When the choice of host country for the 2007 World Cup was made and England did not win some people were disappointed; not us. The immediate reaction was that we will try and go for the whole tournament and it will be much better in France rather than tramping round the football grounds of England. We started planning about two years ago and decided to base ourselves in the South of France and radiate out to group games for the first month. At that stage we had no idea how tickets would be made available and even less idea of our chances for tickets for the final stages other than we will never have a better chance of seeing a World Cup Final so within the bounds of common sense we going to try and make it.

We wanted to see as many games as we could and we would not exclusively follow England as historically some of the best RWC games we had seen in previous tournaments had been between so called minnows. I had found a really nice looking, sensibly priced, villa near Nimes well down in the south of France and it had been chosen for accessability to venues in Montpellier, Marseille, St Etienne and Lyon. The plan was we would take a day trip to check the place out on the Saturday after our game against Castres on the Friday night in the Heineken Cup last year. The only flaw in the plan was that we had not allowed for hangovers after our victory and none of us felt up to it upon surfacing on Saturday. Plan B entailed Mrs Pronters and I flying out courtesy of Ryanair from Liverpool to Nimes in mid May to check out that the place actually looked as good as the internet indicated. All was in order and the planning could really commence in earnest.

Now planning a 7 week trip away for 6 people to watch a large number of rugby games is no lightweight undertaking. Luckily(?) I am an organiser and planner by nature so the other 5 were more than prepared to make the sacrifice and allow me to do everything. To cut a long story short by the time we were ready to depart these shores my wife reckoned I had spent some 500 hours on the internet researching, organising, re-organising, sorting out problems with Ticketmaster, trying to communicate with the villa owner, finding hotels, booking trains etc. etc. etc. You get the picture.

The French had set up a good system for obtaining tickets up to the QF stage via the internet and with some more judicious planning I had a list of what was needed and hit the internet on the first morning. A complication was that an individual was restricted to a certain number of tickets and as 6 of us were going and attending a lot of games I had 4 people’s credit card details in front of me and we had to set up 4 accounts for tickets to be delivered to. It all went very smoothly and all our required tickets including two quarter finals in Marseille were booked. At this stage it had become obvious that the only way to guarantee tickets for the later stages was to commit to some form of package and I felt that we would get a better deal in France rather than via some of the inflated prices being bandied about through British channels. We utilised a company based in Lyon that PSA has involvement in and we had already utilised their services on Sale away trips. It was not a cheap exercise but we knew that before we started and we were guaranteed an apartment in Paris and tickets to all 4 of the final stage games in Paris.

What seemed an eternity away at one stage was suddenly upon us and 6 intrepied Sale supporters set off for Dover in two very heavily loaded estate cars. We broke the journey at my son’s house in London and on Thursday 6 September we landed in France. We were going to be staying in quite a few hotels and I had booked them all through Logis-de-France, whom I can recommend if anyone wants access to Franch hotels. It was an extremely long way from Calais to our villa in a beautiful small town called Uzes so we broke the journey on the first night at a place I had found but no one had heard of in the Champagne region. I had never been to this area before and we had a great approach to the town passing the estates for Mumm and Pol Roger champagne and seeing the grapes being picked. A pleasant but ordinary looking Auberge served us two bottles of the local brew as an aperitif but the ordinary exterior hid a quite outstanding restaurant and we had a superb 3 course meal in the restaurant for 27 euros (about £20.00). A long haul south on the next day saw us arrive at the villa and quickly get settled in before heading into Uzes town centre for the opening game. We sat at an open air restaurant and experienced the highs and lows of a noisy French clientele watching the game on a big screen. Interestingly there were a group of South Africans close to us and we debated the upcoming group game and I said that I thought we would lose that game and jokingly said we would meet them in the Final. I claim absolutely no clairvoyant ability and even before England had played their first game I thought we would struggle to get beyond the Quarter final.

Our first game was on the first Saturday and involved hot favourites New Zealand against Italy. We duly set off for Marseille just over an hour distant but we had not allowed for this being the tail end of the French holiday season and got caught in a huge jam with people trying to pay on the French peage (toll motorway) system. We subsequently got to the ground just in time for the anthems – a problem that afflicted us several times – but were seated for the haka and the first of many AB tries against a very disappointing Italy. We were paying particular attention to Luke McAlister and he seemed very creative but the quality of the opposition did not test him overly. The weather was fantastic at around 30 degrees C and this was the exact reason we had based ourselves in the south. The next day we undertook the first of many journeys up the peage to the Lyon/St Etienne area . This was a round trip of about 5 hours from our villa and with the wisdom of hindsight we probably made the trip one too many times particularly with some games ending at 11pm at night. In this case though we were going to see three of our own with Scotland taking on Portugal. A most enjoyable game it was too with Portugal losing quite heavily but playing with exactly the right spirit and no little skill. Rory Lamont scored the first two tries almost right in front of us. New hooker Scott Lawson took an excellent cross kick a la Charlie to score a good try in the corner and the Sale fans were pretty happy. Until towards the end of the tournament this was probably our favourite game and was a good day out. A similar journey two days later to see our two Pumas take on Georgia and what we amongst many others thought would be a stuffing. The 6-3 half time score put those thoughts to rights and although Argentina got the bonus point in the end this was the first of several games where Georgia did much credit to the “minnow” title. J M Lobbe was deservedly man of the match and throughout the Pumas magnificent tournament I thought he was one of the two or three best players in a very fine team. This was probably the day that we could have missed because it was not a great game and we struggled to get away from the ground and did not get home until 02.15.

It had now become apparent to us that Sebastien Chabal’s profile was much the highest of any of the French squad either individually or as a team. His face was everywhere from magazines to huge posters adorning buildings. No French tv clip on their team was shown without Seabass appearing at some stage and even at this early stage people were commenting when we wore Sale shirts and I had a brief but memorable conversation with someone in Montpellier who stopped me, shook my hand, pointed to the logo on my shirt with the magical words “L’Equipe du Caveman”.

The next day we undertook something I had never achieved before in my rugby career – two internationals in the same day. Due to the way our ticketing packages had worked out and with some luck with the kick off times we could watch USA v Tonga in Montpellier at 14.00 and Italy v Romania at 20.00 in Marseille. There was a notional 90 minute journey between the two but once again we were delayed and just made the anthems. At the end of the game we wondered why we had bothered because Romania had no game plan beyond number ten other than give it to the full back with a siege gun boot and once again Italy were disappointing. Probably overall our worst game of the tournament.

In the next episode: getting on with the locals; depressed in Paris; going deaf; more fraternising...

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