With just 24 hours and counting to go …
Having yesterday seen some of the early rushes from the Channel Four documentary being made about our intrepid Rusters’ Tour de Japan I am confident that the British public will be in for a veritable treat – not to mention a suitably entertaining antidote to whatever the result of the General Election turns out to be – at 9.00pm on Christmas Day as they recover from their post-festive lunchtime stupor.
Set your viewing schedule – or recording devices – now!
Back here in Blighty, as you might expect given the England team’s success in reaching tomorrow’s Rugby World Cup Final, the nation has spent the past week going progressively rugby-bonkers in daily stages.
There are few things with a greater capacity to get we Brits jumping on a proverbial bandwagon of jingoistic battle-fever than a prospective success upon a global scale and right now, inevitably, rugby is the beneficiary.
The cohorts of popular media scribes have been working overtime to crank up the anticipation factor as ‘our boys’ complete their final preparations to go “over the top” against the might hordes of South Africa tomorrow morning.
Suddenly rugby, normally confined to relative the obscurity page six or seven of the sports pages, is making the front page headlines the features – and even the ‘female interest’ sections – of the newspapers from a variety of different angles.
Here below are some representative examples that I spotted overnight:
First up – and justifiably in that position – comes Andy Bull’s piece on the diversity of the England’ squads’ backgrounds that appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
BBC Radio 4 presenter Justin Webb calls for rugby union to replace football at the UK’s nation go-to sport, on the website of the – DAILY MAIL
Jack de Menezes covers Eddie Jones’ press conference announcing the England team and the approach his squad will adopt on the website of – THE INDEPENDENT
Next, Adam Storer brings his readers up to speed on how – should it go that far – the Final’s place-kicking shoot-out will work, on the website of – THE SUN
Jane Fryer give readers of the Female Section the low-down on England’s opponents on today’s website of the – DAILY MAIL
