The Sport Thread

I had hoped to see the ridiculous rugby ball clock replaced this time out, alas that was not to be.

It’s their fifth season in use and they no longer match the new logo (which uses a different shade of blue and white instead of the old logo’s blue and gold). I’d have thought we’d get new graphics with the new logo, but no.

I like it. It's different and quirky and does its job quite well. Takes up a lot less screen real estate than some of its blander boxier cousins.

Best rugby scorebox design ever was the NZ spinning balls. Was sad to see that go.

Well that’s more of a gimmick and those graphics do like quite dated.

It was a gimmick that lasted the best part of 15+ years, adopted by both Australia's FOX Sports and by the Rugby World Cup so it must have worked.

Well more likely someone else liked the gimmick.

Those Sky NZ graphics weren’t just copied by the RWC and Fox Sports Australia - they were the same graphics, albeit with some tweaks to colour and alignment.

To be fair, the year the RWC used them, it was in NZ and Sky NZ were host broadcasters.

An odd feature of the Sky NZ score-bar was that the teams flipped sides at half time to reflect the direction they were playing in.

And 2015's were a (garish) evolution too.



Yup, again, for me anyway, part of their unique charm.

Although unless that’s a convention in New Zealand must be confusing for the casual viewer.

On the contrary I believe ITV’s 2015 implementation is one of the only times it didn’t look that bad.

Side note, my local team (Ebbw Vale) are playing Cross Keys on S4C now. There was also a game on BBC Two Wales yesterday (Bedwas v Cardiff), this is the first season I recall having live coverage consistently, and is especially the first time I have seen two games live in two days on two different channels! It's basically filler for the departure of the Pro 14 to Premier on both channels.

Anyway, S4C used the BBC Sport graphics today. I do understand why, because BBC and S4C have some sort of relation to each other in ownership, but I have never seen this before. Does anyone else recall a situation like this?

Yes, they looked far better in 2015 than 2011 - basically by making them that little bit smaller and tidying things up.

Ironically enough 2015 was the last year Sky NZ would use those graphics - they’d adopt their current set the following year. The current ones don’t flip like that, they’re just normal home/away.

The 2015 RWC graphics were only “inspired” by the Sky NZ ones though - they weren’t actually the Sky NZ graphics, like the 2011 ones were. Also inspired (by way of the 2015 RWC graphics!) are those used from home Sunwolves games (Super Rugby franchise in Tokyo/Singapore).

Talking of scorebars that flip sides, there used to be a convention in GAA that the team leading should always be listed first, and the teams would swap around when the lead changed (which can happen many times in a close hurling game!) but that’s been dispensed with in recent years, at least on TV scorebars.