This is our Diana moment. As day two of the great national mourning passes, we seek solace, leadership, understanding.

Someone to translate the groping ordinariness we're condemned to now by exclusion from the World Cup. Thank god for Thierry Henry to act as scapegoat eh? Brian Cowen is delighted. But so too, in a weird way, must Eamon Dunphy. Otherwise his year of cant about Trapattoni would have been up for dissection.

We've been battered to the point of exhaustion, deadened by a news cycle dominated with talk of civil war, imminent savage cuts and spiking unemployment figures.

Two million people turn their faces to the TV screen to see a football team scorned by the commentariat produce our best performance in a generation. In the pub I watched the game in, people started out chit-chatting casually and then got drawn in.

A lot like the country's relationship with Trapattoni's team. Our team.

The post-match discussion on RTE is initially dominated by the act of a cheat. Until the opportunity to have a dig at the manager presents itself.

"They were let off the leash," says the Dunph. Trap must have been listening all along. Dunphy's vaudeville act is back on track and running hard.

Rabble

Two emotive appearances on radio followed yesterday morning and evening. The old routine, compare the footballers favourably to the bankers and politicians, call for better technology and throw in some liberal use of the concept of integrity. Rouse the rabble and preach the old material.

The Dunphy bandwagon never derails. It's so comfortingly nostalgic, it's almost impossible not to be drawn in. He's the perfect cheerleader for our Diana moment, increasingly vain about the value of his opinions, self-centred and completely over the hill when it comes to actual football analysis. Ireland's misfortune is that instead of the energetic, charismatic, interrogator of the nation's conscience he once was, now he's a punch-drunk prize-fighter pummelling us with his big punch again and again and again.

Manager bad, players honest. Unions bad, workers good. Bankers bad, poor-man-on-the-street-like-me-good. Mostly it's tolerable, but the football team matters too much for this Punch and Judy.

At the centre of the incoherent howls rising from the country over the last 48 hours is the football team. It's our football team again, we've fallen in love with them again, the players and the fans have restored a link that looked eternally shattered after almost a decade of infighting and conflict.

We're raging for them and with them, not at them. All through those bleak times we thought we were right to seek the minutiae of the stories about kits and balls and boozing sessions. Something changed early on during this campaign and Dunphy missed it. The fans stopped caring about the sideshows and started to support the team again. The team fed off it and responded in kind.

Twisted

For the previous decade, when it came to our attitude to football, Dunphy was our seer-in-chief. We devoured his Keane book. Seeing off Terry Venables looks now like the last sting of a dying wasp. He looked so right and passionate during Saipan that it took us years to work out his belly wasn't really in it anymore. Suddenly no detail couldn't be twisted into a shape that suited his pre-cast argument. FAI bad, him good. Ferguson good, Houllier/Benitez bad. Ronaldo bad bad bad.

It's okay when it's Houllier or Benitez or Wenger he's mocking, it doesn't matter when it's Rio he's slaughtering. But this is actually our team, passed on in trust from generation to generation, and now instead of analysing the football that's played he pimps his act.

The effect of the manufactured rage is to divide us from our team. It put's real doubt into our minds which feeds into the players that somehow their Ireland is different from ours.

Here he is talking about Trap after the Bulgaria game -- quotes carried on RTE's own website: "If you want my really honest opinion, I don't think he cares enough. I don't think he's working hard enough."

It's dangerous, nasty stuff, maybe even irresponsible when pay-cuts and unemployment are the order of the day. The team deserves better and we deserve better than this cartoonish nonsense.