As spectators filed out of the Millennium Stadium press box last Sunday a bloke in a bright, white England shirt caught my eye. The day after his team had formally exited the competition he stood out a bit in the home stadium of Wales, packed as it was with the emerald-clad, intermittently broken up by pockets of blue.

“You’re a brave lad,” I said, with a grin and in an accent he might not have considered wholly sympathetic.

“You can get away with this in a rugby crowd,” he replied.

As I turned away a woman, resplendent in the day’s preferred garb, an Ireland shirt, also smiled.

“He’s with me,” she mouthed, loyally. Well, sort of… she was leaving what could only be described as a deniable two to three yard gap.