Markets are often emotional things, never more so than last Saturday, when England produced a fantastic performance to beat the favourites New Zealand in the semi finals of the Rugby World Cup in Japan. After the game, the immediate question for those of us lucky enough to be there was “are you coming back next week?” and the most common answer was “if I can get a ticket”, for the fact was that with a face value of GBP 800 upwards, few of the travelling England fans had been confident enough before the finals to pay that sort of money for a (likely) South Africa v New Zealand final.

The more emotional (in more ways than one) fans immediately got onto the assorted websites to try and secure said tickets and the demand/supply imbalance of course exploded, with ticket prices quickly leaping into the thousands, all breathlessly reported by the Sunday papers in the UK as part of their sports coverage. In the UK too, there was a lot of frantic internet searching for flights, accommodation and of course tickets, adding further to the demand.

Around this point, the supply and demand reasserted itself, for just as there were a lot of travelling England fans without tickets for the final, there were just as many, if not more, New Zealand fans with tickets they no longer wanted and as I hear it the on the ground prices in Tokyo had started to slip even by Monday morning. Throw in the fact that most of the tickets were in the hands of genuine fans rather than speculators and that these fans were happy to sell to other genuine fans without a profit and the market clearing price is rapidly dropping back towards face value. Moreover, because these tickets are a totally perishable good, the closer we get to Saturday, the more likely it is that the price will drop below face value for those with the courage to hold on.

Meanwhile the rest of us are just hoping for as good a game as last week.

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