Rugby needs this new ITV audience

WHO out there remembers what occurred immediately after the great Ashes series of 2005?

To be clear: pretty much every Ashes series in history was touched with greatness when set against the five-act trouserless farce staged in Australia over the last couple of months, but that one on English soil midway through the Noughties was indisputably a classic.

And what happened? The planet-brained governing class removed cricket from terrestrial television and drove it into a satellite ghetto. Well done. Congrats.

Rugby Union has gone a long way down the same cul-de-sac over the last 25 years, moving the old Heineken Cup off the BBC, which routinely delivered audiences of two million plus, because they felt a nine-tenths cut in viewing figures was a price worth paying if it was accompanied by plenty of additional noughts on the bottom line.

Last weekend, this paper reported that Premiership rugby would be broadcast on ITV from here on in, with the final being screened live for the benefit of the many, not the few (to coin a phrase). It is a welcome move and it makes complete sense.

There are plenty of people who throw darts at BT’s coverage of club rugby, some of whom continue to resent the company’s brass neck in outmanoeuvring Sky a few years back.

Your columnist does not share this criticism. Quite the opposite. In many respects, BT have done the game a service – not least by declining to sweep the Saracens salary cap scandal under the carpet and opting for some journalistic rigour instead.

But rugby requires viewers, far more of them than pay-per-view can offer, and terrestrial coverage answers that need. Extra-terrestrial would be better still.