Sideline Cut: Throughout the crescendo of condemnation and regret that accompanied the exile of Neil Lennon from international soccer, nobody sounded one note of true surprise, writes Keith Duggan

And the usual chorus of shock and revulsion from the predictable quarters had a hollow air to it. Nobody was truly shocked or surprised. How could anyone be expected to feel anything other than inevitability that this should happen in a society where teenagers are gunned down on certain streets purely for being teenagers on those streets?

Neil Lennon was right to walk away from Northern Irish soccer, although it probably breaks his heart. Lennon always seemed to me to be one of the few top-flight soccer players plying his trade in Britain who managed to keep the disappearing spirit of soccer's noble working-class sensibility flickering.

Like Robbie Fowler and Alan Shearer, he gives the impression that it has always been about more than just the money, of having an intuitive appreciation of the roots of the game, of respecting the great and grimy history from which the current super-sport evolved. He always struck me as more substantial and grounded than the crass and shallow Gucci brigade championed by Sky Sports.

The chances are that Neil Lennon could have continued to play out the remainder of his days with Northern Ireland without actually getting "shat", as they might say around Windsor Park. As IFA president Jim Boyce repeatedly stressed on the BBC, whoever made the call was probably a crank and definitely a moron. It could well have just been a couple of kids with a mobile phone, a few flagons of cider and time on their hands. But the suggestion by John White, spokesperson for the think-tank of the UDA that Lennon had done his country a disservice by retiring because of the fact that the death threat carried no certifiable weight was actually shocking.

Think about it. In what other part of the world would an athlete be expected to ignore anonymous threats to end his life on the grounds that there is no precedent of local paramilitary groups targeting sports personalities? Northern Ireland is not a country in which you want to depend on precedent. The rules of atrocity and outrage in the Six Counties have been shown to be flexible, to say the least.

Yet it is true that Neil Lennon could more than likely have continued to play for his country and lived to tell the tale. But the chances are that it would not have been a very happy one anyway.

The Lennon affair clouds over the fact that Northern Irish soccer is in the midst of an extended period of misery. It is typical of the contradictory nature of the North that its halcyon days of soccer glory coincided with a period when the place was on the brink of sectarian disintegration. In the summer of Spain '82, the aftermath of the previous year's hunger strikes still hung over the entire island and the only the most optimistic would have ventured the possibility of witnessing a peace process in their lifetime.

Growing up close to the Border, in Donegal, at that time, I remember that Billy Bingham's Northern Ireland World Cup team seemed like a welcome break from all the marches and petrol bombs and portentous death that was happening somewhere on the other side of the check point. The players were colourful and vibrant and somehow bigger than the bleakness that generally informed the BBC NI news bulletins every evening. Billy seemed full of humour and cool.

And Pat Jennings made playing in goal acceptable. The night they beat Spain gave a lot of southern Irish youngsters a taste of World Cup fever that was as real and as valuable as the highs experienced in the Republic eight years later.

The borders didn't matter; religion didn't come into it. Bingham's Northern Ireland wore green and spoke vaguely like we did and they were on TV in the World Cup finals. It was great.

THIS summer was the 20th anniversary of Northern Ireland's finest soccer hour. Now, the achievement of reaching the quarter-finals seems even more exceptional. Historically, politically and culturally, Northern Ireland is a country. But in terms of landmass, it is little more than a decent-sized Australian sheep farm. It is six counties. It is the equivalent of a north Leinster selection making it to the last eight of the World Cup.

It is hard to reconcile those genuinely heady times with the echoing and lonely feel you get from watching Northern Ireland play in Windsor Park now. Our neighbour's soccer decline, of course, coincided with our own rise and the crossing point happened in Windsor Park in November 1993. Billy Bingham was sadly unrecognisable from the 1982 figure that night and irrevocably diminished his own reputation. The genesis of the reported depth of hatred experience by southern participants and observers that night must lie in the whippings that Charlton's team handed Northern Ireland when the countries met in the previous international campaign. There was definitely an element of triumphant hubris during one 3-0 drubbing the North endured in Lansdowne Road.

Who can guess at the mix of emotions and bitterness the sights and sounds of the Republic's (undoubtedly noisy and vainglorious) marches to soccer glory inspired in certain parts of Northern Ireland in the early and mid 1990s? If you weren't mad on southerners to begin with, southerners in "World Cup Fever" mode would not do much to soften your opinion.

It was often loftily claimed in the post-Charlton era that those innocent days of Olé Olé Olé wrestled back the tricolour from the paramilitaries, that soccer made the national flag a legitimate and honourable badge again. Whether this is true or not the tricolour, in the eyes of trenchant Unionists, remains the indelible symbol of Northern Irish nationalism.

And the Celtic football jersey carries similar clout. Viewed through a certain prism, the green and white hoops are vaguely symbolic of nationalism and Catholicism, of being anti-Protestant and anti-Queen, of Lansdowne Road, of an army, a mass of people that represent a threat. If you are a hardcore Unionist, then the Celtic colours stand for everything you don't.

It would be nice to think that the vast majority of both "sides" of the Northern Irish people want Neil Lennon playing for his country again. The booing that rung in his ears, the graffiti and now the sick phone call suggests a less rosy truth.

Northern Irish soccer has swirled through an uneasy downward spiral over the past two decades. Somehow, because of the fact that he plays for Celtic when Celtic are thriving and because the international team aren't going any place fast and because Windsor Park is a ghost town in comparison to 20 years ago, Neil Lennon has borne the brunt of the rage.

He leaves the twisted minority to whoop their empty victory and those who truly care about Northern Ireland's soccer legacy with the uncomfortable truth that if the national soccer team cannot fly beyond the greasy paws of sectarian hate, then there can be no team.