What is it with blokes and lists?

Picking over the bones of the World Cup, we could have been talking about anything -- Cory Jane’s drinking habits, the decline and fall of Jonny Wilkinson, the general uselessness of New Zealand referees -- but somebody had to go and pose one of ‘those’ questions. “Right,” he said abruptly. “The five greatest World Cup matches ever. What’s your list?”

Cue 10 very blokey, very pointless minutes. Cue anguished debates and displays of theatrical indignation and scorn of which Kenneth Williams would have been proud. At the end, lacking a chairman to provide a casting vote, we had six. In chronological order -- well, we were never going to agree on any other kind of ranking -- they were as follows.

1987: Australia 24 France 30. 1991: Australia 19 Ireland 18. 1995: New Zealand 45 England 29. 1995: South Africa 15 New Zealand 12. 1999: France 43 New Zealand 31. 2003: England 20 Australia 17.

Spot the theme? The fact that all the great games involved a team from the Antipodes? The improbable participation of England in two of the classic matches? The fact that three of the games had Scottish referees?

None of the above. What actually ties the games together is the fact that every one of them took place in the later stages of the tournament. The list comprises two finals, three semi-finals and one quarter-final. Not a group game among them. Every match was a winner-takes-all occasion.

A couple -- the New Zealand v England game in 1995 and the clash of France and New Zealand in 1999 -- are there because of the brilliance of one side or other. The rest get in on the strength of the heart-stopping drama they produced. They were games where the scorelines were tight, but the difference between winning and losing was vast. They were what World Cup rugby was all about.

Trawl your memory banks and you might come up with some pool matches that entertained for one reason or another, but history suggests that the drama only begins when the World Cup gets down to eight teams. I raised a colleague’s eyebrows the other day when I suggested that the weekend just past marked the real start of the competition; events of the past couple of days have not altered my view one bit.

It was, moreover, a harsh reminder that Scotland’s role in the 2011 Rugby World Cup was merely peripheral. When the hurt of losing to England nine days ago has subsided, the lasting ignominy will rest in the record books that say Scotland simply made up the numbers at this year’s event. You can pore over Scotland’s performances as long as you like, but the brutal truth is that they simply weren’t at the races in New Zealand.

Neither, it has now been decreed, were England. The failure of Martin Johnson’s lot to reach the last four has unleashed a feeding frenzy among their critics, few of whom had actually predicted better for the side. On paper, England probably did as well as anyone had a right to expect, but the team is being subjected to a very public evisceration.

In fairness to the critics, though, England were worse than awful against France on Saturday.

Some have already dismissed France on the basis that they have now played the one great game that they dish up at every World Cup, but Marc Lievremont’s team can still take heart from the fact that greatness was not needed to knock England out of the tournament. Johnson’s lot were a shambles, their wretchedness personified by the hapless figure of Jonny Wilkinson, a giant of the game diminished in what may well have been his last match for his country.

So the torchbearers for these islands are Wales, who knocked out Ireland with a sizzling performance in Wellington. Having spent the past 20 years counselling my Welsh friends against the pitfalls of lionising the great teams of the 1970s, I watched their 22-10 victory over the Irish with a rising conviction that I may have been talking gobbledegook for the past two decades. Theirs was a performance that glistened with self-belief, pace and power, and shimmering back play. It was Gareth and Barry and Gerald all over again.

Was it a one-off? Doubtful. In fact, it looked like a performance to build on, one that can only instil confidence in their ranks. Yet it is just as conceivable that France will step up when the two sides meet in the first semi-final next weekend. Having scarcely broken sweat against England, there should be little doubt France have more in their locker.

And yet, nothing that happened in yesterday’s two quarter-finals would persuade you that New Zealand’s name will not be on the Webb Ellis Cup in two weeks’ time. In the first of them, referee Bryce Lawrence helped an inferior Australia pack into the semi-finals with a display that added up to a dereliction of his duty to apply the laws. Australia, and David Pocock in particular, got away with murder at the breakdown, making a nonsense of a phase of the game where South Africa were denied the right to hammer home their superiority.

And the All Blacks powered on past Argentina. The hosts also enjoyed a stroke of luck when Colin Slade, supposedly their second-choice fly-half, was crocked out of the game, making way for the far superior Aaron Cruden. Argentina, to their credit, made a game of it for an hour, but the All Blacks found their gears as they turned a 15-10 advantage into a 33-10 win over the last 20 minutes. The betting is that they will find a few more over the fortnight ahead.