Having trouble sleeping? Yip, the 2007 Rugby World Cup has left us feeling much the same way.

The tournament has contained about as much logic and predictability as your average Monty Python sketch and trying to make sense of it all has been a dizzying experience. How did England reach the final? Why did Ireland perform so poorly? What made the All Blacks choke yet again on the big stage? How have the minnows of the rugby world become so competitive?

Why do big hairy Argentinean men cry during their national anthem? Would Sebastian Chabal be the same player if he shaved his beard?

Before we bamboozle ourselves by pondering the illogical events we've witnessed over the past seven weeks, it's important to remember this.

The Rugby World Cup, much like its football equivalent, is a mere snapshot in time, an artificial and limited edifice that's supposed to tell us the best team in the world. Sometimes it will come up with the right answer, like the tournaments of 1987, 1991 and 2003, but that will be by default. Invariably, though, it will give us the wrong one and there's little doubt that it's come up with a bit of a fib this time around.

Not that all this should stop us taking a few lessons from what we've seen over the past seven weeks. While this tournament mightn't always come up with the correct answers in terms of identifying the best team in the world, it does offer up significant pointers as to what direction the sport is going to take over the next four years. A number of different factors within the game have come to the fore, the battle of the breakdown perhaps being the most crucial. No matter what way you come at it, the contest for possession on the deck has had a heavy influence on this World Cup, to such an extent that you could argue that three of the four teams who reached the semifinals . . . England, South Africa and Argentina . . . did so for their proficiencies in this area alone. Two minutes into England's quarter-final against Australia you had an idea Brian Ashton's side were going to at least come close by the way in which they contested the first few breakdowns.

Bill McLaren coined the phrase "hitting rucks like rutting stags" and that's exactly what Phil Vickery and co resembled as they refused to allow George Gregan an easy platform with which to release his talented array of backs.

Even when referee Alain Rolland called "ruck", England's forwards continued to make a nuisance of themselves and while you could argue that the physical impact of it all was minimal, it seemed to mentally disrupt the Wallabies.

Naturally enough, then, if you're physically up for putting pressure on the opposition when they have the ball, basic logic dictates that you'll certainly be up for the task of protecting your own ball. In many ways, this was the main rock on which Ireland perished during this World Cup. How many times in their four matches did we see a couple of Irish players keener to get themselves into the two pillar positions at defensive rucks than to actually attempt to disrupt the opposition? Team policy appeared to dictate that defensive rucks were not to be contested and it had a significant knock-on effect. Just as England's ferocity at defensive rucks carried over to when they were recycling their own ball, so Ireland's passiveness at defensive breakdowns affected their performance when they were trying to protect their own possession. Ten turnovers against Argentina alone, and eight in Ireland's other three pool fixtures, tells this very story.

One of the extensions of the increased combativeness of certain teams at the breakdown was the return to fashion of kicking the ball. As we wrote earlier in the tournament, some snobs on planet rugby categorise kicking the ball as being in and around the same sophistication level as eating your young. It seems to have been forgotten over the past 20 years that the game is called rugby football, not rugby handball, and that when William Webb Ellis showed his "fine disregard" for the rules of association football back in the 1820s, it would be fair to assume that he fancied playing a game which included handling and kicking the ball, and not a sport that placed too high a premium on either skill.

Kicking's new zeitgeist has manifested itself in two distinct forms, those kicking the ball to avoid the contact area and those kicking it to embrace it. To the latter, first.

Teams like Argentina, England and South Africa are so ferocious in the tackle area that it doesn't bother them all that much if they hand possession to the opposition.

Kicking allows them the opportunity to get into opposition territory, a position from which they can growl and fight like cornered rottweilers and bully the opposition into doing something stupid. Like kicking the ball to touch or giving away a silly penalty.

The second kicking tactic we've seen is almost the reverse theory. Teams have decided to launch the ball up in the air or kick it deep because they're afraid of being turned-over at the breakdown inside their own half. Rather than having to protect a ballcarrier going into contact with three or four other players, many would rather take their chances with chasing a kick and seeing what happens from there. We're not saying that some teams do this every time they get their paws on the ball, but it has, for a number of countries in this tournament, been a tactic used as much as any other in their game plan.

A corollary of all this has been the near-disappearance of the offload as a method of avoiding the breakdown but we're certain it will come back into fashion as teams with a little less physicality attempt to vary their tactics from simply kicking the leather off the ball.

The final tactical point that has emerged from this particular tournament is the importance of substitutes.