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Marseille’s Stade Vélodrome will make a fantastic setting for France’s Six Nations game with Italy on Friday night.
Marseille’s Stade Vélodrome will make a fantastic setting for France’s Six Nations game with Italy on Friday night. Photograph: Jan Kruger - UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images
Marseille’s Stade Vélodrome will make a fantastic setting for France’s Six Nations game with Italy on Friday night. Photograph: Jan Kruger - UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images

France’s Marseille date with Italy shows benefit of taking Six Nations on the road

This article is more than 6 years old

England should venture outside their London moneypit and take a big game to rugby lovers otherwise disenfranchised by geography and, in some cases, history

It is October 2007 and the clear Mediterranean sky is turning from sapphire blue to purest velvet. England, against all the odds, have just beaten Australia in the World Cup quarter-finals and down in the Vieux Port area of Marseille a monumental party is brewing. Even before France’s tournament-shaping game against New Zealand in Cardiff kicks off the harbourside vibe makes Twickenham feel like a suburban vicarage.

So bienvenue with knobs on to Marseille as the Six Nations’s newest host city. Whether this Friday night’s contest between France and Italy in the 67,000-capacity Stade Vélodrome will induce a similar frisson of excitement is debatable but it does raise a key question: how big a part do stadiums play in the tournament’s allure? Does rotating the scenery every now and again enhance the production or nibble away at its soul? Make no mistake, the Six Nations committee will be monitoring France’s first championship foray outside Paris with interest.

No one would argue a big weekend in Cardiff or Dublin or Edinburgh has lost its lustre. Ask anyone lucky enough to be in Rome a fortnight ago for England’s visit and they will tell you the game was almost an incidental feature. It may well be similar in Scotland on Saturday by the time out-of-towners have taken the morning air in Princes Street Gardens, met old friends for a coffee in Stockbridge, strolled to Murrayfield beside the Water of Leith and stumbled back into Bert’s Bar or the Cafe Royal for the evening. Test rugby’s founding fathers were clever. They knew the value of a grand backdrop.

At the same time, though, Europe is blessed with numerous great, culturally enriching cities. Everyone loves a weekend in Paris but the French federation rightly feels an obligation to promote the international game up and down the country. Italy have already played the All Blacks at the San Siro in Milan and would capture a few more imaginations if they took a championship game there. What about Scotland playing at Celtic Park, which rocked during the Commonwealth Games sevens, or Hampden Park? When Ireland played at Croke Park – albeit just down the road – while the Aviva Stadium was being rebuilt, the atmosphere was off the scale.

Money plays a significant role but maybe it should be a mandatory component of future Six Nations contracts that each competing nation has to stage at least one game away from its traditional roster of venues every six years. That way even England would be forced to venture outside their London moneypit to, say, Manchester or Newcastle and take a big game to rugby lovers otherwise disenfranchised by geography and, in some cases, history. Belfast, Limerick, Cork, Swansea, Llanelli, Newport, Glasgow, Leeds, Birkenhead, Gloucester, Bristol and Leicester have all staged championship games in the dim and distant past, so a precedent exists.

Maybe, one day, there will be other tantalising trips on offer to Tbilisi – where the wine and exchange rate should soon sway any floating voters – Barcelona or Madrid. Spain’s weekend win over Romania, as it happens, has left them increasingly well placed to qualify automatically for the 2019 World Cup, heaping further pressure on those who see no logical reason why the Six Nations should bother to reflect the changing rugby world beyond it.

Pending that great leap forwards this feels a good moment, either way, to draw up a blueprint for the perfect Six Nations experience. Without question the anthems would be sung in Cardiff and the actual game played in the Principality Stadium; there is nothing quite like it for raising neck hairs, although Croke Park came close. Game-day morning would be spent promenading around Edinburgh before a leisurely lunch in one of Rome’s magnificent piazzas; London or Paris, depending on your architectural preference and/or relationship status, offer all the necessary ingredients for a gloriously lazy post-match Sunday mooch.

Which just leaves Friday and Saturday nights. There are few better places on earth to drink in the atmosphere than Dublin, though Edinburgh is a close second. And the third podium contender? Step forward, in my experience, Marseille. As a base – make that a bouillabaisse – for a fabulous rugby weekend it takes a lot of beating. All it needs is 80 minutes of rugby to match on Friday.

Wild rovers keep rolling

Any retired players struggling to fill the void left by rugby should draw inspiration from a couple of lock forwards who continue to be gluttons for punishment. Damian Browne’s staggering recent achievement – rowing 3,000 miles single-handed across the Atlantic without a support vessel, surviving two capsizes in one day and narrowly missing a cargo ship – will take some beating but there are few worthier expeditions than the trek to the North Pole about to be undertaken by the former Australia and Exeter second-row Dean Mumm. The Wallaby is walking to the pole to raise funds and awareness for a charity researching premature childbirth.

Gatland joins Henry in the 100 club

Warren Gatland’s 100th Test as Wales’s coach on Saturday puts him in lofty company; only Graham Henry has chalked up a century in charge of one country. If Wales succeed in outwitting Joe Schmidt’s Ireland – unbeaten at home in the Six Nations since 2013 – in Dublin it will rank among the New Zealander’s finer tactical ambushes and alter the complexion of the championship.

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