KEVIN MCCALLUM: The best ever rugby weekend... WTF, the greatest

No-one saw last weekend coming. No-one. If anyone says they did, then they are either the grandest of liars or they missed the two greatest days in sport. If you weren’t left utterly discombobulated, not knowing whether to sit or stand, weep or laugh, were unable to speak with any sort of coherence or understanding, had forgotten how to breathe without sighing and could not still the shaking of your hands, then you missed it.

If you weren’t left sitting with your mouth half open, your eyes frozen into a thousand-yard stare at a television set just 2m away and at a game played 12,000km from your front door, then you know what — you missed it. If, by the Friday after the Saturday and Sunday you were still a little confused and felt like you had been dreaming, then you didn’t miss it.

It was a WTF weekend of rugby. Of any sport. It was the best weekend of any World Cup ever. I was told not to describe anything as best ever when I started writing about sport. Nothing is the “best ever”, but the “best yet” or the “best in history until now”. This, though, was the best ever. Anything that can top the headline acts of New Zealand-Ireland, France-SA and the part played by the wonderful sideshows of Wales-Argentina and Fiji-England will need CGI and Hollywood to make the impossible possible.

The 2023 Rugby World Cup quarterfinals were, as the Moulin Rouge would describe it, a spectacular spectacular of a weekend. The four best teams in the world all rocked up in the mood, the form and the hunger to have at each other. Accuracy, audaciousness, skill, brutality, ferocity — all played at the speed of light in two games that never felt like they would end and yet were over almost too quickly.

For France and Ireland, fate, surely, would give them the edge. This was their chance, two once-in-a-generation sides for each nation built, nurtured and honed for this World Cup, their paths paved, their fortunes read and foretold. Finally, the lands north of the equator had superstars of their very own, men and teams the equal if not the better of the beasts from the south. 

France had Antoine Dupont, the young magician, his fractured cheek patched up; Ireland were led by Johnny Sexton, the evergreen man in green, a man with a mouth almost as hard-working as his body. The latter described losing as “that’s life”, his coach, Andy Farrell admitted this was probably “the end” for this great Irish team. They will have to build again, find new ways of dreaming and planning and hoping. 

Dupont left the Stade de France sad and confused with a frustrated dig at Ben O’Keefe, the referee. It was desperation to see if they could have a do-over, get the ref and World Rugby to take away the pain of losing. His coach, Fabien Galthié, told him to be “brave in defeat … over the past four years we have achieved something great, so no regrets, we were entitled to lose the way we did”.

Sport is cruel, but, this weekend in particular, it was not just about the winning, but of the part all eight teams played, the four in black, blue and green to the fore. Winning is nothing without losing, but in losing there is pride and there is drama.

This week, the rugby is all some of the locals in Stanford have wanted to talk to me about — me, a bona fide flood survivor. Oh, they want to know how I’m bearing up, but, man, how about the rugby — wow, gosh, bliksem.

Jonathan Liew of the Guardian was at the Stade de France and captured how we should feel about a game and a weekend no one saw coming: “There are certain extremely rare occasions in elite sport when you realise, even as it’s happening, that nothing will ever quite be the same after this.

“I’m writing this about half an hour after full time and it still feels wrong to talk about that game in the past tense. It was a game that seemed to warp time around it, that unfolded at a speed and intensity that was genuinely hard to process in real time.

“There were offloads too quick for the naked eye, blitz tackles that materialised out of nowhere. People will be writing and talking about this game for generations. It’s over now. But somehow it will never really end.”

It won’t, you know. October 14 and October 15, the greatest ever.