Alarm set for 6.45 a.m., credit card and French phrase book at the ready. Ronaldo! Del Piero! Salas! Bergkamp! Batistuta! World Cup here we allons! 00-33-149-87-5354.
"Toutes les lignes de votre correspondance sont actuellement occupees - veuillez rappeller dernierement," said the voice at the other end, on each of the 27,493 occasions that I dialled the number. And that was just before noon.
Football supporters from the 18 countries in the "European Economic Space", who were dialling this World Cup ticket hotline in Paris, knew it meant: "Ho, ho, ho - you want World Cup tickets? Only in your dreams".
After having their knuckles wrapped by the European Parliament, which accused them of unfairly reserving a large number of tickets exclusively for the French, the World Cup organising committee agreed to put 110,000 tickets up for sale by telephone, with their lines opening at 7.00 a.m. yesterday. But just 40 per cent of these tickets were on offer to the non-French.
All of which didn't help placate angry English and Scottish supporters, who felt particularly aggrieved with their tiny allocation of tickets, around 9,000, for their three first-round matches.
Determined to plunder the bulk of the tickets up for grabs yesterday, England and Scotland followers made four million phone calls an hour to the hotline - 500,000 of those calls were made within the first five minutes. But the odds against success were a tad disheartening - British Telecom claimed there was a two million to one chance of getting through.
The organisers were unable to say how many calls had been received and how many of the 110,000 tickets were sold. I can confirm that I most certainly didn't get one. And my forefinger is now three inches shorter than it was at 7.00 a.m.
