There we were, sitting miserably deep in the bowels of the Millennium Stadium, whose media centre is one of the more pleasantly staffed but least pleasantly appointed in world rugby. With a strange mix of joy and furious, unbearable longing, we watched the scenes from Marseille on TV, the brilliant sunshine, the wild crowd, the bustling streets, the extraordinary scoreline ...
Oh, the joy of being the junior rugby correspondents, we English were grumbling as we averted our eyes from the bewitching, kaleidoscopic scenes from Marseille, sipped our mineral water (complimentary, mind you) and stared at the blank, windowless walls of our bunker in Cardiff. This wasn't what we'd signed up for.
The Kiwis and French were all around us, working furiously, only half-interested, albeit definitely amused, by events in Marseille. For them and the media organs they worked for, Cardiff was the only place to be, whatever was happening in Marseille, however sunny the weather, colourful the streets, forgiving the deadline. (2pm kick-offs are a walk in the park for a journalist; 8pm kick-offs are a kind of living hell - your article has to have been written by the time the final whistle sounds, which is particularly bad if it's a close game whose result is in the balance until the death, which was surely not to be the case with New Zealand-France. But still ...) For us English, though, the place to be if you fancied life as a sportswriter at the sharp end, if you fancied the magnitude of a story, if you fancied the chance to have a proper piss-up on the Riviera, was not in darkening Cardiff.
A quick phone call to the office, then, just to check the word count/remind them you still exist. "Sorry, Aylwin. It's chaos here. England, England, England. Ring back in an hour, maybe two or three. We might by then have a rough idea of the size of the postage stamp your insignificant report will have shrunk to."
Out on to the streets, then. Call it researching the colour and the atmosphere; call it remembering the carefree days when you too could go to a big game and lose yourself in the camaraderie, anticipation and alcohol; call it one last dash for your sanity.
And this is where the sob story started to end. The thrill of the big event, the big rugby event in particular, will never lose its magic, even if you are allowed only to wander through it like a ghost, unable to touch or partake. More French and more Kiwis, these ones less focused than the ones in the media dungeon, mixing happily both their drinks and their bonhomie.
There was a strong Irish presence, too, their tickets bought in anticipation of their team's qualification for this quarter-final. Their team had long gone, but they were damned if they were going to miss a party because of that small detail.
Suddenly there was commotion outside the castle walls, as flashing lights approached. It was a police escort and behind it swung slowly but splendidly a vast coach decked out in silver ferns. The All Blacks were here. Through the windows, dark profiles seemed not to move an inch; the jaws were set in granite, each bisected by the silver gossamer strand of an ipod wire. It was a spine-tingling vision of majesty and darkness. I looked at my watch. An hour to kick-off. They're leaving it a bit late, aren't they?
Taking our seats in the press box, thoughts of Marseille had evaporated. We knew we were witnessing something at least as special, this extraordinary World Cup finding ever newer ways to stun us into dumb wonder. The roof was closed and the atmosphere was boiling with the menace of flash bulbs, flags and noise, oh, the noise.
The haka was a confrontational classic underneath the floodlights, which soon acted as spotlights for brilliant All Blacks strutting their stuff. And what a drama it was that unfolded - a tight, classical narrative of a tragic hero's total command giving way first to hubris, then to carelessness, from there anger to disintegration and, by the denouement, with those spotlights now merciless searchlights, utter, futile desperation. And that was just New Zealand.
In France we had the perfect inverse, as their heroes found salvation the other way round, their inferiority and lack of ambition in the first act salvaged by inhuman bloody-mindedness, and then in the second act the realisation that they were wreaking a disintegration in their opponents, that a glorious homecoming may yet be theirs.
When we left the Millennium Stadium, our frantic key-tapping done, it was dark and kicking-out time was approaching. There were no chic bars, no views of the Mediterranean, no sunshine to assure us that the night of celebration ahead could be as long as we wanted. But, as the taxi inched along the snarled-up M4 past Newport towards a bed somewhere in Bristol (Cardiff that night had been booked solid almost a year in advance), Red Dragon FM blaring from the driver's radio, there was only awe and gratitude for our assignment at the darker half of the Rugby World Cup's most dramatic day.
