Wales fans taking the tram to get to the stadium for the Rugby World Cup Pool C clash with Portugal at the Stade de Nice, France. Photograph: David Davies/PA WireSitting in the front carriage and peering forwards out through the driver’s window, the thin lines of rail set into the grass become barely visible. The tram appears to be gliding over acres of green lawn broken only at the intersections where other traffic must cross the tracks.
For the pool stages, teams have been based in 20 different locations and have been required to travel to others for weekend matches, sometimes at the other end of the country. Trams in the cities that are staging the weekend games have been the most efficient way of getting to team hotels and match venues.
Of those visited, South Africa’s team base in Toulon was at odds with the others in that the grand-looking hotel had a private garden gate at the side of the building that opened onto the beach, where there was a bustling a row of cafes and restaurants. Maybe it was the closest thing to Cape Town sur Mer on World Rugby’s list.
Last week Scotland trained in Stade des Arboras and then travelled to the north of France to play against Romania in Lille, over 800 kilometres away. They were back in Nice this week training in the same stadium before they took another plane and arrived in Paris on Thursday. The ability to get to where you need to be becomes an all-consuming part of the daily ritual. The idea of sitting outside a café leisurely tapping out an instalment for the next day’s newspaper reaches into the fantasy end of the business. It died with the arrival of online traffic and the immediacy aspect to modern journalism.