by Let’s be honest, the most compelling thing about reality TV is never winning. What people want to see is a bit of suffering, whether it’s someone being evicted by the judges, biting down on a kangaroo’s testicles, or pretending to be a cat and licking milk from the cupped hands of the lady from Coronation Street. It’s no surprise, then, that the real star of Netflix’s new rugby series, Six Nations: Full Contact, is not Ireland, who won the grand slam last year, or France, who pushed them so close, but Italy, who lost all. they played five games, and they ended up equal in the end.
The series ends – spoiler! – as their head coach, Kieran Crowley, ponders how he is likely to be out of a job. A caption says that a few months later the Italian Rugby Federation decided not to renew his contract. Crowley has already taken a job with Honda Heat in the Japan Rugby League One, but watching Full Contact I wonder if he has lost his calling. Surely some enterprising producer should already have commissioned a travel series featuring Crowley and his sidekick, former Taranaki dairy farmer Neil Barnes.
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“I’m too old for this shit,” Crowley offers, wearily, as he watches his team suffer yet another crushing defeat. an interpreter. Barnes doesn’t speak Italian, at all, but he still has a knack for being able to translate the nuances of Crowley’s mood into a language everyone else understands, “for fuck’s sake”, “hit that prick”, and , in one immortal reference. to Italy’s one star player, Ange Capuozzo, “give the ball to Capu-whatever his name is, he’s fucking fast”.
Well, at least you know Barnes wasn’t messing around. There’s an authenticity to the Italian scenes that some of the other teams lack, I suspect because the team has been given more access to Netflix. Scotland are the other team to let the crew into the background, so we see the faces of the players when they find out whether or not they have been selected. It’s not a coincidence. Scotland and Italy are the two least rugby-playing nations of the six, and hoped to make the most of Netflix’s promise that the show would bring in new viewers.
The British were more secretive, and after the opening rounds it seems that the English have almost completely disappeared from the series. Which is a loss because both had their own stories; Steve Borthwick had only just taken over as England coach and Warren Gatland, who had just made his own comeback, had to deal with the threat of a players’ strike in the middle of the tournament. All we really see of either, though, is a handful of platitudes and a series of painfully awkward conversations between Gatland and his wife, Trudi, about what he’s up to.
The French, meanwhile, are all, without a doubt, themselves. “Rugby is an art of passing the ball,” says the head coach, Fabien Galthié, at one point, “with arabesques, with parabolas, while the stadium screams at the same time.” It’s a shame we don’t get a bit more of that side of the sport. The makers of the documentaries chose, instead, to repeatedly emphasize how demanding it is. Arabesques? Parabolas? Are they the two who used to play second division for Beziers?
It’s one thing to hear Finn Russell describe himself as “the Messi of rugby”, for example, but since you’ve said it, wouldn’t it be good to hear him explain what does that mean when he’s out on the field? Russell has a lot of screen time, but by the end of the series you don’t know what’s really going on in his head during the 80 minutes, why he knew to throw this pass long, or how he would see that kick. was on. Likewise, the series manages to go through six hours without even mentioning the scrum or the line-out, let alone trying to explain what it’s like to be in the middle of a test match.
Which is strange, since these things are a big part of what makes rugby unique. Instead, the series relies on trying to sell the game by interviewing some of the players – Andrew Porter, Stuart Hogg, Ellis Genge, Seb Negri, Gaël Fickou – about their backstories. But the truth is that, of all team sports, rugby union is one of the least suited to this kind of celebrity-led approach. It is, as Townsend says, “the ultimate team game”, the story of a game is not about any one player, whether they win or lose, and the characters of the teams themselves are more important than the characters of the men or women. in them.
It reeks of distrust, as if the sport thinks it has to sell itself to new audiences by pretending to be something else. By the end of the series this program has worked this out, and the strongest episodes are the ones when it’s really clear what the win means for Italy and Scotland in particular. A second series, if commissioned, could be great if he’s just a little more sure of himself and the stories he’s trying to tell, if, as Barnes tells Crowley, “the balls” by the people involved in committing to her.
