A three-hour delay sent nine of us into a bar in Boston’s Logan airport; infants had invaded the lounges. The man at the end was a dead ringer for Warren Gatland.

There is a Gatland in every bar. A flat top cop or cynical principal or well fed head of sales. Retired from something but not all the way. Ready to tell the right man all about it, but not too quickly.

The Gatland doppelgänger watched an advertisement for life insurance closely but gave the barman his pour instructions (it was not, I can confirm, a Captain Morgan). He broke it down for the sour barman: angles and all. The word ‘pour’ (as opposed to ‘poor’) furnished them ample ammunition for argument.

When I figured out the bartender was gruff Québécois (is there any other kind?) and I counted nine barflies, my column took shape. The World Cup: nine visitors ‘welcomed’ to a bad bar by Gilles, the miserable manager.

Fake Gats had a brown bag with matching slip on loafers and belt; his mobile cringed into a holster. He ordered clam chowder which ended up in drips on his plaid button down and sweater vest.

He never checked his phone; the only one of us with that control. Or perhaps nobody was calling or messaging him; no-one at all. As hour one turned into two, Fake Gats shrank and seemed to become sad. At one point, we thought we spotted a tear trickle down his cheek like the last rains of the valley seeking the sea. But it might have been a Francophone allergy.

Wales will equip a solid team for this Cup but one cannot help but feel it is yesterday’s squad, even with new pieces. A bit too matchy, a trifle stodgy, but hard to budge.

But does their legendary old coach have a foot out the door, in comfy shoes, ready for a Hamilton hammock and canned oysters on crackers? Are Wales uniquely susceptible to a Fijian assault? What can they show the Wallabies that the Aussies do not already know intimately and more rigorously from playing South Africans almost a hundred times?

As it happened, the semi-retired chowder dribbler’s immediate neighbour was a sunburned long blonde backpacker in a burlap hoodie who grabbed and smashed five or six Negronis, with a serious looking bandage on his hand, and an immediate memory loss of the admittedly tricky WiFi password.

“Queensland?” I asked?

“Nah, mate! Gold Coast!”

He was strikingly handsome and athletic, even if he was leaving half of his lanky body in the bar, and seemed to have lost part of the rest on rocks.

Since we had been standup paddleboarding on the Maine coast and shucking oysters for a week, I had about as many bruises and bandages as the lonesome larrikin. We drew him into chat, and he immediately shot his shot at my companion, buying her a shot, and giving her a tour of each of his wounds. He read the room as if the world was ending and we were all on our last drink. But nobody in that bar, let alone the airport, looked a better athlete.

The Wallabies, the most confident 0-4 five card team on the planet, conceding 35 points a Test, with a mullet and a limp and brimming with strange self-esteem. Their backline can out-fiji Fiji’s and they can put almost a tonne of a pack on the field.

Tom Hooper, Marika Koroibete, Rob Valetini, Taniela Tupou, Angus Bell, Will Skelton, and Mark Nawaqanitawase may not end up as head coaches but they are the kind of doers and goers a coach dreams of selecting.

If they can just stay healthy and on the right side of the officials.

To our right was a man we first thought a rabbi but ended up being Orthodox, en route to officiate a wedding. We will call him the Platitude Priest. He had a book open, but never turned the page. Instead, he practiced kindness to all, especially my companion, asking her about each of her tattoos. He had a never ending supply of platitudes.

I tried to stump him, but he always had a saccharine phrase in his chamber, locked and loaded, his close-cut scalp in great contrast to his hairy neck.

“Life is a mystery,” he murmured when the barman spilled a Moscow mule. “I wish I knew then what I know now,” he followed when my well-inked companion told him about her more regrettable tattoo. The Aussie chimed in about a drawing on his bum but nobody listened.

The great rugby immigrant hero of Sydney, Michael Cheika, the League-Union coach, the man who bridges the great schism, whose code is esoteric, has built the Pumas (by the way, there is no reason to say Los Pumas, unless we are also saying die Boks) into an unfazed unit who can see life philosophically, and just by hanging in, hang on, and win.

There seemed to be inherent tension between the Platitudinal Platypus Priest and the Loud Lonesome Larrikin. But we were the buffer.

Argentina and Australia are perhaps the least understood rugby nations by the North. As a winter sport in great sporting nations, rugby’s niche in Buenos Aires and Brisbane, Mendoza and Melbourne, Salta and Sydney is narrow yet passionately deep. When either feature in semifinals lately, the London press seems aghast, almost as if it is unjust.

Cheika has grown. Rugby has grown in Argentina, even existing on narrow terroir.

Their loose trio interchangeable, hookers and locks of high quality, but with a dodgy scrum; the team fits Cheika even more than his Leinster and Waratah champions. He has a gritty backline full of footballers.

Argentina can travel. Home is a hotel; platitude alert. They have knocked off the All Blacks in New Zealand, Australia in Australia, South Africa in South Africa, England at Twickenham. They are coming to France without fear.

It is not a stretch to see Argentina and Australia in a testy, card-strewn quarterfinal that ends the Cup for both, with a buffer referee buffeted during and after the clash.

Far at the end of the bar was a quiet lady who did read and did turn the pages. From time to time she looked up and around, her eyes remarkable for their confident calm. But then she returned to her book, the paragon of airport delay calm. Her luggage was leather. Her hair was an explosion of curl and grace.

She ate fruit. Peaches mostly, but also a banana, cherries, and an apple. They seemed to emanate from her leather bag but I never saw her fish them out. I wondered how she got them through security but then I wondered why I was wondering: is there a rule against it? In contrast to the red eyes of Gats, Larrikin, and Priest, she seemed to glow up with each passing hour. Bottles of sparkling water were delivered by Quebec, who found his smile for her. She stretched her legs around the high stool; she never went to the loo.

New Zealand is ready. The Kiwis are comfortable favourites. The only team who can carry the mantle and not fold. Their tight five can play ball or dig a gold mine. They have their Kaino 2.0 and granite-shouldered Luke Jacobson as a backup for any of the loosies. Their attack coach has the best baggage: starter plays from the gods. Uncle Joe’s playbook.

Kiwi cleaners took the expansive Irish doctrine of ruck and made it even larger. Now, a breakdown has a twenty-foot radius. The referees cannot see that from ground level, especially if infringement is en masse; only a spider cam can catch it.

The Great First Five Eighths Debate is over and the New Richie won, but so did the Barretts who are now the spine of the team and three-eighths of the best eight players.

Will Jordan is the Natural, Aaron Smith has no age, Ardie Savea has discovered the Held Up works for him as well as against him, and Rieko Ioane’s stubborn refusal to be a wing has taken flight at lucky thirteen.

Even the bartender of this World Cup knows it: New Zealand is the main customer even if she doesn’t order alcohol.

The Cup opens with their tilt and my hundred is on the All Blacks no matter how much disco and smoke and flag and Antoinism is pumped into the dark Paris sky. They are in awe of the All Blacks; and all the received wisdom about how France troubles New Zealand in World Cups will not avail them.

And what of the barman? This man who hosted us for three hours looked good but did not know how to balance his nine customers. He was sporadic. Intermittent. Pouty.

He shrugged and pursed his lips and lapsed into catatonic pauses; but when engaged, he was marvelous, especially when he gave us a monologue about the idiosyncrasies of travelers from each region. He knew no bounds on decency and it amused us all.

France has built a distance machine, powered by certainty, geared with size, armed with speed. Every kick is super-sized with frites. Every tackle attempts to pilfer your soul.

But what happens when you throw sand into the machine? Wales, the Wallabies and the Boks did that in 2022 and the Dupont-dence of France on function and design was shown. Attack the energy source at the source: make Antoine Dupont a tackler, pull him into the ruck, and when he is in the zone of misery, it is clear he may be a nine who thinks like an eight, in real life he and Jasper Wiese are made of different sizes of lumber.

This is still a moody team. Capable of insurrection and clique. The home fans are the best frontrunners in the business, but if France loses game one and underperforms in the next, the entire country will be on psychotropic podcasts predicting doom and hellscapes.

Only the French boo their own team. Oh, and the English (but perhaps just the coach).

There was an actual Englishman in the bar. He was, as always seems to be the case with the English, a delightful barfly, big and pink and burly and belly-shaking. He was watching loud TikToks which seemed to annoy Fake Gats but his laughter saved it, a genuine sound which became part of the soundtrack of our delay.

England and Australia did a coach swap too close to the big show and only their easy draw can save them, but they also may run into each other in a melodramatic quarterfinal.

Can Eddie Jones flip the script and know how to beat his own team with his new team? Will Steve Borthwick understand precisely how to topple his old boss? Nobody knows, but this does not feel like a proper English challenge for the Cup. Win a one-off with Wales (or Fiji) or the Wallabies; sure, but what next? A meek exit.

We can call this the TikTok cup for the Sweet Chariot. Not central characters in this story.

Scotland is not that different, even if they have a better-constructed team with a coach who has been building to this moment for a lifetime. The problem is the fifth-ranked team has the most disastrous draw in World Cup history: they do not have the power to topple both South Africa and Ireland. They do not have the speed to round either. They do not have the plough horses nor the desert speedsters to compete in this demolition derby. They have an Afrikaner Android to score wonder tries, the Brickmason to smile tries, a skipping midfield which will score and leak equally, and one layer of locks.

When I looked around the bar, as I ate fish and chips, I saw a happy chap in the corner, looking at the sky, his feet up on the chair opposite, with hair on the verge of ginger. Hullo Scotland: your fans are the best, and good on you for making rugby (and uniforms) better.

My companion is Irish. A mermaid or a faerie. Who can say?

Persnickety at best; a pisser when wrong. She was the belle of the bar for a long time, until she retreated into an Irish reverie and too much in her myth-infused head.

Ask her about her life and prepare for a labyrinth. “I’m not complicated. I just complicate things.” And this is how Ireland is playing rugby at the moment: nobody is putting more beauty on the pitch. Props pass, hookers hoof it, locks are languid, flanks are fleet, rucks are rapid, shapes shift, wings are weird, and the fullback Hugo Keenan is the best player nobody else knows and fails to put in world fifteens.

But as the clock kept ticking, she became furious and frustrated. The delay seemed daft. All our barmates annoyed her, especially the graceless ones. By the end, she sagged.

Ireland’s fate at the Cups is legendarily poor, poured out over and over in the quarters. All their plans revealed, all their players peaking properly, wins for the ages over the Kiwis and French; and now, the finest Irish team in any sport ever, but where to go but down?

A big fellow from Hawaii had the middle of the bar to himself. His knees were the size of the Aussie’s thighs; his head equal to two Irish mermaid’s. His smile was a warning.

This version of the World Cup will have better sequenced and provisioned Pasifika teams. Samoa has a team sheet that widens the eye. Tonga’s team, if paid by one French billionaire owner, would break the bank. But it is Fiji which looms, in Pool C, as the shark.

And what of the unloved but often consequential Boks?

I spread my backpack to the left, positioned my mermaid to the right, scarfed fish and chips and more chips, kept the most amber IPA rolling from Gilles, traded man hugs with the Larrikin, and questioned Father Cheika forever.

Not as well-liked as I imagined, an obstacle at the bar, but right there in the mix, and not quietly.

The bar is being prepared in France, but only after August holidays.

Catch your flights and do not delay. The Roar will have four men on the ground, in the field, treading the rocky beaches of Nice, wobbling in the ancient alleys of Lyon, writing in Bordeaux with Bordeaux, broadcasting in windy Nantes and obscure St. Etienne, and letting these fascinating teams with their wildly vivid coaches walk into the bar of our hearts.

One month.