What a way to start Rugby World Cup 2011.

From an excellent, if slightly cliched, opening ceremony, to a spirited display from Tonga against the All Blacks in the first game and nail-biting trench warfare between the Springboks and Wales, the tone has been set for a superb six weeks.

The television coverage of the matches has been first-rate, as you'd expect, although Supersport's wide range of magazine shows does border on overkill.

Ashwin Willemse is probably the best rugby analyst in television while Neil Andrews' pithy comments keep the mood light.

The beauty of television is that you don't miss a second of the action. I can attest to that, having sat through all eight World Cup games as they happened this weekend. No PVR for this dedicated reporter!

One thing that has stuck out so far is that the minnows are scaring the life out of the top teams - none more so than Romania in their game against Scotland.

Romania were once an East European powerhouse and more likely to join the Six Nations than Italy. But they lost government funding with the collapse of the Ceausescu regime and have been in decline ever since. On Saturday, though, Romanian rugby rose like Dracula in the dead of night, to show that a revival might be in the offing.

With five minutes to go, the score was 24-24 and Romania were the better team.

However the Scots, with two vital breaks, set up tries for wing Simon Danielli to steal a 34-24 win. Argentina and England - in the same group - be warned.

Japan then nearly caused the upset of the decade when they rallied from 25-8 down against France to close the deficit to 25-21 with less than 20 minutes to go.

Japan tackled themselves to a standstill in the first half and found even more energy in the third quarter to leave the erratic French stunned. But it was too good to be true and, as expected, the physical toll of their earlier endeavours sapped Japan in the last 10 minutes and France ran in three tries to blow the score out to 47-21.

You sense Japan won't be able to reproduce that performance and a heavy defeat by the All Blacks beckons this weekend.

Positive performances from Tonga, Fiji, the US and even Namibia also demonstrated clearly that the wide gap in world rugby has been closed slightly.

The real evidence of progress will be how the minnows finish, and not how they began. The same goes for the television coverage.