"This is a team that has ridden its luck to achieve something nobody really expected of them. Having got here, they want to take full advantage." Huw Richards reports

Four years ago you had to catch the Manly ferry across Sydney harbour to get to England's press conferences in World Cup Final week. This time it is metro line number 3 to Anatole France station in the suburb of Neuilly.

That, though, is far from the main difference.

There is still a sense of relaxation, of a delight still almost shading into disbelief in the England team who will play South Africa on Saturday.

That is not for a moment to doubt Jonny Wilkinson's statement that the will to win is just as great and as focussed as it was in 2003 or Brian Ashton's comment that having come this far, his players will not be satisfied unless they go home with the trophy.

It is a matter, though, of the difference in context.

In 2003 England were an exceptional team who had dominated world rugby for the previous two years and feared that they might not attain their full potential on the day when it most mattered.

This is a team that has ridden its luck to achieve something nobody really expected of them. Having got here, they want to take full advantage, but that sense of pleasure will keep on breaking out.

There wasn't a lot of fun about in 2003, but this time volleys of laughter kept on breaking out around the conference room in the team hotel.

It helps, of course, that this time they're not playing the hosts and holders on their own patch. By the last week of the 2003 tournament England had been subjected to six weeks of vitriol from the poison pens of the Australian press, deployed in a manner calculated to turn the most devoted Celt into an Anglophile.

The final week saw inter-hemispheric volley and counter-volley fired between Rupert Murdoch's London and Sydney papers. The Sun and the Sydney Daily Telegraph took full advantage of the time difference - gleefully reporting the insults deployed on the other side of the world a few hours earlier before sending back new ones of their own.

You didn't have to be Jose Bove to find this an unattractive expression of globalisation.

If England seemed paranoid, it was because the Aussie press was out to get them. This time round Eddie Jones is the only Aussie still involved, living proof when he was rolled out by the Boks on Tuesday that not being the chief coach does wonders for your ability to relax and throw out a few decent lines - noting that Dallaglio 'will get on TV a lot, like Chabal. I can't believe the French television people. Do they know any other players ?' - while talking up the virtues of the English Premiership, his next destination in a peripatetic career.

With England you had Mike Catt grinning and cheerful, Dan Hipkiss being philosophical about not making the final starting line-up 'As John Wells said to me, I've got to remember how far I've come in a year' and Andy Gomarsall scarcely able to contain his delight that involvement in 'a game I've loved since I was six' has brought him to this point, only a year after it looked as though he might be finished.

It helps perhaps that French attention is still really elsewhere. L'Equipe continues to devote acres of space to the third place game while Tuesday night's television news programme presented by Patrick Poivre d'Arvor - so firmly established a feature of the French scene that he is routinely referred to by an acronym, PPDA - led on the selection for Friday's match and interviews with a group of players including Ibanez, Betsen and Michalak.

This for a third place match, when France is about to undergo a wave of transport strikes that are the first serious challenge to Nicolas Sarkozy's reform programme.

Somehow it is hard to imagine, under any circumstances, England's players being lined up in front of Jeremy Paxman 'Come, come Mr Vickery. You failed to finish higher than third in the last four Six Nations championships, only just scraped out of your pool and lost 36-0 to the same team you're playing on Saturday. And you expect us to believe that you can win?'.

So upbeat are England at the moment, mind you, that not even that would upset them.