It was an old fashioned World Cup. A final contested by a couple of short back and sides, 4-4-2 outfits. A competition played out in a series of lovely and intimate football venues, grounds built for football and steeped in it.

All the usual underachievers (hello Javier, hello Glenn), all the usual hype and all those moments of extraordinary genius and colour which makes the World Cup unique.

The final was appropriate.

The Brazilians, of course. In the era of Dunga, they are not the intoxicating whirlwind team of the popular imagination, but worthy and responsible heirs.

And the French. Bereft of a striker, but thriving on the beautiful perversity of making the long journey by means of defending. Football finally overwhelmed Paris at the weekend.

And top of the bill? Ronaldo? There has been endless pressroom debate as to whether he really is the best footballer in the world. Is he of the same bloodlines as Di Stefano, Pele, Cruyff, Maradona and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink of Leeds? The point is, perhaps, that the position of best footballer in the world isn't like the throne of the monarchy. It doesn't always have to be filled.

The executives of sportswear manufacturing companies need it to be filled. If there is a Michael Jordan, well, lo there will be a Tiger Woods and there will be a Ronaldo, even if the achievements and the marketing panache don't yet match Jordan's.

Regardless of last night's final, Ronaldo did enough here. His team didn't sink from sight and neither did he. He scored goals and made a few critical ones, none more so than the pair he set up against Denmark. The Brazilians here noted his development as being the farewell to Ronaldinho, the precociously showy youngster, and hello to Ronaldo, the more complete, more mature player.

They know their business. Ronaldo might have won some easy points from the artistic merit judges had he beaten two out of the three defenders in front of him two out of every three times he faced them. Instead, he pulled out wide and sank back deep and stretched the resources of other teams unselfishly and the goals were shared out democratically amongst his team-mates.

There is no failure in improved subtlety, although it won't shift so many replica jerseys.

The big failures of the tournament were the Spanish and the English. The Spanish went home in a caravan of disarray, the eternally stubborn Javier Clemente ducking and diving under a storm of arrows from his media.

The English went home happy enough with the heroic nature of their early departure and, taking the lead from the earnest self-delusion of their manager, failing to grasp the big picture. If the war is lost due to defeat in one battle, the general who let war be contingent on that battle is usually accountable. Hoddle just went home to do lucrative analysis work for TV.

The game's leading franchises reach the quarter-finals as almost a matter of course in every World Cup tournament. England aren't numbered amongst those franchises, despite the shiny, cash-washed edifice of the new Premiership which Rupert Murdoch has constructed for them.

So far the English game has imported Arsene Wenger, but hasn't fully absorbed the culture and philosophy he represents. The lingua franca is still the tabloid headline and the key players are still shiny-suited agents who distort the game for their amusement.

The great successes were the French. Not just their team, but the people themselves. It was hard to find anybody yesterday who didn't agree that this was the best organised major sports tournament of recent years.

The French have a reputation for fussiness which is unfounded. They were endlessly flexible and found a way to accommodate any reasonable request. This they did with a genuine friendliness which was never as cloyingly insincere as the "have a nice day, sir" school of public relations.

They ran into problems with ticketing before the tournament, of course, similar problems to those which beset Italia '90 and US '94. A solution isn't immediately evident. The problem is as untractable as that of hooliganism. The French had to endure some horrors in exchange for their hospitality. A policeman kicked near to death. Towns wrecked. The dead body of an Argentinian fan perforated with stab wounds being removed from a train. He had apparently made the mistake of smiling at an English fan.

The French handled it all with grace and good sense, even if various among their officials took a kicking from English tabloids. They were never too heavy-handed and, if anything, tried to smother fans with kindness.

Fans were the best of it as well as the worst of it, though. For this trooper, the most memorable moment took place on a train. Fitting that. Like most residents of the French World Cup city, the wonderful French train service was a staff of life.

We were making the long trek from Toulouse to St Etienne, a uniquely inconvenient journey involving changes at Montpellier and Lyon. It was the day of Scotland and Morocco, a crunch match.

Chugging out of Montpellier the carriage was filled mainly with football fans, Scots and Moroccans singing and drinking.

In the midst of all the merriment were the regular French commuters, just hoping to close their eyes and relax for an hour or two. Some hope. Across the aisle from me was a white-haired man in his sixties and his wife who was making sandwiches for them both from a seemingly bottomless bag of bread and tomatoes. I had them pegged as a retired banker (him) and a retired schoolteacher (her). They looked petrified, but football fans blow through life as heedless as the wind.

We came into Avignon not too long later and by now our train was a riot of merriment and football chanting. The sight of the plain old sign on the platform at Avignon set a hundred raucous voices belting out the battered ditty Sur le Pont d'Avignon.

Just then the white-haired man decided he'd had enough. He stood up straight-backed and tall, with a tomato in one hand and a bottle of fizzy orange in the other. In a beautiful light tenor voice he sang the song properly, beginning to end. He had hushed the carriage to awed silence by the second line. By the time he was finished every French person in the carriage had joined him softly.

He sat down and his wife leaned across the table and kissed his forehead. Scots fans bestowed bottles of beer on him and his wife gave them tomatoes in return, which made their lips runny with juice.

And from there the time just flew by. Like the World Cup itself.