"I Have Seen It All...I Have Seen Too Much"*

I went to bed early last night, about twenty minutes after the end of the Semi-Final. I wasn't exhausted, I wasn't drunk but I just seemed to be hovering on some greater transcendental plain. All the nervous energy that had been racing around my body for the previous fourteen hours, that even an hours walking and cycling couldn't rid me of had evaporated. England's Rugby Union team have taken me to places I didn't want to go over the past three weeks and last night they brought me home safely and lay me down to sleep.

Being an England fan, in most sports it has to be said, is usually a tale of doing badly to start with, struggling through the qualification into the second phase of the tournament and then exiting through some means beyond normal control (Hand of God, Campase cheating, Seaman's ineptitude, Rooney's metatarsal, Carvallho's testicles etc).

This time however we've just stuck in there played our normal game regardless of what has been going on around us and got through. It's not been pretty but ugly is what you have to do sometimes to be successful in sport and the players who are the tournaments leading points and try scorers are at home and I'm sure they would swap their armchairs for a place in either dressing room at the Stade De France for the final.

We were rubbish to begin with, failed to score a try against any of the bigger countries until last night and had lost to France six matches running and yet in a weeks time we could be the first country to win back to back Rugby World Cup's. Blimey!

I hope we play South Africa in the final, not because of the 36-0 defeat that seems a lifetime ago now but because I've really warmed to Argentina and I couldn't find it in my heart to wish them ill in the final. With the Boks it's easy for me to dislike them.

* Not a pearl of wisdom from Stuart Barnes but the commentator at the end of the film A League Of Their Own about women's baseball in the war years.