SAN SIROI HERE WE GO!

THOSE OF us who watched the highlights of Shelbourne's victory over a Ukrainian outfit in the European Cup-Winners' Cup, were wondering if perhaps we had stumbled onto the wrong channel.

There is a traditional pattern to Irish forays on the European front which has become institutionalised over the years.

They will battle like dogs away from home against "technically superior" opposition, conceding a couple of late goals when the engine gives out before the end. Ideally, one of these will be a bizarre own goal, conceded by a player who, up until then, had been having "the game of his life."

Throw in a bit of suspected off-side for the other goal, and you have the classic Irish hard luck story.

For the home leg, the local boys will pile on the pressure with more enthusiasm than guile, exposing them to a cruel breakaway goal just before half-time, executed with callous precision by the visitors, who then cavort gleefully in the hushed amphitheatre. Their goal will have "effectively ended the tie as a contest."

Against Karpaty Lopov ( who sound more like a character from Star Wars than a soccer club) Shelbourne re-wrote the script dramatically looking for all the world like a proper football team, as distinct from a hardy bunch of lads pumped up to the gills with adrenaline, but little else.

They played some lovely football, scored a couple of excellent goals including one absolute haymaker of a shot by the lad Mooney, and generally did the business in considerable style.

Tolka Park even looked like a proper ground, with its multi-coloured seats, as distinct from a bank of sand and gravel enclosed by sheets of corrugated iron.

Down in Cork, the City boys were enacting a more recognisable scenario against the mighty Welsh representatives Cwmbran Town. Here you had the extraordinary situation of the Irish team starting favourites, confident of breaking down the torrid resistance of their less accomplished opponents by dint of their intrinsic superiority and sheer class.

Clearly the unfamiliarity of this routine did not suit the Leesiders, who eventually managed to squeeze through amid scenes of blood and thunder and hernias.

After the game in Wales, there had been an amusing comment from the Cork camp that as the match wore on, it was clear that the opposition didn't deserve to be on the same park as the aristocrats of Bishopstown and Turner's Cross.

There was a touch of near-fatal hubris in this, and the enormous relief with which they greeted their eventual victory, precluded the potentially hilarious suggestion that "a bad team can sometimes bring a good team down to its own level."

Cork will hardly be progressing to the Champions League stage of this tournament, and there was something almost reassuring about their clumsy efforts to breach the Welsh citadel, as well as a touching throwback to prehistoric times with Turner's Cross serving as a replacement for the unacceptable Bishopstown.

Shels, though, were throwing disturbingly classy shapes in all sectors, sending a signal throughout Europe that Tolka Park is a venue to inspire dread in a way that the San Siro or the Stadium of Light has done heretofore.

This year, there will be no Irish representative on the Ryder Cup team, Captain Bernard Gallacher having plumped for a callow Swede in preference to Ronan Rafferty of Warrenpoint, which, of course, is in Britain, but enough of that.

I will not be losing a great deal of sleep over this, seeing as how Ronan comes across as an unfriendly class of a person who, if his obituary was being written, would undoubtedly merit that great euphemism, "he did not suffer fools gladly."

This generally means that the entire neighbourhood flees for cover a month in advance of a visit by the person in question, refusing to come out until they have documentary evidence that he - or she - who does not suffer fools gladly has left the country.

The Ryder Cup has become an event of spectacular hype, with the Yanks and the Europeans declaring war on one another with all the hysteria that this carries in its train.

Normally taciturn individuals can be observed roaring at their colleagues like madmen, tearing their hair out, and generally behaving in a juvenile fashion.

The captains stalk the course talking into their sleeves or receiving urgent calls on their mobile phones, like generals patrolling the battlefield.

The idea of this quintessentially individual sport becoming a team game clearly has an alarming and de-stabilising effect on the participants. The fact that they are not doing it for the money may also have a peculiar effect on their brain chemistry.

The crowds go utterly apeshit as the tension rises. I recall that at the last dust-up in Kiawah Island, a ball of Hale Irwin's appeared to fly back out of the rough in a way that could only have been engineered by human agencies.

The fact that golf works very well on TV, allied to the brutal atavism of two continents at each other's throats will make this a rollicking spectacle.

Since Captain Gallacher has so contemptuously spurned our grand Irish players, spurned them as he would spurn a rabid dog, I'll be quietly rooting for a Yankee triumph, amid raucous whoops of "You're the man!," "get in the hole!," "on the screws, Lee!," and "birdie coming!"

Be still, my heart.