England No Match For South Africa

Friday saw England take on the mighty South Africa and there were precious few positives for England to take from a game in which they were soundly thrashed.

A humiliating 0-36 defeat exposed all of England’s shortcomings, and matters went from bad to worse towards the end of the match when Jason Robinson sped forward in a rare England attack and promptly pulled up with a torn hamstring.

Coverage began at 7.30pm on ITV1, and a peak of 1.7 million ABC1 Men (a 43.4% share) watched our boys take a battering.

England’s next match is against Samoa, and going on Friday’s performance it is by no means certain that Brian Ashton’s men have the beating of them.

ITV1’s coverage had a peak audience of 1.3 million ABC1 Men (a 33.3% share) throughout its two and a half hour running time.

A peak of 5.5 million adults watched the action (a 28.7% share), whilst the coverage had an average of 4.3 million adults who stuck with it throughout its duration.

On Saturday, Wales played Australia and managed to put in a better performance than England had the day before.

Although Wales lost 20-32 to the Australians, at least they managed to put some points on the board. A peak audience of 511,000 ABC1 Men watched the afternoon kick-off, a 31.8% share of the audience.

ITV1’s coverage of the enthralling contest had an average audience of 448,000 ABC1 Men. In terms of adults, the match had a peak of 1.7 million and an average of 1.4 million.

Below are two ads that broke for the first time in the half time ad break on Friday evening, just before the second half – one for Lynx and one for IBM.

These were joined by ads from Guinness, Ford, Orange, Heineken and Mercedes Benz amongst others.

All creatives provided by Xtreme Information

ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.com