Irish sport, Gabby, rugby shirts, and Scotland
Hello and thanks for the comments this week to Inside Sport.
As ever, a selection of your points and questions are published here. So, a few answers for you.
Some of you have asked for more Gaelic sport featured, I agree Gaelic football and hurling are excellent games and I used to watch a lot of them when I lived in Northern Ireland for a year back in the ‘80s. Unfortunately, I'm not sure they’re broadly popular enough to put on Inside Sport.
Just to reply to one viewer, Tony Livesey doesn't work for the News of the World, he's a sports presenter for the BBC's North West Tonight. But he was a newspaper man in his past. His view on England players' commitment was his view and the points you make, for example about the millions of pounds that weigh on every manager's decision about letting their players play, were precisely the points Des made in response to Tony - Des very much agreed with you. The comment about “tights”, I think, was just a bit of fun late at night.
Gabby says thanks very much to the viewer who gave her such nice comments!
More praise for the UFC piece - thanks again.
RWC shirts - I'm afraid John isn't doing us another postcard but I shall try to find out the answer about the shirts!
To the viewer who says we are a football programme and do not cover enough rugby union: I'm afraid I have to disagree about that. Kevin Keegan was the first football interview we've done this run, which began seven weeks ago with a Lawrence Dallalgio interview, no less. As you probably know, we have no rights to the Rugby World Cup and that makes it difficult for us to cover. We came up with the idea of getting John Inverdale - a man who knows his rugby - to do a series of five opinion pieces for us over the course of the competition. We felt this was a way of adding something different to the acres of coverage elsewhere and was quite a big commitment. In total it added up to nearly 30 minutes of coverage.
We have also invited members of the English rugby team to come on the programme next Monday.
To the Scottish viewer – I’m sorry you don’t feel we’re highlighting Scottish football success enough. There was a long piece and discussion we did about the Scottish football renaissance on our programme on Sept 17th. The story is up on the website.
