They didn't have to come through this way and face the press but most of them did so anyway. The door through which they entered the mixed zone from the corridor that housed their dressing room lay open throughout and in the background you could see some of the Ireland backroom staff walking past and out to where their bus was parked.

You could have forgiven a few of the players if they'd stuck headphones on and ducked out with them, but that wouldn't really be their style.

If you'd kept an eye on that door, though, you'd have seen as sad a sight as the World Cup has thrown up. At one stage, Alan Quinlan walked down the corridor wheeling two ice boxes behind him on his way to the bus. Now, the Irish players are, to a man, extremely fond of Paddy O'Reilly . . . nominally their kitman, but mostly their mate Rala . . . and Quinlan wouldn't have thought twice about giving him a dig-out by taking a couple of boxes from the dressing room for him. He even made a return journey a few minutes later, this time to hump a big, awkward silver box out to the bus.

Still, you couldn't help but guess that he must have been wondering to himself whether it had all been worth it. No Irish player made the World Cup squad without a life of grind and sacrifice and downs to go with the ups but when you take in the last two years of Quinlan's life . . . the knee injury that kept him out of most of Munster's Heineken Cup-winning campaign, the suspension that kept him out of this year's Six Nations . . . you'd be hard pushed to find a player that beat longer odds to make it to France. And yet, once here, he hasn't even sat on the bench for any of the three games. Instead, there he was, past midnight on what was . . .at 33 years old . . . more than likely his last night inside the Stade de France as a player, lugging kit out to the bus.

Mel Brooks used to say that tragedy is me cutting my finger on a piece of paper, comedy is you falling into an open sewer. Had it been a French player in Quinlan's position, you'd have had a good old chuckle to yourself. On Friday night, it just seemed sad.

Sad, not just because this is what one man's World Cup came to but because by now we can see that the whole experience has been a dreary, soul-destroying nightmare for everyone involved. As Quinlan carted boxes, Ronan O'Gara stood 20 yards away laying parts of his personal life bare to the pressmen in a way he could never have imagined having to do while wearing an Ireland tracksuit.

Paul O'Connell was leaning over a barrier trying to think of words to sum up how he felt while at the same time trying to keep his cool as French players bumped into him as they attempted to squeeze past. Shane Horgan and Simon Easterby searched for words as well, fronting up to their credit, but at the same time making no bones about the fact that they'd have liked to be anywhere else in the world but where they were.

"Dejected, " said Horgan.

"And disappointed. We've got to pull together now. It's going to take something special but we've still got a shot. We're going to be very disappointed if we leave this World Cup without putting in a performance, without playing like certainly I think that we're capable of. The type of performance that we've been putting in for a number of years is needed now and we can't go home from the tournament without doing that."

"The performances haven't been great, " said O'Connell.

"No doubt about it. And we're very disappointed with that.

We were ambitious coming into the competition and I don't think that's a bad thing.

It's good to be ambitious, it's good to set your sights high but we just haven't performed. It's been through no lack of effort on the training ground or on the match pitch, but it just hasn't happened for us."

"It's very disappointing, " said David Wallace, "because we feel we're better than that.

We feel we've dug our own grave to an extent because our discipline has let us down here and basically left them off the hook. You can't get away from the fact that we haven't performed the way we would have liked to out here."

Nobody hid, nobody waffled. Even though the display had been better than against Namibia and Georgia, nobody was of a mind to accentuate the positive. The World Cup has been a disaster from top to toe, the most talented group of Irish players ever to go to the tournament wasted partly through misuse and mismanagement and partly through the untimely emergence of their own frailties.

Getting a handle on the specifics of the problem wasn't something that came quickly to them either.

"I'm finding it difficult to fully understand what's going wrong at the moment, " said Horgan. "In the first half tonight, I thought we were getting it together finally. We were in touch, we were certainly pulling our weight. I don't think we tried to play too much rugby. We kicked a lot of ball and tried to keep them down in their half. Probably our downfall was that on occasion, we got into their 22 and didn't come away with points. We just didn't have the scoreboard ticking over and they did. They kept on tagging on three and tagging on three. It's the old adage . . .

you have to score when you're in their 22. If you don't, you're chasing the game.

"I don't think it's necessarily gameplan related. There's a lot of individual errors which isn't really a hallmark of our play usually but has been for the last three games. Individual errors cost you. We haven't pressurised as much as we could have either."

"It's a combination of things, " said Easterby. "We've been turning over too much ball and if you don't go through the phases against poor sides, never mind good sides, you're not going score points. It comes down to that.

We've given away cheap points at times as well, especially tonight and you can't do that either."

You can't and if they're to have any chance of surviving beyond next Sunday these are all things that are going to have to stop. But surely hoping against hope at this stage for a miracle against Argentina is at best a fool's errand. To beat them, garner a bonus point and prevent them picking up one as well would go far beyond the realm of the unexpected. Unexpected is finding a fiver in your jeans before you throw them in the wash. The way this World Cup has been going, four tries against Argentina would be like finding an extra pocket.

With a winning raffle ticket in it. And a car.

"It's something we have to work out now over the next few days, " said O'Connell.

"We didn't want to be in this position, we didn't imagine we would be either so we'll have to come up with a contingency plan over the next few days. I don't have that plan now, but all I know is that we'll give the Argentina game a serious rattle next week. We will have to get a bonus point and on the current level of performance you'd have to say that's going to be very tough but it's something we have to do or else we'll be going home."

This was supposed to be the time of their lives, the chance for them to burn their names into history and hug greatness to their chests like no Irish team before them in any sport. They talked openly and enthusiastically about winning the thing, remember. On this Friday night, it seemed like going home was the only thing worth looking forward to.