A few years ago we used to while away an hour or two sitting in dark Dublin pubs nodding our heads appreciatively while a singer-songwriter friend of ours performed his masterpiece Sitting In An Irish Bar Watching England Losing. It touched a chord. Schadenfreude is a dish best served extremely cold.
There were old certainties and we wore them comfortably. Stuttgart and then Italia '90 only added to the piquancy - We'll never forget you Steve McMahon and all that. We laughed dismissively at the old argument that obsession with a colonial past was no way for a proud new country to behave as we cleared our throats for another rendition of Hand of God, Hand of God, Hand of God.
But last Friday night in post-ceasefires, post-referendum, post-Assembly election Belfast it wasn't so simple. England were playing Colombia in a do-or-die World Cup group game and the streets were awash with knots of people carrying the tell-tale cheap, blue plastic bags full of big match carry-outs. Every pub in the city centre was ready to welcome the watching hordes. Close your eyes and you could have been in any city anywhere in Britain. We arrived in one of the best pubs to watch live football 45 minutes before kick-off. How was it going to go? England shirts are familiar enough sights on the streets in certain parts of Belfast but at times the anti-England sporting antipathy seems to run equally deep everywhere here. England-Ireland Five Nations rugby matches are a case in point and inspire rabid anti-Englishness in even the most mild-mannered characters.
Back to the pub. By any standards this was a big game with a lot at stake but our atmosphere was strangely muted. If there were pockets of England supporters, they weren't yet declaring their hands. Just to our right a cluster of old guys spoke semi-knowledgably about the virtues of the Colombian team but theirs seemed to be a passing rather than a passionate interest.
Ten minutes before kick-off the big screen cranked up to a cheer eerily reminiscent of that roar you get at real-life grounds when the players run out. Most of the people in this cavernous basement have probably never been to a club game, never mind a full international, but television coverage 1990s style has made informed spectators of us all.
And that's when events took a stranger turn. The BBC ran through the usual prematch preliminaries and with one voice Belfast said "No" with a collective groan to the sight and sound of Jimmy Hill. But as the anthems began, the programme sound over the pub PA cut out to be replaced, rather bizarrely, by the Scotland's World Cup song Don't Come Home Too Soon. And then as the players broke for kick-off we were back with the BBC commentary, just as quickly as we'd lost it a few minutes earlier. It could have been coincidence and it could have been expediency, but it did have all the appearance of a typically Belfast solution to a typically Belfast problem. There's a nervousness about the England World Cup experience here and it's almost impossible to gauge how to play it.
After an early tricky period, England of course bossed the match against Colombia and with the goals came increasingly vocal pockets of support for them all over this Belfast bar. There was little or no edge to the occasion and the whole evening passed without any discernible murmurings of trouble.
And a few days later when you get to thinking about it as England dust themselves down for tonight's last 16 game against Argentina, there seems little reason why there should be. Why should Irish football supporters, North or South, set their stall out against players like David Beckham or Michael Owen or Alan Shearer, whose fortunes they follow avidly throughout the English Premiership season? Why should they boo the very same people they're prepared to cheer week in week out and whose replica shirts they're prepared to wear?
On the other hand, Why should we expend energy on an England side and manager whose selection ditherings are at best an interesting sideshow, a cameo to the main drama being served up by a cluster of sides which are far superior in terms of technique and ability?
If we have settled into a new set of relationships there seems little doubt that the driving force has been the potent football alliance forged between commercialism and television. When the England captain is on screens here advertising everything from soft drinks to pizza and when modern technology serves up match coverage that makes consumption almost unavoidable, clinging to old hang-ups seems almost old-fashioned.
With RTE available to only a small percentage of homes here and with Southern newspapers prohibitively priced after the English paper wars, ours is an Anglocentric media and that understandably creates its own climate. But the relentless march of satellite and cable is tending to make national boundaries less of an issue. The Eurosport channel is living proof of this and the way that European sport is now a Europe-wide product.
New-found maturity is one of the buzzwords here just now. Old enmities are being challenged and there's a stumbling towards new positions. Sport is not immune from these broader social movements. If Northern Ireland and the Republic were to be drawn together in a future qualifying campaign it's unlikely that the venomous hatred of November 1994 at Windsor Park would be repeated. Nobody's saying that there would be a festival of football with face-painting and carnivals in the streets around Windsor, but there's every hope it could never be as dark or as poisonous again. Outmoded positions have been trampled by progress and no amount of fingers in the dyke can stop that.
New maturity or not we'll be out in force tonight, some hoping for a limited, unambitious team to cause an upset, others eager to see the potential World Cup winners driving home their claims. The same people will be in the same positions in the same pub as last Friday and the reality is that the World Cup juggernaut will roll on regardless.
There are a few harsh decisions to be made. Do we want to be a Scotland, content to fail gloriously and take all our enjoyment from the trials and travails of our nearest neighbours? Are we content to be envious bit players on the outside looking in? Or do we want to aim just that little bit higher?
