So the location of the 2007 World Cup is going to be a straight fight between we French and our old enemies in my adopted country, assuming the presentation of the RFU plan is not postponed yet again. Time to nail my tricouleur to the flagpost and explain precisely, without any overtones of chauvinism, why victory in this particular competition should be ours.
The first thing that has to be said is that the World Cup has to go to a single country. No more joint bids, please. I remember starting the 1999 World Cup playing against Canada in France, but it didn't really get under way until France got to Wales in the later stages. On our side of the Channel, it didn't feel like a truly major event.
That World Cup was all over the shop: pool stages in France, bits in England, quarter-finals in Ireland, semi-finals in London. The France games in France just felt like routine Test matches; there was no feeling of being part of something special.
For that reason I'm glad that next year it will only be in Australia, even if it took a political row for New Zealand to be excluded - and they aren't too happy about it. The players who had been to the previous World Cup, South Africa in 1995, all told me that it felt very different there, in one country, in a nation which lives and breathes rugby. They could feel it every time they stepped outside their hotel. That is how a World Cup needs to be: it has to raise the players motivation by making them feel that this is something special and privileged.
Obviously, in France 2007 the World Cup players would eat far better than in England. They would have a far higher chance of playing in the sun, guaranteeing beautiful flowing rugby, and they would stay in chateaux by the sea. Having got the cliches out of the way, I do have reservations about England which aren't based on chauvinism.
Rugby in England isn't focused on one area as it is in France, where the south-west is the stronghold. In England the fan base is more diffuse: the east Midlands, the West Country, Newcastle, parts of London. It's hard to say how many people would go to the less glamourous games in the pool stages. It's worth remembering those empty stadiums during the Rugby League World Cup and having a good hard think about where to locate the matches. I fear that in London, in particular, some of the games would feel dwarfed by the city, as there are so few hardcore rugby fans. It would be like running Australia v Argentina in Paris.
It might well turn out that the matches in France would attract bigger crowds, because a French World Cup would be largely based in the south of the country, apart obviously from the final at Stade de France. There would be a strong case for basing the England games in Lille, simply because of the transport question: that would mean the England fans would not have to trek across France for every game.
As for the stadiums themselves, we have to ask how many modern rugby stadiums there are in England which can take a decent crowd. Apart from Leicester and Northampton, and perhaps Newcastle in the near future, the infrastructure is not the best, the rugby stadiums tend to be small, and in some hotbeds like Gloucester and Bath, they are not up to date. In France, however, you have cities of some size in the south, like Toulouse, Beziers and Biarritz, with decent, large stadiums taking between 20,000 and 25,000. And these are the great rugby cities, where the public live and breathe the sport.
I don't think there would be much to choose between the two countries in terms of ability to promote major events. The Commonwealth Games showed that England can put on sport to match anything in the world, although there are questions about the transport infrastructure compared to France.
There's one other reason I'd like it to go to our side of the Channel. I'll still only be 32 in 2007, and I recognise that it's going to be hard getting in the side for the 2003 World Cup. So a French World Cup four years later would mean I can still dream of playing in the world's premier competition on home soil.
By the way, I see that Danny Grewcock's ban was duly cancelled on Thursday. As this column said a few days earlier, no suspension at all was better than a meaningless five weeks, and the powers that be clearly thought the same, although I suspect what Kyran Bracken said in Danny's defence had more effect than any of my words.
