BUDAPEST LETTER:INSOFAR AS Ireland's brief visit to Budapest was noticed by the locals at all, it probably served to reinforce their current state of mind: in Europe but not quite of it.

Watching their national team play the Republic of Ireland wasn’t the worst way to pass a stormy June night and as their sometimes dashing young team run gorgeous geometric lines through green shirts, the local football fans must have thought wistfully about how Hungary might have fared in Euro 2012.

The Budapest part of Ireland’s whistle-stop tour of Europe attracted only the most devoted and adventurous of Irish fans. The vast, beautiful city swallowed them up. Every so often you might spot an Irish shirt or a Celtic shirt, wandering down some boulevard or waiting for a tram.

By early Sunday afternoon, a few gathered in one of the Irish pubs in the city to watch the Dublin football match. Afterwards, a group of English boys on a stag tour came in and sang songs about Bobby Sands that weren’t exactly commemorative. On Kiraly Street another group of English men sat sipping beer in the warm evening and talking about Frank Lampard and of England’s chances. None was optimistic.

Maybe the most eye-catching fan in Budapest was a black guy who wore a Celtic shirt sitting with the Magyar crowd for Monday evening’s game. It wasn’t until I saw him that I realised he was probably the only black person I had seen in a city edging towards a population of two million.

Hungary’s football team seems to mirror the feeling of the country in general: it is torn between the hauteur of its past and an energetic wish to push ahead and become more European and modern and economical. The Puskas Stadium is in one of the grimmer parts of town, far away from the magnificent squares and towering statues of Magyar heroes and surrounded by the functional rectangle apartment blocks of the Iron Curtain era. There are grand plans to raze the stadium and build a glittering new arena where it stood.

I hope they don’t. The place is dated – Steven Spielberg used it to shoot the stadium scenes of the 1972 Olympics for Munich – but it has this regal sense of its own importance and the Hungarian fans chanted and sang with the self-assurance of a nation well aware of its aristocratic heritage in the game. As football grounds go, it is perfect. If they pull down the stadium, they will lose that aura.

Sports stadiums are like breathing museums. This was the pitch – the same dressing rooms – used when Hungary beat England 7-1 in 1951, a feat still celebrated in song.

Black and white photographs of old athletics meetings hang in the press room where Giovanni Trapattoni was accidentally brought in while Sandor Egervari, the Hungarian coach, was still talking about the match. The Italian was apologetic and charming and quickly left the room again.

Egervari’s fingerprints are all over the rejuvenated national football programme but he made little secret of the fact that he was a bit star-struck by Trapattoni and spoke of the Irish boss in the voice of a fan.

Anyhow, the chances are that the stadium will be about for a few years yet. Budapest would not be the first city to shelve a construction period. The city is caught in a strange place, where the forint remains the official currency but the euro is accepted everywhere so that a dual currency exists: a beer costs a few pence but a Prada handbag holds the same price tag as any Parisian store. Hungary is supposed to be even more on the rocks than Ireland but from its style-conscious boulevards to flourishing café society, you could never tell. Budapest is like a grand old Hollywood dame after one gin fizz too many: if you think I’m hot now, you should have seen me 100 years ago.

Just as in Florence, the Irish players could wander around the streets perfectly unknown, just like any other tourist. Given the narrow intense existence that the English football life dictates, that must have been a liberating – and disconcerting – experience for them.

But in the early hours of yesterday morning, they re-entered a more familiar stratosphere, creeping into Gdansk in the witching hour. Thousands of their fans will gather in the coming days. They should bring their overcoats rather than flip-flops: a cold wind is blowing in from the Baltic and it is staying that way for at least a week.

So it is home from home for the Irish – and the Poles.