live transmissions of the France-Ireland match on BBC, which was followed by the live transmission of the Wales-Scotland match on the Saturday afternoon. The matches had staggered kick-off times and the audience figures reached around 6,000,000. When one bears in mind that the England team was not involved and that England has a far greater population, there is considerable food for thought there. Could there be a greater justification of the Celtic nations stand on the television rights?

"We maintained throughout the negotiations on the television deal, that the propagation of the game was a crucially important issue and there is strong evidence to support that view and our decision to do the deal we did with the BBC," said Syd Millar, one of the men who negotiated the deal. Furthermore, the decision to switch matches in the Five Nations series to Sundays has not proved a success. Switching matches to Sunday was of course part of the television deal, but there is no enthusiasm for it among supporters. According to those who were in Murrayfield for the recent Scotland-England match which was played on a Sunday, the atmosphere was totally downbeat before, during and after the match. As one observer put it: "Edinburgh was a ghost town an hour after the match."

Millar's comment that "Sunday matches came about as a direct result of the television deals. We do not favour championship matches on Sundays. Saturday is the traditional day for the internationals and it is obvious that is what the rugby public wants. It is not a question of being hidebound by tradition. There are many factors on this issue, not least economic.

"People like to spend the weekend when they travel, it has long been an integral part of the series. For instance, 20,000 Welsh followers were in Ireland a fortnight ago. There seems to be a compelling argument that all the championship matches will revert to Saturday, with staggered kick-off times to accommodate the two-tier match programme." There is indeed.