I had a similar complaint - getting the fixtures list for the 6 Nations means jumping through hoops to get the calendar, either logging in to your google/apple account and authorizing access to it, or filling out a form with your information.
Here is a simple ics calendar file for 2026 6 Nations fixtures:
📆 Download this .ics file and add it to your calendar
To generate this, I thought it would be a simple exercise to outsource to Claude Code to scrape the fixtures, however that was fraught with issues, and required much troubleshooting, to the point that I hit my limit of Claude Code for this single session!
It would be difficult to obscure the actual fixtures list further from a data‑architecture perspective, which used to be a web staple folks of a certain web accessibility background would take for granted.
Of course the web page does not contain the fixture list itself, it gets loaded by javascript on page load. Additionally, it's not a single identifiable json/api call either. It's convoluted CMS output, which reads like obfuscated code.
Once that roadblock was discovered, scraping was out and a new approach of screenshotting the web page and parsing the image was in. I assume to the UI of the features list, Claude again struggled here with combining fixture dates/weekends into single date. There was a strange artifact (hallucination) that Claude included the assumption that the first match of the tournament is historically on a Friday, and made that assumption here, despite the web page showing it was on a Thursday this year.
Other dates were wrong, match times were also hallucinated, so much back and forth, asking to verify dates and manually checking them myself before we arrived at something I could have knocked out in ~15 minutes manually, but took ~1hr for Claude Code, with much manual coercing.
As an aside, much debate between AI models is often described emotionally. I’d rather benchmark AI against concrete tasks.
While waiting for Claude to do its thing, I looked into the service behind their "Add to Calendar" functionality - ecal.com. I'm amazed at the niche's that some companies rally around, but if there is convenience in outsourcing, it makes sense.
Given audience size of the 6 Nations, I'd estimate that they're paying on the order of $5,000 annually for ecal.com to manage their calendar service.
At first glance, it seems outrageous that there would be a budget anywhere to spend that on a calendar hosting service, where there are, ~45 events annually, that are scheduled & locked in, months in advance.