The Rugby World Cup kicks off in New Zealand tomorrow (well, today their time). You can expect me to be spending a lot of time on front of the TV getting very depressed as Wales embarrass themselves against Samoa and Fiji. Still, as long as the English don’t win, we don’t care.
Those of you in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand will already know your teams’ schedules and where to find coverage. I’m not sure what you’ll get in the US and Canada, but you can see the match schedule here. ITV are showing the matches online so TunnelBear may allow you to watch them. For Kevin’s benefit, the USA matches (in California time, assuming no clock changes) are as follows:
- Ireland: Sat. 10th, 11:00pm
- Russia: Thurs. 15th, 12:30am
- Australia: Fri. 23rd, 1:30am
- Italy: Mon. 26th, 11:30pm
Sadly the Russians appear to be rather good. I expect the Eagles to finish bottom of their pool. Wales should at least manage to beat Namibia. It looks like the Wallabies have an easy draw all the way to the semi-finals, which gives them plenty of time to play themselves into form.
Don’t get me started on the state of the Rugby coverage in the USA.
NBC Universal Sports, which is on basic cable, has an exclusive deal with the IRB which translates to 10 out of the 48 games, and they’re NOT showing the final.
They are showing the US group games on NBC in HD, but everything else is SD, unless I want to pay DirecTV $34.95(!) a game to watch them on PPV.
So, VPN + one of the local Irish/English/Australian bars for me…
NZ clocks go forward on Sunday 25th (which may not matter, if you started from the ITV times).
The office is quite festive – white and black and red (opening match vs Tonga). I don’t think we have any Northern Irish around to get offended by the (unofficial) posters using the Eire flag.
Currently considering chosing France in the sub-office pool, to improve my chances (several people having gone for NZ, and refusing to pick England).