In a funny sort of way we are going to miss England. They are the lousy, noisy neighbours who have suddenly upped and left the area which they have inadvertently defined. We have depended on them for the friction, the saltiness, the fly-in-the-ointment awkwardness.

Without the English, we journalists, we professional peddlers of sports cliches, have no texture to our lives. We are just fat geezers off at the World Cup in sunny France. Without the English we have no chance to call up our offices on the mobiles and announce, all Kate Adie, that it's "going off" outside.

"Can your hear me, hello, can you hear me? Oh God. Hello? Hello? Is there anyone there."

"Eh, yes, sports desk here. Hearing you fine. Is that you? How are ya? What's the weather like."

"Listen. This could be my last call. My last call. If I get cut off, Jesus, tell the sports editor that I love him will you. It's gone off outside. Do you hear? It's gone off. It's too dangerous to walk to the media shuttle, four of us are going to try to call a taxi. It's our only hope of getting to the hotel bar before it closes. Pray for us. "

"Any chance you could do 500 words on the scenes you have witnessed? Eyewitness account. `My terror' sort of thing."

"Well, it's just too confused. There was some pushing I think. I got the suede bit on my runners scuffed coming down the stairs to the press restaurant. You can't repair that. I'll never get that back, that brushed look. That's gone forever. I'm not going to let myself cry.

"Eh listen, I'm going for me bus now, speak to you in the morning."

"Well don't call too early and, erm, if anything happens put it in the paper that I was working on a novel and `ironically, this might have been his last assignment'. You might say "he had seen too much, begun taking too many risks'. Should I send you over some obit stuff. Tragically I'm younger than I look. I think the paper had yet to see the best of me."

"We were wondering about that alright."

So there's that. No more adrenalin rush for those of us hooked on danger. From now on it's just sappy crowds singing together and hugging and swapping jerseys. That and the Germans.

We'll miss our colleagues, too, not the solid English chaps we are friendly with from the trips with the Irish team, but the big league full-colour tabloid guys. They are the best thing to watch at the World Cup. We Irish sit around and discuss them in press centre restaurants like old Cubans spitting tobacco juice and lamenting the state of baseball pitching in the major leagues in the US. We have only a sketchy grasp of what we are lamenting, but even from our little island home we can see that it's worth lamenting.

You haven't begun to understand the sociology of the English hooligan until you've seen an English tabloid big hitter slightly inconvenienced.

"Taxi driver. I-WANT-TO-GO-TO-THE-STADIUM. GOTTIT? DO-I-HAVE-TO-SPELL-IT-OUT-TO-YOU? STAD-EE-OENTE PLEASE."

"Can't you see I have customers in the back, sir. I am stopped at the traffic lights."

Witnesses to the tabloid warriors last foray into the post-match mixed zone on Tuesday night came back blanched with fear, or convulsed with laughter. As happens most evenings the winning manager and players arrived in first to provide the media with their thoughts. Argie thoughts were of absolutely no value to the boys. After two minutes of Daniel Passarella and his team, you could hear the French press liaison guy over the TV monitors pleading with the gentlemen to please calm down. What we couldn't hear was the journalistic side of the debate. Inside the mixed zone the air was blue. The tabloid boys were shouting at the victorious Argentinians,

"Now f**k off. We've got deadlines. Go and f**k off."

Argentinian journalists and neutrals were trying to do their jobs and gather the thoughts of the winning team. The tabloids turned on them.

"You've got six f**king hours to do your work. Six f**ing hours. We've got deadlines now. F**k off out of here. Go orn, f**k off."

Beautiful.

We'll miss Glenn Hoddle, too. Like Richard Nixon we won't have Glenn to kick around anymore. Glenn is a little luckier than Tricky Dickie, though. He didn't get found out.

It was all shaping up for an ugly finale, with the tabloid boys keen to gut and fillet the chap for the enjoyment of their readers. Hoddle's post hoc rationalisations of decisions which suggested that he was making the World Cup up as he went along could only work so long as England still had a chance of winning. Nobody thought that he could still manage to look like a winner if England went out in the second round. The laughter was barely suppressed among the ranks of the fourth estate when Hoddle announced, without irony, that it had always been his plan to have Beckham in the centre of midfield by the time England played Colombia, that he was always going to introduce Michael Owen little by little and so on.

All along Hoddle seemed to be fondly watching himself spooling these yarns out, smiling approvingly at his own cleverness. The old quote about Graeme Souness was much used in the past week. If Hoddle was made of chocolate he'd eat himself.

The focus has shifted a little now. The mass market papers generally follow the national mood and in England this week's defeat has played out as a heroic failure. Nothing wrong with that, but four weeks ago losing to Romania, failing to top the group and then going out to Argentina in the second would have been classified as a calamity by the English football public.

Hoddle reacted to his team's departure from the competition by stating that they had no luck, that destiny had it in for them, that Beckham's departure cost England dearly. In the short-term past, he could get away with those claims. The truth is a little more prosaic, a little more damning than that, though. Beckham, for instance, was on the field for the last 15 minutes of the first half on Wednesday night when the Argentinians played there most irresistible football. Under the sort of pressure England experienced for that period, the lightweight, non-tackling feel of England's midfield looked as if it would be the factor which cost England the game.

With Beckham's departure the English had to reorganise themselves along emergency lines. At this point Sol Campbell, Tony Adams and Alan Shearer intervened to save Hoddle's bacon. In a state of blissful paralysis on the sideline, Hoddle took 46 minutes to introduce David Batty, leaving poor gangly Darren Anderton to experience a crash course in tackling in the centre of midfield as the Argentinians swept through again and again.

Three things kept England alive. Some extraordinary tackling by their defence, heroic work by Alan Shearer, who bailed water all night, and a disconcerting bluntness to the Argentinian attack. Ortega apart, they never looked like scoring.

So Hoddle goes home having slipped the hangman's noose. The drama of a third English exit from a major competition by way of penalty shoot-out gives a flavour of heroic martyrdom to the exercise. It will take a while before the damning context of dry history shows Hoddle up in a more stark light.

We'll miss them, with their carping, their arrogance and their spirit. One moment from Tuesday's match of the tournament summed up the best of them. Shearer had just taken his second penalty of the night, England's first of the shoot-out. England looked somehow doomed, what with three of their designated five penalty takers (Anderton, Scholes, Beckham) were unavailable for one reason or another, but Shearer scored with aplomb and shook his fists to the heavens. And the cameras picked up the look on his face.

Up against it, but exulting in that fact. They were like that all the way through. They left at the end of the best match of the tournament, one of the best of any World Cup.

If you are leaving the party early, you might as well make your exit memorable. They got that right at least.