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PARIS - Rugby fever has gripped France for weeks but the World Cup hosts can only feel bitter that they will miss the final party.
French fans experienced a roller coaster of emotions, from their team's opening defeat by Argentina to their semi-final elimination by England, with an astonishing quarter-final win over favourites New Zealand in between.
Normally restricted to the south west, the sport's heartland in France, rugby was everywhere - from newspaper front pages to bus stops, where giant posters featuring the country's top players promoted anything from shampoo to hamburgers.
French tourism enjoyed a boom, with hundreds of thousands of rugby fans filling top-end hotels and proving wealthier and better behaved than the average soccer supporter.
France's Tourism Minister Luc Chatel said an estimated 350,000 foreign fans and their families would have been drawn to France during the six-week tournament, which ends on Saturday with the final between England and South Africa.
"They spend more than your average tourist and more than your average sports fan, like football supporters," said Chatel.
The World Cup, he added, was expected to generate revenues of around 8 billion euros (5.6 billion pounds), including television advertising and sponsorship deals, with half that money arriving in the months and years after the tournament.
Some fans have pointed out that the quality of rugby has been disappointing with few thrilling moves, not even from the usually flamboyant French, who relied on ruthless forwards and relentless kicking until bumping into an English wall.
Still, rugby, normally in the shadow of soccer here as nearly everywhere, became a truly global sport.
DULL TACTICS
The players' wives and girlfriends were invited to talk shows and France's Sebastien Chabal, a burly, hairy forward not widely known before the tournament, became an instant celebrity.
President Nicolas Sarkozy joined the party, attending the games and expressing constant support for France coach Bernard Laporte, a friend of his who will now become a junior minister for sport.
The colourful Laporte faced criticism for his dull tactics and also for saying that he would stay in the government only if he liked his new job.
His comments did not amuse Sports Minister Roselyne Bachelot: "I think the question about a ministry is not whether you like it or not," she said.
Unlike in 1998, when France lifted the soccer World Cup on home soil, the excitement did not last until the very end for the locals.
On Thursday, it was all back to normal with public transport on strike and soccer returning to the headlines courtesy of France striker Thierry Henry, who became the national side's all-time top scorer.
The strike threatened to continue and was bad news for England fans but coach Brian Ashton was confident they would make it to the final.
"I don't know how they'll get here but they will," he said.
"We're pretty well known for Channel swimming."
- REUTERS
