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As edge-of-your-seat, VIP-thronged World Cup draws go, this one was definitely VIP-thronged. The long-range countdown to the 2015 Rugby World Cup began in the concrete bowels of the home of rugby (known to some as Tate Modern) with a moment of semi-fraught almost-theatre.
It was here that the International Rugby Board staged a draw involving some teams who will definitely be competing at a World Cup, against some other as yet unnamed teams, in venues that are still to be decided. But which is definitely, and we can be sure of this, going to happen three years from now.
Perhaps we have been spoilt by football when it comes to draws. In football the draw tends to be a moment of urgent and ominous pronouncement, a genuine divvying up of the sporting fates. Most importantly it also tends to relate to something that will happen within the next calendar year. By contrast the World Cup 2015 draw contained only two surprises of any note. Firstly there was the news that England will play Wales in Pool A. This was already eminently possible, but it still drew gasps from the beefy-shouldered eminences gathered in Tate Modern's Tank Rooms. And secondly this has all apparently got a lot to do with Boris Johnson, who was unexpectedly prominent at all stages draw and pre-draw, striding in through the main entrance in a flash of power-blond, and eventually hopping up centre stage to provide his own familiar fidgety scene-stealing accompaniment to the poor old draw itself.
Of course, these days Boris will turn up to the launch of a squash ladder such is the enduring political glow of London 2012. But there is still no obvious reason why the mayor of London, as opposed to the mayor of Leicester or Newcastle, should attach himself to this World Cup, other than the fact that his office is 200 yards away and the fact that – in his bearing as much a Spode as a Wooster – the tone of Johnson's rhetoric has always contained something of the rugby-style motivational bark.
A familiarly burly figure, he certainly looked at home in a room containing surely the largest amount of human neck ever gathered under this roof, an acreage of straining shirt collar so pronounced it seems likely if some modern-day Russ Meyer were ever to abandon the cleavage and make a film specifically for neck fetishists, it would probably look a lot like the draw for the 2015 Rugby World Cup. "Please take your seats for the pool allocation draw!" a voice announced, thrillingly, across an auditorium glimmering with chichi purple lights. And suddenly it was time for Boris, who really is very good at all this, to skip up on stage and yodel a succession of loud posh, long-wordy things: "The spherical fetishists of Association football! … The peerless game of elliptical ball!", even at one point "rugby's coming home!", before sitting down leaving that familiar, diffuse glow of nonspecific, detail-free but still unarguable triumph.
Not that this was a bad draw by any means. Lavishly staged, beautifully lit, ringed by statuesque women bearing almost overwhelmingly succulent nibble-trays, the draw went off very nicely. The balls were cracked successfully. Boris got to shout "Tonga!" as though this was simply a silly word made up for his delight. And what became clear by the end is that the draw is really just another detail when it comes to Rugby World Cups. We do pretty much know who is going to play who when the interminable drubbings of the pool stages recede (one observer here noted that Pool A, with its England v Wales sensation, is arguably the most interesting Rugby World Cup pool ever concocted). If there is an objection to letting everyone get on with the logistics ahead of time like this, it is that the next three years of rugby are inexorably skewed. For example, everything England and Wales now do is going to be preparation, in some form, for facing either England or Wales, and careers will rise or fall at least partly on this basis.
As for the draw itself those eight unidentified teams will now get stuck into the "global qualification process", which kicks off in Mexico City, before finally wrapping up the whole process in 2014.
Two years in the making: rugby union may not have the glitziest World Cup draw, or the most thrillingly revelatory, but it can surely claim to have the longest.
