Rugby World Cup: Can France channel the spirit of 2023 while avoiding the ghosts of 2007?

Can it really be 16 years since France played host to this tournament, turbo-charging the World Cup with full stadia, sound and light shows and all scored by Jean-Michel Jarre? 

The 2007 tournament featured interludes in Edinburgh - the famous all-silver clash between Scotland and New Zealand in which, from my vantage-point at Murrayfield, the two teams were indistinguishable - and that quarter final in Cardiff, when France shook off the nerves of their pool stage performances in Paris to turf out the All Blacks. This time the carnival will be 100 per cent 'made in France'.

Visiting fans who are veterans of 2007 will almost certainly tread new ground - only the Stade Beaujoire in Nantes and the Velodrome in Marseille retain much the same shape and character 16 years on, while the venues in Lyon, Nice and Bordeaux weren't even plans on a drawing board then. Even the mythical St Etienne 'cauldron' has been extensively rebuilt. 

The sports betting landscape has also changed dramatically in the intervening years, with online gambling legalised in 2010. A Rugby World Cup on home soil will undoubtedly be a huge event for the domestic operators, although having a bet for foreign visitors remains a challenge. 

Outlets run by the PMU and FDJ (the national lottery operator) bear little resemblance to a British or Irish bookmaker, while foreign-based accounts on smartphones and computers are geo-blocked. 

French television loves an evening kick-off and many of the major clashes this time will again take place under the lights at 9pm local time; England's crucial pool encounters against Argentina in Marseille and Japan in Nice, as well as both of Ireland's Pool B heavyweight clashes with South Africa and Scotland at the Stade de France will bring the curtain down on full and frenetic Saturday and Sunday action. 

More eagerly anticipated than any of those will be the tournament opener between the hosts and New Zealand, a match which will do much to determine not only the two teams' trajectories in the tournament, but also has the potential to send interest levels stratospheric should Les Bleus pull off a win. 

Alongside perhaps only Ireland among the favourites, France enter the World Cup with a settled idea of who they are; a young group who have no experience of past failures and who are entirely invested in the vision presented to them by Fabien Galthie.

And while the specialist sporting press frets about the loss of key players during the preparation, the sense of coherence in the project means that, while you can argue that Matthieu Jalibert is a far less talented player than the stricken Romain Ntamack, he has been the understudy for most of the last four years. All the players will know their job.

When Galthie called his squad together in the summer, he read out a crie de coeur penned specially by the popular philosopher Charles Pepin. 

Pepin wrote: "A great team is more than just the sum of its talents, it is not an aggregation. A great team is not an addition, but a mission. 

"You must throw out the arithmetic to understand what makes a great team. Throw out the arithmetic and enter into the mystic."

If they beat the All Blacks on Friday night in a way their stuttering predecessors failed to do against Los Pumas 16 years ago, the confidence that already courses through the veins of this France team may just become an irresistible flood. That's certainly the way it will feel in the streets of every host city for as long as Les Bleus can keep it going.