Hi everybody!

As long time sports board denizens will already know, I like to watch pretty much every sport you could care to name. Sure there are some exceptions, but those are few and far between. I know I can't be the only similarly-minded person here, and in that spirit I want to tell you about a sporting event starting next weekend that I enjoy thoroughly every year that might not have made a blip on your radars: the Six Nations.

For the uninformed, the Six Nations is the annual rugby union tournament held between Europe's top 6 nations (hence the name); England, Scotland, Ireland (who compete as a unified nation in rugby), Wales, France and Italy. In my younger days the Six Nations used to be the Five Nations (Italy were added in 2000), and much before that it was the Home Nations tournament until France was added in 1910. Every team plays each other once, and they alternate between home and away between years, e.g. England vs France is in England this year, it was Paris last year and will be Paris again next year.

Now, I know I've made similar posts here in the pasts evangelising the sport of rugby union and I'm probably a broken record on the subject at this point, but please know that I wouldn't keep bringing it up if I didn't think at least some of you would get way into it if you gave it a shot. The rules are perhaps slightly obscure and abstract to an entirely new viewer, but if you can follow football you can 100% follow rugby - much like the differences between cricket and baseball, the differences in rules are ultimately not that large, just enough to render the sport somewhat alien at first. Once you can couch the various jargon in familiar terms, you're set.  

Big dudes making big hits with no pads in a sport where the ball is not often dead and the clock doesn't often stop, and unlike soccer there's no flopping and no arguing with the referees. 80 minutes with no timeouts and just a 15 minute half time break, so for the investment of little over an hour and a half you get a full and action packed game, unlike the 3-4 hours baseball and football puts forth interspersed with commercials (not that there's anything wrong with that, hell, I watch 5 day cricket games, but it's important to some). You'll see blood, you'll see violence, you'll see unimaginable skill, you'll see humans of a size that defy reason, logic and biology all at once, you'll see some pretty good musical performances, you'll see some Welsh people dressed like daffodils and some English people like medieval Crusaders, the ladies get something to look at (my cousin won't ever shut up about Leigh Halfpenny, if you wanted someone to google), you'll hear some unintelligible accents (trust me, Jonathan Davies is speaking English, he just happens to be Welsh), and best of all, some top quality sporting drama with long (seriously, 4 of these teams have been in this tournament since 1883), historical rivalries thrown in for good measure.  

Give it a shot! Worst case scenario, you switch it off having wasted anywhere from 5 to 90 minutes. No harm done. Best case scenario though, you find a new favourite sport. Surely that's worth the low, low price of nothing to find out? I'd never have gotten into baseball if it wasn't for stumbling into a game late at night (I'm not from a country where baseball is prevalent) and now it's my favourite sport.