Stoics to the end, a nation looks for the small comforts

We're coping. As a nation we've already dealt with the Queen Mother dying, a third series of Big Brother starting, and Elton John and Cliff Richard appearing in the same televised concert. Plus the ritual Wimbledon humiliation is nearly upon us. All over England, daughters, who had moments earlier been shouting the team on, told their dads that they didn't see why so much fuss was being made about men kicking a ball around. At least, mine did.

Two men in a lift, one says he's "deflated". The other one reminds him that there's another World Cup in 2006, and that it is in Germany, and that there is a European Championship two years before that, and that the best team won, and that we have a lot to learn. I realise that I am listening to the ITV post-match analysis all over again, very nearly word for word.

All they have missed out is a rendition of the Tallis Requiem, full of mournful trebles singing Latin, that the broadcasters used over the slow-mo pictures of Beckham bemused, Seaman stony-faced and Sol slumped. Because, in fact, there's nothing to mourn.

In train carriages full of Londoners going to work very late, you hear the compensatory refrains. At least it wasn't South Korea. At least, unlike in 1998, we deserved to lose. Hadn't we done well, what with the broken metatarsal, to survive the Group of Death? Hadn't we got further than the flash Frenchmen and the morally dubious Argentinians (let alone the plucky but essentially inferior Irish)?

And hadn't the best team won? Much though we had supped on expectation, the more we knew, the more we realised that we weren't good enough yet. How many of our players, English fans asked themselves, would have got into a Brazil side? Two? Three at most? And which had the technique of a Rivaldo or the puckish Ronaldinho? What English player since Gazza could have run at a solid defence, like Ronaldinho did, before laying on the perfect pass for Rivaldo to hit the perfect shot? One sublime goal, and one fluke, true. But this time it was the opposition who were reduced to 10 men.

What have we learned? That they are, after all, human beings in Japan. That the flag of St George is a terrific standard in really cool colours. That "Greensleeves" ought to replace "God Save The Queen" as the English national anthem. That our fans, though well-behaved, still sing appallingly and look dreadful. (Where bronzed Brazilian lovelies danced out the samba, one camera caught a rhino-sized Englishman in a tan-coloured shirt, as he reached beneath the great underhang of his belly and freed something unspeakable from where it had become tangled in a bush. Ugh.)

For once, English participation in a major football tournament has not been a matter of fear, disappointment and recrimination but of fun, hope and realism. And all true football fans can only wait and pray for one of two wonderful possibilities to round it all off – a Brazilian or Senegalese victory on a sunny English summer's day.