LAST night before the big screen behind the Eiffel Tower, tens of thousands of English rugby fans died a slow, drunken death. South Africa stole the World Cup from Jonny Wilkinson’s team of veteran brawlers in an ugly, deadlocked game that broke the rugged tactics of the heroic but outclassed England squad.

It could have been so different but for a disallowed try just after half time. After that the Boks drained the life out of the game with their kicking and even the sudden appearance of the aging, raging bull Lawrence Dallaglio was not enough. The Boks won the game 15-6.

Yet the ticketless crowds in the Champ de Mars stayed hopeful to the last. Reeling, patriotic, deliriously sentimental and bursting with Heineken and Kronenbourg, they balled out the only two lines they knew of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot to the final whistle. And then they flooded away to the bars and cafes wildly elated. They were just so stunned and grateful to have been here at all. Barely a single one would have bothered to book a Eurostar or ferry ticket five weeks ago when English rugby seemed dead and buried after a 36-0 trouncing by the same South Africans.

The air was thick with emotion and the French riot police were so hot for action following an English defeat that they raided one bar, solely on the basis of a waiter complaining that someone would not pay for a drink. Sheepish, they stood around and were mocked by the strangely happy fans.

They fought to get here and, win or loose, they were going to live the moment. They had seen their team rise, Lazarus like, from the dead, to defeat Australia and France. The minute noble Jonny kicked us to victory in the semi-final, they took sick leave, booked holidays and abandoned essays to get to strikebound Paris.

Yet, by Friday, when I get there they are still outnumbered by the South African fans. Many could barely get out of the gridlocked hell of the Eurostar station at Gare du Nord. But I am lucky.

“Winston Churchill! Jonny Wilkinson! Deep Purple! Hermann Goering! The Germans come and in two weeks — pah! — the French collapse. But the English, they grip! They hold! You and me old hippies! We have best music.”

It’s Paris, still paralysed by a transport strike and the Rugby World Cup, and my deranged old Anglophile hippie taxi driver seems to be heading for the Alma tunnel. People die there. He sticks a Deep Purple CD into the stereo, cranks up the volume and starts dancing at the wheel.

“You’re old hippie, you’re smart. Stupid people wait for taxi at Gare du Nord but you walk and find me!”

I am beginning to wish I hadn’t. Even more so when he drops me, ears ringing, half a mile from where I want to be.

“Rock on!”

Still, it is nice to meet an England supporter, even a French one. The Eurostar train had been swamped by South Africans.

“Shall we have a few drinks, gentlemen?” I am surrounded by a management team from SA’s First National Bank. Unwisely I agree to sink a few beers. Nine of them have flown into London from Jo’burg and three more have gone ahead to Paris via Lagos.

They are on vodka and whisky. They have a rule — when you say “cheers” you have to look them straight in the eye or they make you buy and drink a tequila. Parents passing down the train guard their children nervously. But these are okay family guys, telling their filthy jokes in whispers.

The Lagos advance party have radioed in with news of final tickets available at ¤800 (£560). New Zealand fans are big sellers.

The bankers have come from all over South Africa and I get vertigo as they explain the logistics of their trip. It culminated in a rolling maul at the French consulate in Jo’burg where they browbeat the bureaucrats into giving them immediate visas — it normally takes two weeks. But they had done it because this final counts in so many ways.

“After you beat us in 2003,” explains Wickus van der Walt, “we spent four years preparing to beat you here.” And they did — 36-0. But then, with freakish, Winston Churchill, Jonny Wilkinson, Deep Purple-like determination, we bulldozed our way to the final to face the Springboks again.

There is another reason why they had to come. It may never be this way again. There are only six non-whites in the 30-man Springbok squad and only two regular starters — Bryan Habana and

JP Pietersen. The South African government has passed a law pushing all sporting bodies to increase their non-white quotas and the sports minister has talked of “an element of coercion”. The boys from the bank think this means the glory days are over. “It’s crazy,” says one

of Wickus’s pals, “the blacks play football and the whites play rugby. They don’t want to play rugby. But they’ll make us take worse players.”

Overwrought by nature and now feeling even more beleaguered, Africa’s white tribe had descended on Paris to say one more — one last? — time: “We are a people.”

Their first stop was to be Boktown. Once I had lugged my bags from where Deep Purple had dropped me, I discover this is, more properly, called Rugby Town. It’s a big marquee across the river from the Eiffel tower. Inside there are a couple of attempts at proper restaurants, but they’re empty. Everybody is dancing and singing, drinking lager and eating jaw-breaking baguettes. The Boks are everywhere, cursing the French.

Two middle-aged mates from Bloemfontein have decided the city is “complete shit”. You can’t ask a Parisian directions, they say, because they always send you the wrong way. And: “Between you and me, their blacks smell terrible.” Good grief. They are a people all right and this is still a nation with issues.

“Of course race still matters,” John Robbie, a player turned TV chat show host, had said. “For 12% of the population, race was all that mattered for so many years. Race is still all that matters in South Africa for many people, in business, politics and sport.”

But one calm voice tries to steady the ship of this troubled state. Nelson Mandela sent a note to the Springboks, assuring them “the rainbow nation” was at their side and telling them they were “a great cause for unity in your country”. Maybe.

A group of flag-carrying English boys in rugby shirts from Bath University have been in cars and on a ferry for 12 hours. That night they will sleep in their cars.

The ferry landings had been quite something, another D-Day. The ship doors had swung open to reveal cars draped in English flags and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot blasting out from CD players. Several more divisions had come through the tunnel with Eurostar clogged and slowed by the volume of traffic. And, finally, air support had come from 28 rich kids on private jets from London City airport.

On the road to Paris, the English mechanised infantry had been cheered by tooting French car horns. They were on our side against the Boks.

Everywhere I go I hear the sacred name of Jonny Wilkinson, even on French lips. The Queen’s good luck message to the team singled out Jonny. And now there is a Tussauds waxwork of him on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Quite right, but make it bronze, make it last. Perhaps, for the French, it’s the fact that he’s called Jonny, like a Spitfire pilot, a golden-haired liberator.

This is the man who nearly killed me. I covered the World Cup in 2003 from an Australian pub in Earls Court. It went into extra time and I was certain I was close to cardiac arrest when Jonny won it for us with a drop goal. I babbled and sobbed incoherently for hours afterwards.

Now, among his team-mates, he is known as Goldenballs, like David Beckham. But, unlike Beckham, Jonny is unmarketable. He talks flatly, he does not sell or brand himself. So much the better for Jonny. With Jonny what you see is what you get. A rugby player. A scrapper and a kicker. A hero.

It’s all about character, you see, courage. Even Gordon Brown, for once, got it right when he quoted Churchill in his message to the team: “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all others.” Like war, rugby rewards courage — not skill, not youth.

You see, we came from the deepest depths to get here. It’s what we, at our best, do, we dig deep. Old Deep Purple, the crazy cabbie, was right — “Winston Churchill, Jonny Wilkinson”, there’s a link. A team of awkward old English bastards fought the world to a standstill. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, they were “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Winston Churchill! Jonny Wilkinson! Deep Purple! We grip, we hold, but time and fate weakens us all. The Boks deserve their trophy and England will rise again.