This means, if I have understood correctly, that the good people of Twickenham are likely to be treated on Sunday to another command performance by one Diego Armando Maradona Franco.

When he showed up earlier this month at Jamie Vardy’s usual stomping-ground of the King Power Stadium in Leicester for the Pumas’ clash with Tonga, Maradona was reported to have told the players he would be back if they made it to the semi-finals.

Last weekend’s thumping win over Ireland means Nicolás Sánchez and team-mates have kept their side of the bargain; it is hard to imagine El Diego, who turns 55 the following week, will not keep his.

I was sitting three rows behind the Maradona party in Leicester, and I can tell you I use the phrase “command performance” advisedly.

From his heckling of the Tongan Sipi Tau before kick-off to his post-match changing-room visit, he was constantly on the go, basking in the adulation of his compatriots, signing shirts, flags, you name it, hurled his way in the stand and, at half-time, posing demurely for smart-phone snapshots with fellow directors’ box occupants who plucked up the courage to ask.

His presence dominated the post-match media coverage – at least all the reports I saw, read or heard.

And this in spite of the match being so good that a crowd which was a) bathed in autumn sunshine and b) full of both neutrals and children did not indulge in its first Mexican wave until the 75th minute.

Actually, there is a serious message for rugby here, lest anyone be tempted to take their foot off the gas as we near the end of a flagship tournament that has been both record-breaking and organisationally plain-sailing.

Yes, OK, you have had a good World Cup – and prepared the ground admirably for the next one in the developing territory (so far as rugby is concerned) of Japan.

But don’t think for one minute that you have made it onto the A List of world sport, not really.

For that you need to wait until one of rugby’s old stars can hog the limelight at a FIFA World Cup tie as comprehensively as Maradona contrived to, barely 20 miles from the spot where, in 1823, William Webb Ellis, a Hand of God of a different stripe, is said to have caught the ball and run.

To be fair, rugby increasingly has the feel of a sport on the cusp of an international breakthrough whose speed and scope may catch some by surprise.

Yes, asked at the outset of the present competition to compose a short-list of nine from which all eight quarter-finalists would eventually be drawn, nearly all rugby fans would have scored a full house.

So the top dogs remain the top dogs.

But quite apart from the shock of Japan upsetting the Springboks, few games have been one-sided to the point of embarrassment: the top score notched so far is 65 points; the widest victory margin 64.

Next year brings the sport’s return to the Olympics in short-form sevens format.

Here predicting the podium places is a harder task altogether; what is more, 50 per cent of competition-time, and quite possibly publicity and media coverage, will be devoted to women’s rugby, another hugely significant development.

Eyes will then start to turn towards Japan in 2019, via the equally exotic rugby setting of the United States, which is to host the 2018 Rugby World Cup Sevens in San Francisco.

What is more, Rugby World Cup 2015 will probably generate a record £150 million surplus ($230 million/€209 million), compared with £91.6 million in 2011 (/$140.9 million/€127.5 million), to oil the wheels of the sport’s expansion over the next quadrennium.

So a great deal is rosy in rugby union’s expanding rose garden.

But something else is happening next year which I think may highlight a need to ensure that the increasing internationalisation of the sport itself does not leave its control machinery looking unduly parochial by comparison.

In May an election for Chairman is due at World Rugby, the governing body.

I do not yet know either whether the incumbent Bernard Lapasset intends to seek another term or, if he does, if he will face a rival or rivals.

But if it does come to a contested ballot, who do you suppose gets to vote? Did you imagine naively, as I did, that it might be a case of one country one vote among World Rugby’s c.120 member unions?

Well it ain’t.

The Chairman would be determined by a 27 or 28-man (and it is men) body, the World Rugby Council, in which a single sovereign nation – the UK (divided, of course, among its traditional rugby-playing constituents) has no fewer than six votes.

The rest of the sport’s old guard basically has two votes each, with nationals of a further six countries, from Canada to Samoa, also present, sometimes representing regions.

France has another two members in addition to Lapasset as Chairman; the body currently boasts two Argentinians and two Japanese.

On the other hand, no nationals of Tonga, Georgia, Uruguay, Namibia, Fiji or Brazil, next year’s Olympic host, are included.

Interviewed just before the current World Cup, Brett Gosper, World Rugby’s chief executive, told me that a governance review was in progress, while giving me to understand that one country one vote was unlikely to be adopted in the foreseeable future.

“The belief is that right now the sport is not economically ready for [one country one vote],” Gosper said.

“The economic concentration in certain markets and the contribution that those markets make to the sport is recognised by their influence in the sport.

“We are going through a governance review at the moment.

“I think we will come through that governance review and there will be the ability of more countries to be at that table...

“But they will earn their way to that table through their own governance, through certain criteria…

 “You can re-weight the voting, you can bring people in.

“So there is definitely I think an appetite for greater representation.

“The feeling is that you want all countries to have access to the sport and access to competitions, but that the decision-making does tend to reflect the economics of the sport.”

Given the likely expansion of rugby’s global footprint over the balance of the decade, it will be interesting to see how substantial the changes advocated by the review ultimately are.