Another Saturday afternoon in Marseille with the sun tenderising our scalps and turning those of us north Europeans who can take a colour to a stunningly beautiful shade of off-white, marbled with lobster red.

We are drawn towards the air-conditioned press room like dogs to a butcher's shop. Tongues lolling, tails wagging.

Marion, the woman behind the ticket desk, is all smiles and ponytails as we queue up contritely to see if we have made the cut for tickets. Marion says that she speaks English "like a Spanish cow" but she has a photographic memory and charm to spare.

"Ah, I know you. Too much sun this week I think."

"No. Too much drink, Marion."

"Ooooh. I didn't want to say that but I thought it. And you. I know you too. I like that T-shirt."

"Thank you."

And in the queue all the tails are wagging. This young woman remembers us all. We feel like soldiers home from the war to be greeted by Vera Lynn.

We love Marion. We are in love with her. Collectively we may settle down with her and pretend that we are going to write books. Her words divide the hacks into two groups, a caste system of affection. Those she remembers are the elite, the loved, the blessed. Those to whom she merely hands the tickets without glancing at are the untouchables and must retreat backwards wiping away all trace of their wretched footsteps.

After nearly three weeks the World Cup gets like that. A big community living in the same suburb, but living in it in different cities. Faces become landmarks. In Marseille, Marion is our icon. In St Etienne, the woman at the accommodation desk beams bonjour to everyone, all day long. In Lyon, well, actually we hacks know Lyon to be a town with no cheer.

The other day, the volunteers of Lyon abandoned the list for journalists' match tickets and turned into fairground barkers. They kept presenting themselves at the desk with one or two of the sacred, perforated tickets in their hands, there to holler out the name(s) of the hack(s) they were intended for.

We were incandescent with rage as we thronged eight deep on the other side of the desk, sweating profusely and bumping into each other violently as we tried to surge towards the front of the mob where we might hear the names being called out. And the more red in the face we all got the more amusant the French volunteers found it all, hamming up the roll call by leaving little dramatic pauses between Christian names and surnames as they tilted their heads back and scanned us with their eyes.

Many of us were ready to kill or be killed if they had begun tossing the tickets to the crowd for us to scrabble over. Eventually the CRS came in and tear gassed us all. We went off to the game in foul humour. All of us.

Looking at all the tired faces and the jadedly identical layout of every World Cup press centre, it becomes clear that being at the World Cup as a journalist is to experience a very different World Cup than almost everyone else experiences. It is the Coup de Monde of self-centredness, not just in the short-term and selfish sense, but in terms of the values which journalists bring to assessing the competition.

We define whether it is a good or bad competition purely on the basis of the last couple of games we have viewed. Sitting at home gives you an overview and access to the opinions (influential, regardless of their validity) of TV pundits as to the competition as a whole and what it says about the state of soccer.

We print hacks have no view. We watch two good games in a row and it is the best World Cup ever there was. One bad game and the competition is a dud. The rest of the time is spent trying to enhance the flavours which TV can never bring out.

The influence of television as a cipher for the competition is all the more necessary now that the World Cup has become so large and unwieldy. Every competing nation experiences their own World Cup, but the broader definition of the event is too great for any one person to arrive at.

So many journalists here have heard that Spain v Nigeria was the match of the tournament so far. Very, very, few have actually seen that game: they were either travelling to or from a venue or typing stuff out in a cool press room or sleeping. When another game comes along that we in the media wish to elevate to the rank of best of the tournament, very few will be in the position to make valid comparisons.

Which brings us to the crux of the thing. Television unavoidably glamorises all sport. So much money is invested in the purchase of rights and the grooming of presenters and the art of the build-up and the effervescence of the commentators that we can hardly distinguish between good and mediocre anymore.

The faux midas touch of television was a phenomenon much commented upon by those who attended the drawn Dublin and Kildare game a few weeks ago in Croke Park. Practically everybody who attended the match pronounced it a dire, lifeless spectacle. Those who watched the game on RTE, where the mere closeness of the scores was enough to have the game declared a classic, came away beaming.

So can anybody tell anymore if World Cups are good competitions or bad competitions? Television, which expensively disseminates the image to most of the world, cannot afford to take the pulse of the world's most expensive rights event and pronounce it dead. Too much money is riding on the event for that to ever happen.

Ulcerated journalists who watch at most one third of the games between evenings of fending off deadline stress and mornings of sleeping through hangovers operate in the goldfish bowl of their own experience whereby the jolly demeanour of the handsome woman at the ticket desk can send most of the hacks up to the media tribune whistling merrily.

We know good refereeing decisions and bad refereeing decisions, we know that Sepp Blatter has a big mouth and we know that the organisation of the World Cup is good. We know that Glenn Hoddle is less than he imagines himself to be and that Guus Hiddink is brighter than Cliff from Cheers whom he sometimes resembles.

But how football has moved on, what the overall tactical trends are, what is the feasibility or true merit of this huge competition? One big shrug.

Nobody knows anymore. The competition has a life of its own and will take place because, whether the skills on display are sublime or ridiculous, the World Cup is an industry, the well-packaged opiate of millions of easily sated people.