The Rugby World Cup is not all glamour. South Africa are staying outside a one-horse town 25 miles north of Paris where even the horse took one look at Thursday’s torrential rain and declined to leave its stable. Ireland are now based next to a motorway junction near EuroDisney, a long, long way from the capital’s smartest boulevards.
It was hard to avoid the sense of another big missed promotional opportunity for rugby, certainly from a photographer’s perspective. Johnny Sexton and Siya Kolisi posing in front of the Arc de Triomphe? Faf de Klerk offering passing tips to the dancers at the Moulin Rouge? Instead, on the eve of this most marketable of top-level games, all of them were sitting in sterile conference rooms, doing their best not to generate any unwanted headlines.
