How Mike Tindall must wish he had stayed in his hotel room. When he walked into the Altitude Bar in Queenstown accompanied by a former girlfriend to find a "dwarf-racing" contest in full swing, his antennae should have twitched. As an England player at a Rugby World Cup in New Zealand who had just married the Queen's granddaughter, it was never going to be easy to have a quiet pint followed by 15 noisy ones.
That error of judgment, on a fateful Sunday night in mid-September, has now caught up with the 33-year-old after he was thrown out of the England squad and fined £25,000 by the Rugby Football Union for his "unacceptable" drunken conduct that evening.
Tindall is appealing against the disciplinary action but had he followed the advice of his manager, Martin Johnson, and the team's media officers and issued an immediate apology, things might have been very different. By all accounts he repeatedly refused, still adamant he had done nothing wrong.
The night out at the "Mad Midget Weekender" happened only six weeks after his wedding to Zara Phillips at Canongate Kirk on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.
For a player of such immense experience, it was a hopelessly naive stance. Maybe images of a furious Princess Royal flashed across his mind. Perhaps he optimistically reckoned that, even in an era of CCTV footage and camera phones, the old cliche "what goes on tour stays on tour" still applies to professional sports players captaining their country at a World Cup. Blaming the press is perfectly fine until your own PR advisers issue a statement complaining that they have been misled and a highly respected England manager discovers he has unwittingly not been telling the truth.
Worse could yet follow if a rumoured second piece of video footage ever reaches the public domain. Either way, Tindall's demotion from the elite player squad appears to signal the end of his 11-year Test career. It leaves only Jonny Wilkinson and Steve Thompson as current squad survivors from the starting XV that won the Rugby World Cup in Australia in 2003.
That victorious evening in Sydney Tindall was first introduced to Zara Phillips, now his wife – showing that a boys' night out need not always end badly. That World Cup even reportedly ended with Tindall attempting to beat the Australian cricketer David Boon's record for the number of cans of beer consumed on the flight home (Boon's record is 52 cans).
Hanging the Otley-born Tindall out to dry is far from the end of the story as far as the Rugby Football Union is concerned. There are now visible splits within the squad between those who feel he was out of order, including Jonny Wilkinson, and others of a more open-minded persuasion.
A former colleague, Austin Healey, has accused the RFU of making Tindall a scapegoat while another ex-England international, Martin Bayfield, described the punishment as "laughable, too severe and far too late. The horse hasn't just bolted, it's died of old age and been turned into glue."
This breezy, old-school attitude may well amuse the equestrian half of the Tindall family, if not the inmates of Twickenham. It is undeniably true the punishment has been a ludicrously long time coming. If Tindall's behaviour was felt to be poor enough at the time, he should have been sent home immediately. Instead the issue was allowed to fester and seemed to infect England's entire campaign, which ended with an ignominious quarter-final defeat to France in Auckland.
It may also taint memories of Tindall's 75-cap career. He scored 14 tries for his country, earning an MBE for his part in the 2003 World Cup triumph, but his greatest asset was always his temperament, specifically his ability to stay calm in the most turbulent of situations.
He was mostly a solid citizen off the field too, save for a couple of drink-driving convictions, the second coming when he was stopped the morning after accompanying Phillips to Cheltenham Festival in 2008.
His profile had risen as the relationship progressed. When she became world eventing champion in 2006 and won the BBC sports personality of the year, Tindall was there, as he was when she picked up her MBE from the Queen in 2007. He has done a considerable amount of charity work and donated his £25,000 prize for winning ITV's All-Star Poker Challenge to the Parkinson's Disease Society, a condition from which his father, Phil, suffers.
The arrival on the scene of the powerful young Samoan-born centre Manu Tuilagi, fined and reprimanded for leaping off a ferry into Auckland harbour last month, might have curtailed his Test career anyway but he remains a member of Gloucester's squad and will be in the starting line-up for their Heineken Cup tie in Toulouse this weekend.
If he scores the winning try, expect the battered fall-guy – who the Princess Royal jokingly asked to fix his face before July's wedding – to be the first in the queue to buy the drinks. He knows the Queenstown saga will follow him whether he likes it or not.
