Locker Room: There we were last Saturday week, supping in contented peace, writes Tom Humphries.

Our under-12 camogie superstars had won the league earlier in the day and Happy Gilmore had scored a cracker of a goal. It had gotten late now, and the superstars themselves were tucked up in bed or gone clubbing. Then Happy Gilmore's dad announced out of the blue that he had to be up early the next day.

Now, he's a hard-working man and he could have had very good reasons for getting up early on a Sunday morning, so at first none of us suspected anything was amiss in his life. Then he began wondering aloud if the lads could do it and an awkward silence fell over the group. We'd never realised how badly scarred he was by a period at Blackrock College when he was a schoolboy.

So, happily, we fell to arguing. Red Ed the communist came over all politically cerise and defended rugby with a dazzling number of bodyswerves and sidesteps. There were other voices saying things like "but what about the GAA?", and it all ended in a mushroom cloud of smoke when Happy Gilmore's dad got up and cut the night with a rendition of Ireland's Call before heading off for his few hours of shuteye.

Now, this all happened late in the evening of a very long day and the transcripts of the debate weren't the sort of thing one would want reproduced in academic textbooks. I, for one, was arguing from a position of unassailable ignorance having seen not one kick or pass of the current rugby festival.

That - in a way which was beyond me late at night last Saturday week - is the very point though. It's possible to live a full and happy life without the Rugby World Cup or indeed rugby itself ever coming near you. And it's hard to escape the conclusion that it's a situation which suits rugby just fine.

While our late-night discussion group fragmented in several different directions in order to more fully explore various aspects of our feelings about rugby, somebody drew comparison with the soccer World Cup. This turns out to be the sort of audacious switch move which the rugger types have been pulling for years. It doesn't stand up.

The Rugby World Cup is a made-for-TV event which revolves around the ambitions of eight rugby nations, the five from up here and the three from down there, and which uses as fodder any other poor divils who'll try to gain admission. The top eight will be blessed with cozy schedules and an almost guaranteed run to the quarter-finals. The others will end up playing four games in 14 days and going home.

There is no room for a Cameroon to emerge. Or a South Korea or a Turkey. The last eight of the last three soccer World Cups have involved the following nations at least once: Italy, Brazil, Holland, Bulgaria, Germany, Sweden, Romania, Denmark, Argentina, Croatia, Spain, South Korea, Turkey, Senegal, England, France and the US. Note, too, that there's a lot of decent soccer nations not on that list.

The Rugby World Cup offers no such surprises except the vast and breathtaking scale of its hype. We were all moved surely by the manner of Keith Wood's departing words, but Limerick has long been the exception that proves the rule in discussions about Irish rugby. The longer you argue that Irish rugby is cold and elitist the more you'll hear somebody say indignantly "but what about Limerick?"

Wood spoke with heartfelt passion, and that, in the end, is what Ireland seem to provide to the panto. We went as the number three-ranked side and came back as the number six-ranked side but had a passionate cut at the Aussies, so all's well.

The Aussies seem always to have known that their real final was with the All Blacks, so the fact they squeaked past Ireland is hardly likely to trouble them.

Even within the big eight of world rugby things ain't all that good. The game is in trouble in South Africa, in Scotland and in Wales. Professionalism has had a severe impact on Irish clubs, but the adventures of provincial sides have kept the sheepskins grinning even though we stand alone among the five big Northern Hemisphere rugby nations as still playing our home games in a semi-derelict ruin. We play passionately and we're good craic - that's what matters.

Then there are the big claims rugby makes for itself around World Cup time in order to justify commandeering vast swathes of newsprint and many hours of TV time.

The best is the one about 200 nations and an expected audience of four billion! That's up from 3.1 billion the last time! Nobody seems able to break this down and we are left to conclude that the entire population of China and India are watching in secret, as are many Russians. Even still, the numbers don't quite add up.

In 1999, when broadcast times were friendlier for the Northern Hemisphere alickadoo, ITV's best figure was 5.7 million viewers for England v South Africa, or a peak of 47 per cent share. In 1995, the best audience was 6.3 million for England v Australia, or a 68 per cent share.

Put in context, the 1999 figure would have tied for 50th place in the most-watched sports events in the previous year's list, and the 1995 audience figure is about the same as that for the Boat Race each year.

So the rest of those four billion? They ain't European. In 1999, Eurosport took on the World Cup and pumped it into 44 countries in 16 different languages. A lot of trouble, considering they only twice got viewing figures over the 600,000 mark.

This time around, according to Saturday's London Times, the highest average audience in Britain has been six million, with a peak of 7.1 million for the final 15 minutes of the England versus Wales game. This year the Boat Race had a peak viewing figure of 7.7 million.

ITV hyped the whole thing as dutifully as any other media outlet. Apart from the Heineken adverts, which were everywhere, ITV pumped out 200 advance trailer slots. The broad audience response has been a shrug of indifference. For the other two quarter-finals screened on ITV 1, the average audience was 2.85 million, while the fourth game between New Zealand and South Africa drew 710,000 on ITV 2. Those are some puny sets of numbers.

Which brings us to the nub of the argument. As ever with rugby, it's the quality, not the quantity, that counts. Rugby draws in those A and B1 viewers advertisers pay top dollar to reach.

Brian Barwick of ITV conceded at the weekend that "For ITV, the aim is for the tournament to be watched by everyone. However, it undoubtedly does attract the elusive upmarket male audiences, particularly for the big games."

Better still was the rather sceptical contribution from Kevin Alavy, a research analyst at Initiative, an international media agency specialising in collating global ratings.

He pointed out that the Rugby World Cup has been reasonably successful in Britain, where the quality of the audience is what matters, but the worry for the IRB and World Cup sponsors are the low figures in other countries.

France has been an exception here, and the highest figure before the weekend was 5.7 million for the pool game against Scotland. Alavy points to good-ish figures in the rest of ruggerworld, i.e., New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, but notes that all these countries have relatively small populations.

The hype is neatly punctured by one statistic. The Australian Rugby Union announced before the opening game, between Australia and Argentina, that a billion people would watch the opening ceremony. Alavy said: "We have collated the TV figures from all 20 countries taking part. The final figures have yet to come in from South Africa, Japan and Tonga, but we now do not expect the total from all these markets to exceed 10 million." Oh!

Ten years ago, in an effort to justify throwing such a big party for its eight basic constituencies, the IRB swore that before long another nation would make the breakthrough and the game would be on its way to being globally meaningful. We're still waiting, and we're still having to chew great big lumps of coverage which rugby doesn't deserve but we getjust because the boys at the helm are from the world of quality and not quantity.

Ah, if only I'd thought of all this last Saturday week.