Letter from France: Forgotten luggage, forklift mishaps and system failures

QUEUES AT STADIUMS: Supporters at Marseille had issues getting into the stadium. Pic: ©INPHO/James Crombie

If there is one thing more discommoding than living out of a suitcase for weeks on end then it’s that moment munching a jambon et fromage baguette on the 12.28 to Marseille when you realise you left the damn wheelie-thing at the train station back in Toulon.

Multiple strands of thought assail you all at once. What to do, obviously. How do you contact the station? Is your pidgin French going to let you down here? Will it be nicked and give those worn Saucony runners an unexpected retirement in the south of France? And will it cause a major security scare?

That last known unknown? Very real. Major tournaments tend to operate under a heightened security detail and the sight of armed police and soldiers is just par for the course here on a normal day. Luckily, the suitcase was very much still intact and stored in the nearest lost and found, but the possibility of the gendarmes shutting the whole station down and going all Hurt Locker on six days’ worth of pungent clothes, a spare Lynx roll-on and a small yellow unicorn - long story - was absolutely real.

“You were very, very lucky,” the guy in the ‘objets trouvé’ bureau said after the most fleeting of visits to Marseille and a return trip an hour down the road.

A day later and another curveball. This time a lurking forklift hidden in the shadows beside the stadium exit in Marseille. Look, it was dark, right? There was only ever one winner and the forklift stood faster than a Springbok scrum against a pair of unsuspecting shins. Nigel Owens and his like don’t care for expletives in rugby, don’t you know, but there was language you wouldn’t hear down by the town’s Vieux-Port where the tournament’s flotsam and jetsam tends to drift.

The scars will be some time healing but the memories of a tournament that has been unmistakably slapdash in places behind the scenes won’t be going away any time soon. Forget the anthems: who leaves an all but abandoned forklift on a path beside a stadium catering for 63,000 people and a fair chunk of them loaded up on liquor?

It’s really a potpourri of small things that have stood out. Monstrous queues and needless complications, basically. They’re first-world problems, but the poor organisation is less forgiving and far more annoying when part of a collage that has been six years in the making, since France beat Ireland and South Africa to the hosting rights.

The systems failure in getting fans into the stadiums in Bordeaux and Marseille over the weekend was the most visible and concerning example of all this given the obvious health and safety aspect, the vast number of people affected, and the enormous amount of money they spent just to be there.

Images and videos of supporters looking to get into the Stade de Marseille for the England-Argentina game on Saturday evening caught particular attention as it unfolded on the plaza directly below the press room on the seventh floor in the hour or so before kick-off.

The crowd moved slowly but patiently and, while tournament chiefs subsequently came out to apologise and promise that steps are being made to avoid a repeat through the rest of the tournament, it’s a staggering failure on the part of those involved.

It’s not long since scenes of Liverpool fans being treated abominably at a Champions League final were flooding our phones and TVs. Andy Farrell has challenged his Ireland side to embrace the chaos as they tackle this World Cup but that shouldn’t extend to those in the stands. Or simply trying to get into them.

The pity of it is that it takes from an occasion that is in so many ways a pleasure. Major sporting events, whether they be World Cups of whatever code, athletic meets or the Olympic Games, bring with them an atmosphere that is unmatched anywhere else at any time.

It's in the air and the spring in everyone's step.

Marseille, whether the city centre of the neighbourhoods surrounding the Stade Velodrome, was a carnival of colour and people for three nights over the weekend. The scenes there were replicated in Bordeaux and Toulouse and Saint-Etienne. Even Saint-Denis, that unloved bowl on the outskirts of Paris, looked like fun on Friday night.

But this is a tournament that works to its own unique circadian rhythms. As Mick Cleary put it in the second episode of the Irish Examiner’s tournament podcast, it would be nice to have Japan-Chile to look forward to now after the weekend that was. Three days off now though? Time for everyone involved to get their act together.