The BBC Rugby News website is well known for its ability to ignore the existence of the women's game - uniquely women's rugby is the only women's team sport that the BBC does not provide a permanent, dedicated news page for, and the site's fixtures and results page manages to include every conceivable men's league down to games between the more unpronounceable Welsh villages while ignoring even women's international games.
But things may be changing (or it could be just that all the male reporters were having a particularly long liquid lunch yesterday and were unable to stop a female reporter getting her hands on the keyboard for once). Either way Sarah Orchard deserves some recognition and praise for her feature article on women's rugby which says pretty much everything that needs to be said, including (shock! horror!) admission that the BBC's coverage of women's rugby, and sport in general, is not what it should be.
So well done Sarah! We're still awaiting a dedicated page for the tournament, of course - its very telling that you have to link to the IRB site rather than anywhere on the BBC - but its a start, and if your colleagues can be persuaded to spend even more time in the pub who knows how much more you could improve the site!
Well done, Sarah! It's about time that the media acknowledges the presence of the women's rugby league. I think the long-awaited recognition is well-deserved and it's definitely the initial break that they need to change the people's perspective in the women's rugby. Surely, the more publicity that they could get from media, the more people will see how passionate and how dedicated these girls are in their rugby games.
ReplyDeleteThank you once again, Sarah. This is really great news for all the supporters of women's rugby and sports in general.