by It’s 7.50pm on a Monday in mid-January and at the premiere of the Netflix rugby series – The Six Nations: Full Contact – Marcus Smith is perched casually on the edge of a stool, facing a huddle of rugby journalists. Smith is wearing a tux that makes him look like he’s going to the school prom. We were told that he has exactly seven minutes left for us. “Yes, 100%, of course …” Smith says in response to the first question when interrupted. “Good night everyone! Please make your way to your seats to begin tonight’s event! I repeat, please start making your way to your seats!” The screening is about to begin.
Smith, who has a starring role in the first episode as well as the premiere, has spent the night bustling from camera to camera. The truth is that he looks much more comfortable running a Test match than he does walking a red carpet. There needs to be more space in midfield, too. Tonight he has an entourage of five, six, seven people, handlers, agents, press officers, cameramen. Two of them are busy recording footage of it all on their phones. I ask them if they are with Netflix. “No,” they said, “it’s for the socialists.” In the time it takes for them to say that Smith has already passed out and both are scrambling to catch up with him.
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“It’s probably not what I signed up for when I was 18, to have all these cameras in my face,” Smith admits a little ruefully. “But, it’s a privilege.” This last part is completely irrelevant. “You see what he’s done for golf, what he’s done for F1, and I hope he can push rugby, the sport that I love and that changed my life, to a wider audience as well. .”
The success of Netflix’s Drive To Survive comes to a head during the evening. It has had a transformative effect on F1, particularly in the United States, and now sports such as golf, tennis and athletics have signed up their own behind-the-scenes show in the hope that it will do similar things for their popularity. So far it is not clear that any of them have enjoyed the same cupping.
The first episode focuses on England’s match against Scotland last year, which is presented as a sort of spat, between Smith and his opposite number Finn Russell. The other 44 players involved barely mention it even though, as Russell coach Gregor Townsend says in the show, “rugby is the ultimate team game”. Perhaps the producers are saving 45 minutes of the nuances of WP Nel’s scrummaging for the second episode.
Ellis Genge obviously made the cut. He’s also at the premiere, contemplating a tray of tiny fried canapés dotted with jelly blobs. He is leaving, and he is hungry. Part of the art of putting together a series like Six Nations: Full Contact is picking out which of the 200 players involved in the competition should be targeted. Genge was an obvious choice, witty, simple and funny. “Rugby needs all the help it can get to be bald,” he says. Genge is a UFC fan, and thinks his sport could learn a lot from him about how to sell itself to a new audience. “Ultimately,” he says, “you need these kinds of shows to raise the game.”
All the focus on individual celebrity players, the sense that rugby is turning into something else itself, will make some people uneasy. But Genge doesn’t have much time for that kind of thinking. “I think we’re in a little bubble. Rugby thinks the most important thing is the end but it’s not. He needs stars, he needs idols and he needs good press. Look at other sports: football, the NFL, the NBA, even cricket. People follow the individuals, not just the team. I don’t watch the NFL, I don’t know the teams, but I know the players. Are we going to go there? Who knows? We will find out.”
Russell is milling around the address, too, moving at a more leisurely pace than Smith. Like Genge, Russell is one of those people who can only ever be himself, whether he’s on camera or not. The crew came into his house to film him with his family. “They told us what to ask each other,” he admits, which is perhaps a little more honest than his press handlers liked. But Russell is pretty relaxed about it, and everything else too. “If they want to know what I do off the field, even if it’s playing Playstation with my daughter, I don’t mind. I don’t do anything I want to hide.”
Besides, Russell says with a laugh, “they’ve never been there on a Saturday night, thank God”. Instead, we see him spending time with his wife and child, and working with Townsend. Both of them are quite open about their check history, and all the series they have had over the years. Russell hopes opening up will help draw new audiences to the sport. “If you turn on and see a kick-battle going on back and forth, the audience might think ‘that’s a bit boring’. But hopefully if you’ve watched the show it will give the audience more of an understanding of what we’re doing and what we’re thinking about during the game.”
And after it, too. “It’s good to show the vulnerable side, so people can see what you’re going through in rugby,” says Italy’s Sebastian Negri. “People only know what they see on TV, they don’t see all the recovery that goes with it, how you wake up in the morning after the games and you can barely walk, how you get up in your hotel room and good luck. the stairs, or the way my friend is worried about what life might be like for me in a few years, because of some of the knocks I’ve had, and the injuries I’ve had. I think that will be a source of pride for outside viewers. I think that kind of insight can only be good for rugby.”
Six Nations: Full Encounter, premieres on Netflix on Wednesday January 24.
