Send your Rugby World Cup content

It has taken all of one weekend for the inevitable truth of the Rugby World Cup to emerge, that the hosts - in the wider European sense - face a crushing embarrassment in their backyard.

England will surely relinquish the Webb Ellis Cup - a trophy carried to their shores on the blood and sweat of men like Martin Johnson - with a retreat of Dunkirk proportions although without any glory.

The English media is reluctantly getting the dinghies out of the sheds already and it is now only a question of when their cumbersome troops are hauled off the beaches.

The French players may even get to return to their actual homes before the playoffs, although they may find it preferable initially to forsake the attraction of croissants in le salon for the charms of bacon butties abroad.

European rugby is at a low ebb. It lacks the athletes to compete against the Southern Hemisphere sides, and their leading teams have been sucked into complex build-ups instead of moulding tough stable units a-la England in 2003.

England created a thoroughbred team from a load of donkeys for the tournament in Australia although they are making an ass of themselves this time.

France, the country, looks beautiful at this time of year, but the World Cup is not a pretty sight. God knows what will happen when the All Blacks attack Portugal.

It took only 30 minutes of the opening match between a magnificently determined, well organised but limited Argentina and a deeply confused French side to realise that this tournament is now down to three teams - New Zealand, South Africa and Australia.

France were the only European side with a chance of holding out the southern raiding party but they were shown to be as erratic as their maker, the bizarre Bernard Laporte.

There is a real chance that France will not even make the playoffs, as the myths about French rugby were cruelly exposed in the Stade de France, scene of their 1998 World Cup soccer triumph.

French rugby is a place where inconsistencies are often re-interpreted as a magic capable of rising out of their soul. Its status is often exaggerated because their major opponents are in the Six Nations, a competition where the glories of magnificent stadiums and the past are manipulated to overshadow the truth on the pitch.

How on earth could Laporte have stationed David Skrela - a first five-eighth so ponderous he makes Butch James look like Mark Ella - in charge of this monumental game.