Sideline Cut: Ah, it's a funny old game, Saint. There we were on Wednesday evening, flicking around on the idiot box to see how our neighbouring nations might fare in the brave new world of international football.
In the glory years, those midweek European showdowns were grist to the mill here in Ireland with we, the nation, ready to scream our lungs out and get wholeheartedly drunk for the cause of watching our boys secure a hardy 0-0 draw (1-1 might do, depending, as George would have said, on permutations elsewhere). Once, we were masters at getting the result when it mattered. This week, that patriotic duty fell on the shoulders of England's golden generation.
Out of some perverse loyalty, we began by watching Norn Iron's attempt to get glory in Spain. The Wee Six have been the unsung heroes of this campaign, not only because they have performed heroically against talented and absurdly glamorous teams like Spain but also because they have been a bit of fun, acting the buck on aeroplanes and generally being rowdy and spirited.
And surely David Healy's stunning haul of 13 goals in a single campaign deserves more recognition. If Cristiano Ronaldo or Wayne Rooney achieved that kind of feat, it would be greeted as rapturously as The Second Coming. But it was clear from early on that it was going to be what the television boys would call a damp squid over in Gran Canaria.
So over it was to BBC 1 and it took quite a few seconds, to be honest, for the truth to sink in that Croatia had scored two goals inside 20 minutes at Wembley. It was like turning on the RTÉ news to be confronted with the vision of Brian Dobson solemnly reading the headlines in the buff or watching Brian Cowen giving a grumpy synopsis of the Budget while wearing a little pink number and quaffing champagne: remarkably unexpected, in other words, momentarily funny and ultimately fairly unsettling. You had to wait with bated breath until the BBC opted for the obligatory scrutinising close-up of Steve McClaren, but the England boss looked the same as ever, puzzled in that abstract where-the-hell-did-I-park-my-car-again? way. Beside him, Terry "El Tel" Venables looked so contented it had to be assumed that either John Delaney had just texted him to say the Ireland job was a go or else he had gone out and put a monkey on the Croatians.
It was clear, though, from the tone of voice used by John Motson that England had been plunged into the gravest threat to national morale and pride since the infamous and unexpurgated edition of It's a Royal Knockouttraumatised a generation (and possibly The Golden Generation) of English kids.
Motty was speechless, at one time pleading with Mark Lawrenson to take the pressure of him by saying something. "Lawro", ever the master of understatement and once the master of the clean and accurate first touch pass, looked on in amazement as beneath him millionaire footballers, the cream of Blighty, made clowns of themselves on a rain-soaked Wembley pitch. "Can't. Nothin to say," gasped Lawro.
In the studio, Ian Wright and Alan Shearer were also literally stuck for words, coughing each utterance up as though it were a salmon bone lodged in the oesophagus. Is this the best that BBC can do? Alan Hansen, surely a parody now of the irascible Scot, seems to have decided to reduce his contributions to one word, gnomic utterances, as if what he had witnessed was not worthy of a full-blown sentence.
And perhaps it was not. Losing to Croatia has made English football look squarely in the mirror for the first time in many years. It will become clear that this is the price to be paid for selling the jewels of their game to private enterprise, for huckstering for the best of foreign talent rather than trying to coach the next Paul Scholes or Steven Gerrard or Rooney.
It will become obvious, over the next few weeks, that the lack of passion and the absence of the healthiest of fears - the dread fear of losing - is the consequence of rewarding mediocre football men with grotesquely inflated payments and by stinging the fans with hefty ticket prices. It will become apparent that rather than fret about the quality of the turf at Wembley, England will once more have to tend to the neglected plains of the ravaged old football towns left behind in the stock market frenzy.
It was flabbergasting to see just how uncomfortable England looked in comparison to the delighted Croatians. True, the Croats played this match with no real pressure on their shoulders while the expectation on the men in white was oppressive. It could be argued that without John Terry and Rooney, England lacked the moral substance for the fight.
Lampard disappeared. Gerrard looked like he wished he were sitting back in Merseyside with Jamie Carragher. Scott Carson now belongs to that growing catalogue of England howlers. And for all the many times that David Beckham has been placed on the slag heap by his countrymen, he injected one last shot of instinctive brilliance to the arm of English football on Wednesday night.
Poor Becks has lost the pace he never had but he still has the work ethic of a coal miner and his pass to Crouch, first time, perfectly placed and weighted so that the big bean pole forward did not have to break stride - did not even have to trap the ball on his chest, really, because it just landed there, cushioned by the sympathy of the cross. It was a moment of genius from the often-derided poster boy of celebrity scandal rags. England won't produce a player who can do what Beckham used to do with a football in the next 50 years.
Who knows why England were so bad? Roy Keane has an idea. Learning on Friday morning of Keane's weekly Thursday press conferences has become one of the great pleasures of the sporting week. The Corkman is incapable of giving a crooked answer. Because we don't see him much anymore, he has become this mischievous voice of reason and concern emanating from the perennially unfashionable heart of Sunderland.
In his playing days, Keane was regularly branded as the embodiment of the new age, ruthless to win at all costs. That interpretation was, of course, criminally wrong. Yes, Keane wanted to win but that is hardly a knew conceit: Duncan Edwards wanted to win. Keane was and is a throwback to the bread and butter days of English football, modern in his thinking about the game but impatient with the attendant silliness and the vanities and preening that seems to cloud the performances and thinking of many contemporary players.
Ego was Keane's reason for England's failure. Ego based on nothing but status and huge reputations that are as easily pricked as party balloons. And one thing is for sure now that the debate turns to who might next manage Blighty. Keane would laugh at the notion but it would not take long for the Corkman to strip the elite of England football of their delusions of grandeur. It would not take him long to whip the Golden generation into a shape that would decide the truth of that tag once and for all. The FA would not have the humility or the foresight to consider an Irishman with a history of rebellion and little more than a season on the sidelines.
But Roy Keane could lead England back to international respectability. The two qualities needed to manage England are a cool intellect under fire and plenty of cop on. The Corkman has both in spades and he could and would make England happy and glorious once again. It would, of course, be the oddest union of man and country in world sport and the mere thought would probably be enough to make Keane keel over - let alone the dyed-in-the-wool men of St George. But it's a funny old game.
