When I recently wrote about the end of Eurosport, I also referenced once more, the then ongoing discussion about what would happen with the Six Nations.

The good news is that yesterday a four-year deal was announced for 2026-2029 between the Six Nations and the BBC and ITV. The tournament will continue to be available live and free-to-air. The new deal is reportedly worth £63 a year, split between the two broadcasters, with ITV paying more. That’s because ITV gets 10 games and the BBC just 5. That broadly replicates the current situation. The difference now is that ITV will always get all five England games. Previously the BBC would get Scotland v England, or like today, Wales v England.

It seems that good sense has prevailed – or perhaps, TNT Sports just didn’t bid (Sky Sports seemingly didn’t). The complexities of the importance of rugby in Wales and Ireland were a major factor.

More to the point, I’ve always seen it as critical to the future of the sport that there is regular live rugby on free television. The odd club game on ITV4 and a quadrennial World Cup just isn’t enough.

One way or another, the deal has been done, and rugby union remains available for all to view.

The photo above was created with Adobe AI. Asking the AI to create a rubgy pitch proved to be basically impossible. It kept coming up with NFL posts or something that really didn’t look like regular rugby uprights. Similarly, despite asking for a “rugby” ball, it kept coming up with an American Football. In the end, I completely changed track and came up with the following prompt, to which I added a sub-par rugby ball that Adobe Express also came up with. Overall, a very unsatisfactory experience despite using lots of prompts. Here’s what I ended up with, which really isn’t what I ended up with (I was thinking of the opening credits to The Good Fight as inspiration): “There is a flat screen TV in an empty room which is exploding. There are shards of glass and television everywhere.” I did try including the rugby ball element in this prompt, but it gave me poor results and I added it in manually.