Half the concierges in Paris are Portuguese, but where they or their FrancoPortuguese offspring watched the match, I do not know. National teams don't necessarily reflect the general make-up of a nation.

As right-wing French commentators never tire of complaining, the French football team has a much more coloured and immigrant aspect than France as a whole. For that very reason, the immigrant districts of Paris were particularly excited that night, and especially en fete after the Zidane goal won the match.

One important thing about the World Cup final was that that pride was one of the things lost when France lost out to Italy.

Too much hangs on too little when it comes to soccer. I lay in bed that night and listened to the car horns hooting, and the shouts and whoops of ecstasy from the streets, and what sounded like the swish of fireworks.

Of course, I remember celebrating like that myself the Ireland team under Jack Charlton. That was because of the astonishing drama of it all, given our lack of pedigree and our unfavoured status. That was because the Englishmen on the Irish team seemed to heal the wound of emigration in some way.

That was because for us to be in contention against the big European teams was comically unlikely. But what does it matter to France, I wondered.

France is a great nation by any standards.

France has wonderful footballers. France is one place that has never lacked in self-belief, to put it mildly. What have France and Ireland got in common?

There's something altogether disproportionate between the psychic effect of sporting success and the ordinariness of those expected to deliver it. And they are ordinary, except in two very different ways. The first is that there is a sportsman's attitude to defeat that seems to me very fine. It takes real, hard-won discipline to fail . . . to be seen to be defeated . . . in public.

The television camera zooms in on some golfer, tennis player or Olympic athlete who hasn't made it . . . and, somehow, the loneliness of the years of long training usually allows the person to bear him or herself with dignity.

Something, certainly, makes top sportsmen capable of being dispassionate about themselves, as if they were at some remove from their achievements. When it comes to losing, they behave much better than people who have never done anything at once so distinguished and so silly as to be very good at a game.

But the exact opposite is also true. The second way that sportsmen are different from you and me . . . at least if they are team players, at least in soccer . . . is that they are nearer to the animal state than we are.

Clouds of rhetoric from overheated male writers about their character, their heroism, the beauty of their play, their courage, their silken skills, etc etc, disguise the fact that the hand-eye coordination and the physical giftedness footballers possess are the skills of the jungle.

The ability to read the game has more of the human about it . . . though again, knowing where a ball is and where it might go, and being able to get it there or stop it getting there, has more to do with instinct and practice than with the mind.

And the whole thing is about nothing but dominance. That's all. Soccer is . . . as Neville Cardus said of cricket . . . an attenuated form of warfare. However, it has been so loaded with sentimentality and significance that it is never remarked that the life-and-death issue in a big game is nothing more than whether this little lot of men end up higher on the totem pole than the other lot.

To this end, the players are sent out in a state of animal alertness barely restrained by rules and refereeing.

No coach would field a team of footballers who are mainly intelligent. They want footballers with the relevant smarts but, above all, they want footballers who can break their opponents' nerve by every means short of kicking them in the balls or headbutting them.

The reason their trainers prefer them not to engage in such crude physical assaults is that it is against the team's interests to do so.

But soccer is so far away from thought that the players actually forget self-interest. As we saw during the World Cup.

And don't think that aggression and intimidation are exclusive to soccer, an English invention. Anyone paying attention to the GAA provincial football finals last Sunday could give multiple examples of players crossing over into mindless aggression, much to the detriment of their own team's cause.

GAA players don't get paid, they're not, as a rule, world-class sexy and their wives are seldom thin enough to go out in four-inch heels, a wisp of a shift and a lot of hair. But the same huge and powerful matters of pride and identity swirl around Knocknaheeny and Marino as Paris, Rome or Berlin.

Out there on the field of play, men who were once little boys continue to try to prove that they're the Kings of the Castle to other grown-up boys who say that, on the contrary, they are the Kings of the Castle.

The same physical imperative takes over when self-discipline fails. The same truth is bared as to how near we all are to our animal selves.