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The sky over Paris today is watery blue and scarred with white airoplane trails. The crowds on the Champs Elysees, and beneath the Arc de Triomphe, and in the square in front of the Louvre are flecked with white.
It is presumably never hard to spot an Englishman in Paris, but it has never been easier today. Entire families, from baby to grandfather, are trailing about the boulevards in England rugby tops. In front of the Eiffel Tower, white-shirted fans have colonised a large area of the park in front of the television screen, staking their places for the evening. Near the front, sitting before a shrub bush which they have decorated with empty beer cans, are students from the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, and from Bristol West of England University. In front of them is a shopping trolley, loaded with beer, and as George S-B (he won't give me his full double barrelled name) put it: "We have a bit of the traditional vino too to keep the frogs happy."
It cost George £41 to get to Paris. He pitched his tent in front of the screen but was asked to move by policemen, after which he pitched it in some nearby bushes. They began drinking at 10am. Would they last the evening? They weren't sure. "Eating is cheating," said Fergus Playfer.
Cath Robinson, from Hartlepool, was behind the posts through which Jonny Wilkinson kicked in 2003. She is busy painting the faces of her travelling companions: Glynn Evans, Paul Rudd, Craig Robson and her husband David. "We decided to come on Monday," says Mr Rudd. "We will have all been divorced by our wives by the time we get home." They ply your correspondent with lager. "They're only tiddly ones," says Mr Rudd. "Take another one for your travels." They also offer me a lift home, and ask if I have a driving licence and might be sober tomorrow morning. They have to drive out of Paris at 6am.
Underneath the Eiffel Tower, two students from Cambridge dressed as St George are knighting a string of South African fans. "St George seemed approproate," says George Dean. "We are hoping to slay some Springboks tonight."
A red route master bus pulls up beside the tower. Aboard are Chobham Rugby Club: there is a Queen Elizabeth I, a Richard Lion Heart and a Sherlock Holmes among them. "It's really hard to think of English things rather than British ones," said Rose Seale, who has travelled in a very authentic Virgin Queen outfit. On the way they picked up fellow fans in their bus. "The French have been very supportive. We have had toots all the way down, even from the French lorry drivers."
"We have only had to do two U-turns for low bridges," says Andy Penn, 52, the owner of the bus. "And a police man did get fed up with us after we kept going round and round the Arc de Triomphe."
A lady from New Zealand whom I had contacted earlier this week via the online message board Gumtree calls to say she has arrived in Paris to pick up her pre-booked ticket. She offers it for £650. I should hold my nerve, it seems a little over the odds, but seeing the train-loads of ticketless fans, I have no nerve left. I have missed too many tickets. We meet in her hotel on the northern edge of town. We have neither of us done this before. She is Mel Sagote, from Wellington, a lawyer now based in Surrey. The ticket is violet with a silver hologram, and bears the words ‘Finale’. Finally. I have never seen such a beautiful piece of paper.
To get here I have spent £21.70 on a train down to Dover, £20 on a return ferry ride, £46 booking a train back to Calais on Sunday. For the lift down from Calais, myself and Toomas, my fellow Estonian hitchhiker, paid petrol and toll road costs: that was 26 Euros or £18.10. My campsite comes in at 11 Euros a night, £23 for three nights stay. That's £128.80, so I'm now down £778.80 for the trip. Also my ferry home gets in too late for a train and I may have to spend a night at a B&B in Dover, another £34, but I'm on budget. I may have to implement the Australian backpacker Jonny Christie’s five Euro diet, but I have a ticket, and suddenly, nothing else seems to matter.
As I run about Paris - quite literally with the trains all up the spout - word reaches me from readers of this blog who are now on their way. "If you find more tickets than you need, call me," writes a solicitor, Nick Jervis. Meanwhile there is elation in the the chaotic-sounding Vavasour household.
They had planned to be on holiday this weekend, but all was placed on hold at England's ascension to the final, and Sarah Vavasour has been working her contacts quite ruthlessly all week to secure a ticket for her "rugby mad husband".
Her quest illustrates the curious nature of this ticket market. There are mass exchanges beneath the Eiffel tower and outside the Stade de France, but so many tickets have taken a route through corporate hospitality companies and sponsors, and surface through a series of informal networks.
Mr Vavasour, a doctor, had been depressed at the general lack of corporate hospitality in the NHS: a little brother in the City had little problem laying his hands on a ticket. Then he was told of an orthopaedic surgeon who had been trying to get rid of 2 tickets. "By the time the very kind theatre nurse had tracked him down, he had sold them," writes Mrs Vavasour. Then there was a mutual friend "who had had a ticket, but was actually on holiday in Mallorca with wife and new baby, and who would have "given" it to Simon if he had known, but had just sold it.
"However dawn lifted on a brighter day. The younger brother's provider of tickets has come up trumps and got tickets not only for Simon, but also his elder brother - but at a cost. Looking at the moment at £800 each, but incl travel and accommodation. Let's hope they're kosher. As a former lawyer these things worry me." From where I'm standing it looks like a great deal.
All that remains now is for the two of them to attend a 50th birthday party this evening, for Mr Vavasour to race to Kent afterwards to get a dawn ferry to Calais, for Mrs Vavasour to get her daughter to Norwich High School for Girls at 4am for a Netball and Hockey tour in Barbados, and for herself her remaining three children to get to the Dordogne for their half-term holiday. Judging from her emails, this is all in a weekend's work.
I have found a man who knows a man in the French rugby federation. He leaves a message on my mobile saying he can secure me a ticket. The asking price is £450. I call him back: he has sold it. “I don’t think you will get one now” he says. At the Stade de France, French and Antipodean fans picking up pre-booked tickets are quickly surrounded by touts. A British tout who has been here several days tells me: “Demand is hot now. The price is Euros 1-1,500.” At the Gare du Nord, arriving England fans find a city still paralysed by a rail strike. Perhaps it reminds them of home.
Darren Lees, 23, a Royal Navy marine engineer and Tim Myatt, 25, a rugby coach, have arrived without tickets and due to the strike, they cannot reach their hotel on the edge of town. They are remarkably cheerful about their predicament. "We will be sleeping at the Stade De France tonight to try and get tickets," says Darren.
They do not have sleeping bags. "Alcohol will keep us warm," said Tim.
"Besides," says Darren. "We are built for comfort not for speed."
Their plan is to intercept French fans on their way to the play-off with Argentina, who may have bought final tickets. "We have got to get there sharpish," says Darren. "The next load of England supporters arrive in 35 minutes."
On the bus into town I met a family of New Zealanders, heading for Euro Disney, and made what may turn out to be a big mistake. Barry Clark, 47, an engineer, had sold up the two businesses he had built up and headed for Europe on "the trip of a lifetime", his wife and two kids in tow. He had bought two tickets for the World Cup Final, together behind the posts, he offered them to me for £800 but came down to £700. For that money I could take a friend in with me and still get home on budget. I took his number, surely he would not bump into any England fans at Euro Disney. He texted me twenty minutes later to say he had sold both for Euros 1,200.
The England camp have been worrying about their sleep patterns as they attempt to set their body clocks for the 9pm match on Saturday. There has been similar worries in my own, albeit smaller, ticket hunting camp. This has something to do with the fact that my lodgings in Paris are, in a very real sense, a camp. The Mayor of Paris had advised England fans to bring a tent and I am sleeping, or rather not sleeping in one, in a camping site on the western edge of the city, in the Bois de Boulogne.
It seemed a strange proposition, camping in a large city. People returning from camping trips to the Amazon rainforest often talk about how noisy it is with all the insects: they say it is like camping in a city, although I am certain it is not as similar to camping in a city as actually camping in a city. I seem to have pitched my tent on the shattered remains of an ancient pavement. It is rather cold too - I had worried about finding a pitch, but the lady at the desk just laughed and said: "Of course we have spare pitches. It's winter."
Such are the mild hardships endured by ticketless England fans for the sake of the match tomorrow. The tent next door is draped with a St George cross, at reception were a group of seven students from Oxford Brookes who had arrived overnight on the coach from Victoria. "It was an impulse decision on Tuesday," says one. "Don't give our names, we're skipping lectures."
It is a good place for ticket hunting. In the caravan area I find a camper van draped with an Australian flag. Stuart Lyon, 23, from Perth is at the start of a six week trip round Europe with three friends. In May he bought two violet Category 1 World Cup Final tickets, the plum seats, via his rugby club at home. He is selling for Euros 1,200. "I wanted to go to the game, but to be honest the money would let me travel longer," he says. To save money while in Paris they have been setting each other challenges, the latest of which is to eat for less than Euros 25 for five days.
Jonny Christie, also 23, is winning. He has only eaten up five euros since Monday. He is selling an orange category 2 ticket for behind the posts for Euros 1,000, but I get him to knock off Euros 200, or fifty weeks worth of hot dinners. In the end I let them go - I have a few other means to try first. They may have sold them by now. They were planning to head to the Eiffel Tower with a sign advertising tickets, attached to a baguette. Yesterday in Paris some bad seats apparently sold for around Euros 300, but the price seems to be bouncing back today as England fans arrive en masse. This is getting awfully nerve wracking.
Prices have come down a little today on internet auction and ticket re-sale sites, with some going briefly at around £750. According to the CEO of one of these sites, Get Me In, this is because fans are now worried there will be no accommodation for them. They expect a further drop tomorrow and on Friday. On eBay, some sellers are addressing the accommodation need too and attempting to flog the rooms they have booked.
Meanwhile in Paris there are discouraging reports that touts are taking over, hoovering up the best tickets from French and antipodean fans for resale. Time to get to Paris and take my chances.
This in itself is no mean feat. You expect the best Eurostar trains to be booked up along with flights from London Airports, but even the all-night coach rides, possibly the most gruelling and uncomfortable means of getting to Paris, are all fully booked. National Express have been continuously laying on extra coaches through the week, but these seven hour journeys have been selling out like Led Zeppelin concerts.
"We've laid on ten buses for each departure time and they're all full," said one of their sales agents. "It's like D Day." Seats on a flight tomorrow from Norwich to Paris Charles de Gaulle were still available for £90, and there were a few spaces for drivers on the Eurotunnel Shuttle and on the ferries, but anyone hoping to make it across the channel and down by public transport has their work cut out. SNCF go on their suspiciously-timed strike tomorrow: people travelling via Eurostar have been generally looked after but those English fans who arrive in Calais hoping to make their way onwards may find themselves stuck. I may be among them: I hope to find a ride with some of the English fans who disembark onto French soil tomorrow morning, the first wave of the great invasion.
The Downing Street press team were not sure if Gordon Brown had been given a plus one by the Rugby Football Union, though they think on balance that he would not be willing to sell it to me, or in some way privatise a spare ticket. It might get out.
Prince Harry is going too but if I want to be his plus one, a spokeswoman says, I will apparently have to join the end of a long line. She does not provide any further instructions about where I might join this line, she may be speaking metaphorically.
While I am pointing out to various well-ticketed organisations how important it is that I be given or sold a ticket, a fellow ticket-seeker contacts me to point out how much more important it is that he be given a ticket.
John Williams, 62, a semi-retired former headteacher, was at the 1966 football World Cup Final and at the Rugby World Cup Final in 2003. With this record of him turning up and England winning World Cups, he thinks the Rugby Football Union would be reckless not to give him a ticket this time around. They would almost be inviting defeat. He may have a difficult time of it. Both the RFU and the Professional Rugby Players' Association turned down my pleas for a ticket, even when they learned of the high level to which I had played under-thirteen rugby.
The word from the England camp was that even the players themselves were struggling to cater for the demand from relatives, who like Jonny Wilkinson's mother, are planning to turn out this time.
The Stade de France has a capacity of 80,000. On a good day, it seats another 400, according to the organisers. They announce the exact total once everyone is inside and the game is underway, which sort of means that they do not know how many people will be in the stadium on Saturday, which must give hope to those of us in the ticket-wanting predicament: there must be room somewhere.
For the final on Saturday, just over sixty per cent were sold to the public and are now being held or sold on eBay and elsewhere. Of the remainder - they won't give exact figures - a large chunk went to travel companies, to be sold in packages. Some of those tickets are being sold too, particularly by those disappointed antipodeans who do not now consider English rugby a sight worth watching. Then there are the corporate hospitality companies around the world, the VIPs, the rugby organisations and the sponsors, not forgetting the friends and family of the teams.
Somewhere amongst that lot, there must be a spare ticket, an unwanted plus one. I call a big French sponsor: Societe General. Did they have any tickets they would like to get rid of? It seems a strange request, given that they normally only offer corporate banking services, but a very nice lady on the switchboard puts me through to a lady who apparently knows the score.
"We don't have any tickets any more," she says. "All the most important people are already going. I am sorry. Maybe next time." SNCF, the French national railway, are getting back to me.
A postscript to the previous post on this morning's official ticket sale. A sign appeared on the website just after noon announcing that tickets had, as suspected, sold out. My man from the organising committee said that they had sold out in around twenty minutes. In the end they had put up around two thousand tickets, far more than he had predicted yesterday, though as he said, this was a mere drop compared to the ocean of people repetitively clicking the "final sale" icon this morning.
I may have found a source, who I will call K. K's husband is also selling and K has to check that her husband has not already sold, but the ticket is £650. Tickets are currently going for that sort of price on the French version of eBay, but having made contact with K, she seems trustworthy. It would be a pick-up in Paris. I would stress that nothing is confirmed yet, particularly to Sally Woodward who wrote to me this morning warning that as well as having an excellent rugby name, she also had extensive rugby connections, and "if there was a spare ticket out there, I would have to get some of my cauliflower-eared props to relieve you of it, so I could go in your stead."
My attempts to storm the fortress of the Rugby World Cup organising committee website this morning have not proved victorious. I had opted for a full-frontal assault on the French and English pages, multiple windows, aggressive repeat mouse clicking, the full arsenal. All of it led me directly here, with, I expect, thousands of others. It was reassuring to learn that we were not being given access to the site in order to guarantee the quality of the service. In desperation I called in reinforcements: my colleague in Paris, Adam Sage, laid seige the France-only phone number, in what might be termed an attack from the rear. Still we were repulsed. The website says tickets are still being sold, but it seems likely that the only remaining official channel dried up a few minutes after it opened.
In the lull before the great push this morning, (the last official ticket sale will apparently begin at 9am our time) I ought to share with you the advice I have been offered so far on how to get into the Stade De France on Saturday without breaking the bank.
Last minute buying: Many people think tickets will be cheapest as the game begins. My only worry is that stewards may be more likely at that point to check your tickets against your ID if you are arriving when everyone else is already inside. Still, apparently this worked for many people at the semi-final.
The personal touch: In 1999 Peter Frazer, a Scottish rugby fan, went to Cardiff the week before the final and paid a visit to the offices of the Millennium Stadium, where it was to be held. "So long as you are persistent and polite (and don't take no for an answer) you will eventually end up speaking to the right person, and I guarantee that they will have at least a dozen or so tickets held back, and will let you buy one," he said.
Going under cover: A reader suggests that I go to Paris on Thursday and attempt to find a job as a bar steward or cleaner in the stadium. "Just before the match kicks off tell someone you just need to pop out for a second and disappear in the crowd". This worked for him at the FA Cup Final in 1990. A less complicated suggestion along the same lines comes from a veteran of several big football finals, a Liverpool fan who always manages to slip through the lines without a ticket. "Rugby's got to be the easiest bunk of all time," he said, wondering in addition what sort of man would fail in such conditions.
The tickets are out there, but what to pay? Some have been spending £3,000 today. Watching the time expire on lots that seem more reasonable, you wonder who you can trust. A man in north London is selling two tickets for £700 that he says he was given by his father. He cannot now attend the match because of unspecified “business”. He wants the payment to be made via a money transfer.
By yesterday evening a very nice-sounding lawyer from New Zealand had come down to around £900 for one of five tickets purchased several months ago: the original asking price had been £2,000. I’m looking to do the whole trip in £1,000 so that is still beyond me, but the consensus among my fellow ticket-purchasers seems to be that prices will come down as the week progresses. Ultimately, they say, the best time to buy will be just as the match starts. The alternative view, put to me by the head of Viagogo, one of the ticket exchange sites, was that prices will spike on Friday as people get more excited about the event.
In the mean time we all have an outside shot at one last official ticket sale. Tomorrow morning the Rugby World Cup organising committee are selling a few hundred tickets that have been returned by extraordinarily honest media organisations and from countries knocked out of the tournament. As demand rather outstrips supply, they have decided not to tell anyone precisely when this sale will start, or how many tickets they have. “If we do that,” a man from the committee said yesterday, “our server will crash.”
Failing that, we are all working what contacts we have. “The New Zealand friend whose father has got tickets is most unreasonably still going to go,” a lady, looking to supply her “rugby mad husband” wrote to me this afternoon. “Have tried the Shroders banker friend, whose son my husband coaches, to no avail; left messages on answer machines of all the children’s god parents . So far no luck from the Corporate City solicitor, the City headhunter, maybe the Army Lieutenant Colonel can arrange to ‘shoot’ someone with tickets.”
A few hours in to the hunt for a good-value World Cup ticket and a few truths are becoming painfully apparent. There are plenty of tickets around, on eBay, on message board sites like Craigslist and Gumtree (the latter two being particularly good for obtaining tickets from disgruntled antipodeans), and on the various ticket exchange sites, but despite this apparent glut, the price seldom falls below £1,000. The fact is rugby fans are prepared to pay more for their black market or 'secondary sale' tickets.
My target is to get to Paris and back and spend less than £1,000 in total, for tickets, travel and accommodation. That means finding either cheap tickets or extremely cheap everything else. Thank you to everyone who offered advice on how this might be accomplished. One frequent suggestion was to buy in the last hour before the game begins, from New Zealanders and Australians and French rugby fans who have still not off-loaded their tickets, and are consequently desperate to sell. Apparently this worked for many people at the semi-final.
Before that, there is still one official channel that remains. Tomorrow the Rugby World Cup organising committee will put a couple of hundred tickets up for sale on its website. These are mainly tickets that have been returned by media organisations - "We are scrabbling around and will have a few hundred tickets for sale as soon as the software is up and running," someone from the organising committee told me today.
It is the question that every newly-minted England rugby fan must have begun asking shortly after ten on Saturday evening. How do I get a ticket for the World Cup Final in Paris? Before that moment there had been other more pressing concerns. There had been a mortgage to pay, a leaking roof to fix, a kitchen to rewire, an old friend to meet, a cold to recover from and so on. There were also broader existential problems to contend with: I am nearly 30 and still have not written a symphony. When Mozart was my age, etc.
All of these things were swept away last Saturday: they now seem far-distant details of a refashioned landscape in which the central feature is a rugby match in Paris next Saturday. I am no mathematician, but the chances of England reaching another World Cup final, in any sport, in this lifetime, seem very slim. Surely this sort of dominance cannot be sustained for very long: in years to come as we watch our side beaten by a succession of new South American teams, we will look back on this period as a golden age, a brief era when English rugby players were world beaters, and reached the final in a tournament that was located conveniently close to London. If we do not go to this match, our grandchildren will ask why not. I have now begun my quest to find a ticket and a way to the Stade de France. It will not be easy. Acquaintances who are proper rugby fans tell me they obtained their tickets via a ballot that took place some time in the period before England reached the final, a period in which their motives for wanting a World Cup final ticket seem not a little mysterious.
On eBay they are going for several times the face value, at least a thousand pounds each, which is a price beyond my meagre budget. I’m hoping to find one at face value, which seems a long-shot when we are talking about a sold-out match, but it is still only the beginning of the week. A lot can happen before Saturday. A rugby fan would probably say it was all to play for, so long as I have the belief and am ready to battle for every metaphorical loose ball. Still, any advice would be appreciated. Please email me - will.pavia@thetimes.co.uk -with your suggestions, or post your comments below, which I will share in the spirit of solidarity with all the other new rugby fans, and by Saturday evening, God-willing, Jonny Wilkinson-kicking and our own ingenuity not lacking, we will surely toast victory from our stadium seats in Paris.
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