Women’s Six Nations–five things we learned

A lot has been said about how this year??s Six Nations showed?˜how standards are evening up across the competition, but the truth is that it is sevens that is making the difference. Not for the first time, a clash with the World Sevens Series has had a significant effect on England, and France too have been affected (as discussed below). Ireland certainly benefitted from being relegated from the World Series ?? which has allowed them to introduce a whole batch of new players to 15s as their sevens chances evaporated. Would Ireland be champions if they were also competing on two fronts? It is no surprise that Italy, fast improving anyway, with no sevens commitments had their best tournament, while Wales also had a good tournament free from sevens concerns. Sevens is good for the bringing new players into the sport (as Ireland have shown) but the balancing act means the top sides have yet to work out how to juggle both successfully.

And the message is that this is not a one-off. This is how the Six Nations is going to look from now on. With both France and England both in the World Series next year, and the probability that both will also be preparing for the Olympics, we are unlikely to see a Six Nations championship with full-strength teams before 2017. And after that they will split again - 2018 is Sevens World Cup year, and in 2019 we will be back where we are now.

The days when anyone could claim that there is no interest in women??s rugby are over. Apart from in Scotland, games are attracting growing crowds. Ashbourne in Ireland appeared to be as full as it could be, Italy??s final game in Padua attracted the highest crowd ever recorded for a women??s game in Italy, and France came close to filling the home of Montauban for their game against Wales. In addition TV ratings of between 300,000 and 800,000 were recorded on France 4, even when pitted against live soccer, making the games some of the highest rated programmes on the channel, and the RBS Six Nations website reported that most of the growth in reader numbers was for its women??s pages.

As Sara Orchard??s , pointed out this month?˜football and netball win far more TV hours in the UK in particular than women's rugby. And yet the headline figure is that overall 13 of the 15 games in this year??s championship were available to the armchair viewers, nearly half of which were TV broadcasts while the rest were exclusively streams.

But this good news hides a range of problems. The first is that ?? unlike with the men??s Six Nations - the TV broadcasts were often only available in one country, and in the majority of cases were actually geo-blocked for viewers attempting to watch from elsewhere. The six games shown were also scattered across five TV networks ?? only France4 showed more than one game ?? which made presenting the tournament to the average viewer as a cohesive narrative nearly impossible.

In addition games have to be easily accessible to broadcasters. Outside broadcasts are not cheap and if played on remote grounds with no in-built outside broadcast facilities, or scheduled against games in the men??s championships, are unlikely to attract coverage however supportive a broadcaster may wish to be.

Streaming is a more cost-effective and available alternative, but the experience of this year??s tournament again showed its limitations. The most serious was actually finding the stream ?? including the TV broadcasts games were scattered across at least nine websites with precise URLs rarely announced until hours, if not minutes, before the game. The streams themselves were of mixed quality, with loss of signal common. There is one obvious solution to this ?? which would be to make all of streams available in one place and we have been told that there is no technical reason why RBS Six Nations website could not act as a host for all games. Is there a?˜will to make it happen?

Negotiations for the next TV contract (from 2018) will start soon ?? there is no reason why the women??s championship should not be included.

A fourth place finish in the wake of a World Cup triumph will be a bitter pill to swallow for England, despite the contributing factors of the absence of players to sevens and the retirement of key forwards. Perhaps the most negatively impacting factor was the oddly timed departure of Gary Street just a few weeks out from the competition, giving England??s relatively young squad little time to adapt to a new interim head coach in Nicky Ponsford. While their rebuilding phase would have meant they probably weren??t favourites starting the tournament, three losses will be a shock to the system. The form of the English sevens team may also mean that this transitional phase for its test side could be even more prolonged as England are currently outside the automatic Olympic qualifying spots and may need total focus on sevens this summer to secure a place in Rio. Simon Middleton is now tasked with overseeing both programmes and the coaching roles England are currently recruiting are now vital. Young players like Abigail Brown and Amy Cokayne will be around for years to come, but their first taste of the international game has been a tough introduction.

Post World Cup, England need to push the legacy of their success to help grow the game and this year's results so far are making that task less easy than they surely would like.

What is even more puzzling about England??s performance is that France ?? with identical pressures (and probably lesser resources) ?? seem to have got things so right. They too lost key players through retirement after the World Cup; they too have had a complete change of management (albeit a couple of months from the start of the tournament, rather than a couple of weeks); and they too are seeking to qualify for the Olympics through the World Sevens Series and so have had to split their squad. In addition they had the extra challenge of playing both of their most important games (against England and Ireland) away from home. They then announced a tournament squad packed with young ex-U20 squad players from second division teams. It should never have worked.

Yet it did. The Sevens squad sit in the crucial fourth place in the World Series, while from the very beginning the fifteens seemed a notably happy ?? even joyous ?? squad. The fringe players, who had mainly been reserves in the World Cup (such as Rivoalen and Poublan), or had missed out altogether (Billes) stepped up to the mark, while the most of the young debutants (such as Cabalou and Boujard) played as if born to it. Yes, France pulled in Izar and Mayans for a couple of games, but the latter played less than 80 minutes over the tournament ?? and England also called back McLean. The youth policy may have taken a step too far against Italy, but that aside France performed better than anyone (even the team themselves) expected. So what was the difference? Was it the result of the U20 programme that so many had been through, or was it the effect of the new management team? It is very hard to say, but it??s a conundrum England need to solve.

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