I need Fever all through the night

In the car the other day the man on the radio was talking about outbreaks of winter vomiting virus in Cork. There was a ruminative silence in the back seat until my eight-year-old, a child of the modern world if ever there was one, asked earnestly what computers look like when they vomit.

It occurred to me that she's also too young to remember the first great outbreak of the summer vomiting virus which beset this great little nation some years back. Indeed, I'm beginning to think we'll never see another outbreak of same. Summer vomiting virus - or, to give it it's common name, World Cup Fever - may be a thing of the past.

I am waiting to catch World Cup Fever. Has anyone got it? I could come and rub up against you. My defences are down, my immune system is switched off, I am easy pickings. (Before you write in, I have to point out that World Cup Fever as in the red-top tabloid version doesn't count. If the tabs see no sign of World Cup Fever they just go out and create some synthetic WCF themselves. We in the IT are made of sterner stuff. When we detect mass outbreaks of natural WCF, only then will we record the fact with a light and tasteful colour piece - it's not rugby after all.)

I need Fever soon. People (well, Vincent Conroy) have been saying to me: "So (slow nodding of head suggesting the words jammy and bastard) you're off to Japan and South Korea". I have to blurt - as if they've just caught me in bed with their wife - that it, uhm, is not how it looks.

See, people who do trivial jobs like firefighting can't exactly understand the heroism involved in being a young sapper going off to cover a World Cup at somebody else's expense. Hotel rooms in Japan are small and apparently trenchlike. It's a long way away. You have to deal with live soccer players. Tacking all this without the delirium brought on by World Cup Fever is just plain dangerous. Besides, it's a young man's game.

Me, I long for the old times. 1990. Matches on the box, then out into the streets for singing and communal vomiting down laneways. I could have lived like that forever.

By this time in 1990 the front window of our rented house in Lauderdale Terrace was decorated tastefully with the heads of the entire World Cup panel. Not literally their heads, but representations of their heads with little sucker devices on their foreheads so you could stick them to the window. (I was disappointed when I met some of them afterwards that, apart from Chris Morris, they didn't actually have little sucker devices on their foreheads. I suppose it would have made window shopping quite difficult.)

Ah, 1990. Back then our evenings were spent playing with our inflatable bananas (bah, provide your own double entendres there) and debating whether it was a literal truth that, after 800 years of oppression, poverty and RT╔ sitcoms, you could never beat the Irish. I was so genuine in my belief that we were all part of Jackie's Army that I mentioned it on my CV for years as a means of explaining several hazy years in my mid-twenties.

We had two methods of watching Irish games. We could either go to the Wexford Inn and stand on the seats, catching little glimpses of the match and squeezing in so tight with other menfolk that we got a touch of the Roger Casements into the bargain. Or we could wander up to Quinnsworth in Rathmines and place as much drink as we could collectively afford into a trolley along with a potato and ask them to deliver it under the auspices of their free grocery delivery service. It was the beginning of a way of life which the Celtic Tiger and globalisation was to make unfashionable. I can remember we would spare ourselves RT╔'s pre-match analysis by playing the Pogues very loudly and patriotically and then switching to soccer right at kick-off.

I don't know if I've ever had a better time at a real live soccer match than I did when Niall Quinn scored against Holland in 1990, or when Houghton scored against England in 1988. When men say that the greatest moment of their life was attending the birth of their first child, I always assume they mean apart from those two moments, Quinny's goal and Houghton's goal.

Now great moments in big games just means having to change your intro. People don't think about that though, do they? I have an additional difficulty. Right now, I have Munster Hurling Championship Fever. I have Dubs All-Ireland Condition. I have Under-11 Camogie Syndrome. Still no World Cup Fever.

I thought last week when I heard that Stephen McPhail had moved to Millwall on loan that I was catching World Cup Fever. I have long been an admirer of young McPhail, and when a former mentor of his told me that young McPhail has a reputation for laziness, well, naturally my admiration turned to adulation.

McPhail's move seemed perfect, not just in the footballing sense but as an extravagantly symbolic act of laziness from a man who makes Phil Babb look hyperactive. What better way of getting to the World Cup finals then by relaxing on the bench all year at Leeds and then moving down a division to Mick McCarthy's old club, the one he lives nearest to, for the last eight games of the season. You know Mick will be along, he has to watch Robbie Ryan, Richie Sadlier and Steven Reid. Chances are he'll see you hitting those defence-splitting, 50-yard passes while reclining on your chaise long, he'll hand you a first class plane ticket.

Sadly, McPhail got sent off on Saturday. I am taking this as his refusal to wantonly infuse me with World Cup Fever. The incursion of a three-game suspension may be a breathtaking gambit on McPhail's part, a scam to boil his actual working year down to five games, in which case my hat is off to him. But I tend to think that it means he'll be watching the World Cup on TV and perhaps ordering in from Quinnsworth.

Elsewhere there is nothing stirring on the Fever front. I have tried grooving down to the syncopated rhythms of the Wolfe Tones' You'll Never Beat the Irish, but I just don't get the improvisational solo stuff. I have tried sushi binges, geisha evenings and sumo nights. Nothing. I have tried being a Mark Kinsella groupie.

Time is hurtling on. I feel nothing. Is it just me? Has anyone caught it?