Rugby League World Cup Coverage

George Riley wasn't scheduled to present any of the TV coverage, just the radio coverage. It was Tanya Arnold, as billed.

Ah thanks - was reported otherwise in The Sunday Times

Note to BBC researchers, "Tonga" doesn't rhyme with "longer", it's pronounced as "Tong...a" – like in the sentence, "this host's pronunciation of Tonga has all gone Pete Tong...a." Not that anyone has to listen to commentators, but they get some things right

BBC have diligently been removing the video ref's KFC adverts from the highlights, so that we only see the essential information of "TRY" or "NO TRY", or "MORE CHICKEN IN VID REF BOOTH PLZ"

About the match graphics, have they been made specially for this tournament? The team line-up pages are a lot more plain and simple than you might have expected. Australia's 7 Network grabbed the rights and they probably want their coverage to be flashier than channel Nine's. Don't they?

http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/9e330bf845bfb6ceb829a752c74c9159

Thoroughly recommend the New Zealand v Tonga game, which has lifted the whole tournament, and showed NZ sport at its best. Not the Kiwis/Warriors, but the amazing fan turnout for Tonga (many in NZ have Tongan heritage) and the way the team inspire such passion.

The graphics bear a resemblance to Sky NZ’s but are not the exact same.

Don’t Fox Sports and Nine have nearly all Australian Rugby League coverage between them? If so, and Seven (assuming they are host broadcasters) doesn’t show any rugby league normally, they probably needed to devise graphics specifically for it.

Yes. I wondered how the BBC got around the truly unsubtle KFC advertising. It's one thing to see a priced product not available anywhere else in the world on the pitch, but then (watching a game via Freesports) then to see the video ref caption, being polluted with the same rubbish.

Also, I really don't like how the seconds part of the score/time bar has been done. White numbering going into white shading on the very edge on the right hand side, isn't very clever graphic design.

Yeah, that's right. Bit of a risk choosing a different broadcaster.

It looks like the tournament is struggling in Australia:

- https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/nov/13/rugby-league-world-cup-has-been-snubbed-in-nrl-obsessed-australia

I was wondering about the lack of live radio coverage in most countries – it's due to an organizational stuff-up:

- https://www.radioinfo.com.au/news/rugby-world-cup-radio-deal-collapses-two-days-opener

I think it's a tradition for commentators to balls up the pronunciation of as many things as possible.

I'm sure the Pronunciation Unit are well aware of the correct pronunciation, as every time I've heard it on the news, it's been correct.

The commentators in Aus/NZ do say it right, but some of the studio gang may not have noticed.



Not just Australia - the crowd at Wellington for the quarterfinal NZ v Fiji is embarrassing.

Hmm, this tournament isn't very meaningful to Australian TV... It turns out channel Seven also had the 2013 tournament rights, and put every game on their secondary channel, 7mate. They're largely relegating the games to that channel in this 2017 World Cup too, despite being in the host nation. It's all free-to-view though.

The famous divide between the two halves of Australia is also in evidence – in eastern Australia the main channel has the Kangaroos' games and the final, if nothing else. (According to the full schedule for Aussie TV.)

(Graphics from a few weeks ago)


In central and western Australia, the main Seven channel won't show any rugby league games during this tournament, because the sport doesn't sell.

In those regions, people would much prefer to see the World Cup of Aussie Rules. And now they can. Kinda.



Looks like another 5am kickoff for BBC's match next Saturday. The final will also be live, but that's a 9am start.

That video was from two years ago incidentally! This years International Rules series concluded yesterday - the graphics Seven used were like something out of the 1990s and bore no resemblance to the ones they are using for the Rugby League World Cup.

The split in Australia from state to state in perceived interest in the sport is so engrained that up until this year Seven went as far as not having their main channel in HD in some states because 7mate shows the AFL games and they'd struck a deal guaranteeing HD coverage nationwide, so rather than show AFL for 2 hours a week on the main channel in the rugby league states they made their secondary channel HD and sacrificed their main channel. Thankfully this year common sense came into play.

Abbreviations news, Seven's scoreboard renders the Cook Islands as CIL



instead of the unfortunate abbreviation the organizers use. And which the Olympics use. And FIFA. And the ISO. And "COO" isn't even taken by any other country