Well, if you are a New Zealander in the USA and you miss home then of course rugby is far more important than just about anything else.  I've been loving the coverage on foxsportsworld for the last 4 years which makes up for my lack of physical presence on the terraces at Eden park.  All good things (apparently) eventually come to an end. Foxsports dropped rugby (talk about dropping the ball) and rebranded the channel Foxsports soccer (talk about a kick in the guts).

Of course my immediate retaliation was to drop digital cable from COMCAST completely as a result and site no rugby as a reason. While that made me feel good for a day or two my wife does miss TLC :).

Anyways where was I, the ex-foxsportsworld rugby types are gauging interest in a 24-hour rugby channel so if this is something you feel you would watch and you are in the USA fill out their survey here.

Now in the good news part of the rugby news.  Not having foxsportsworld forced me to look around for other sources.  It turns out that radio new zealand sport is finally (it wasn't ages ago when I looked but it is now) up on the internet.  While it doesn't stream they do save a full week's worth of audio and a bit of .asx hacking to put them together, in conjunction with windows media player on my wireless pocketpc attached to a speaker means I can listen to the rugby out in the garden and I'm incredibly excited about it.

This weekend I heard the Blues try really hard to loose against the Reds (until Carlos did a Carlos), the Crusaders and Chiefs try and break pinball record in scoring, and just for fun its time to go dig out another big stump out of the garden and listen to the Hurricanes game.

The other cool thing about radio new zealand sport is I was also able to listen to the horrible, horrible performances of the NZ cricket team over the one-dayers. I haven't heard cricket since I've been in the USA.  Apparently the cricket team is now good, it clearly wasn't when I left NZ several years ago, but then again it didn't sound good last week either. I wonder if I should stop listening again<g>