It was the soggy midsummer of 1987 and the England rugby team had been home almost a week before anyone, to all intents, actually twigged that an inaugural World Cup was taking place far away. It was the middle weekend of June and, with cricket and tennis rained off, the evening television news bulletins had room to show a grainy recorded snatch of sporting drama which had happened that day in the antipodes - Serge Blanco of France boldly, desperately, heroically, scoring a hair's-breadth injury-time try to eliminate the home team Australia and put his side in the following week's final.

Blanco's 20-second candescence may have passingly enlivened the "and finally" routine news bulletin in Britain, but for his pastime's serious pretensions to global possibilities it was unquestionably the stroke which illuminated rugby's hitherto unnoticed and dowdy debutant world tournament. Intrepid maestro Blanco had got the show on the road, and the sheepish England players (as well as those of Ireland and Scotland who had also been dispatched home early) might even have realised as much as they shrugged off their jet lag and watched television that evening. Was there just a chance that England and their haughtily insular masters at Twickenham had been wrong to dismiss the World Cup as a pointless one-off jolly never to be repeated?

The weekend before, the England team had been soundly beaten by Wales in the quarter-final in Brisbane - orders having been faxed from Twickenham to the poor, put-upon management that lineout enforcer Wade Dooley should under no circumstances mark Wales's Bob Norster because bad blood between them had been perceived in the previous season's match in Cardiff. The following morning the bus taking England to the airport had passed the Welsh team congregating outside their Gold Coast Mayfair Crest Hotel - and the England men had jeered them with fistfuls of gleeful V-signs, and cheered themselves because they were on their way home and poor Wales had another week to go.

Anyway, hadn't England's most memorable passage of the whole maiden venture been - utterly incredible when you consider the boot-camp intensity of training only 16 years later - the five-day holiday at ritzy Hamilton Island on the Barrier Reef (wining, dining, capering, paragliding) between group matches? And did I dream it, but did young bloods Brian Moore and Dean Richards spend most of the whole month fooling about in masks depicting Gorbachev and Reagan? What larks.

Only 16 years ago - but time for the whole of rugby's freemasonry and culture of more than a century to be ransacked. The only three seriously conditioned and passably decent teams in that first World Cup of 1987 were New Zealand, Australia, and France, each to all intents, already professional. The rest were matey club amateurs on a typical time-honoured jocund rugger junket. They'd all drink to that.

After a month and, in passing, some painful defeats, the festive beano palled and just about everyone was pleased to get home convinced, anyway, that such a one-sided competitive global jamboree had no serious future. To be sure, 1987 might well have been the one and only World Cup - till June 13 in Sydney when, at the very palpitating last and with the scores tied at 24-24, the singular sporting bravado and utterly colourful splendour of a chevalier called Blanco was seen and savoured around the world and, because it was, it set a most unlikely pageant on its unerring course to global prominence.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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