Sideline Cut: It is common for people to salivate over the thrilling, guilty pleasure of watching two countries reduced to the lottery of nerve, conviction and luck that is the penalty shoot-out and then piously declare it a terrible way to decide a game. In the case of Ukraine versus Switzerland this week, however, the fate did not seem terrible enough. There must have been many thousands of fans hoping both countries would somehow be knocked out. I for one was astonished the Swiss did not elect to pass their penalty shots back to midfield.

It was a dreary, fearful game that at least hammered home just how gloriously adventurous most of this World Cup has been. The only way to endure it was to support one country over the other.

Therefore, it is probable fans all over the globe adopted the Ukrainian cause, on the grounds it is emotionally impossible to have any kind of feelings about Switzerland, the general anaesthetic of nationalist fervour.

We in Ireland have, after all, a bit in common with old Ukraine, where they endure psychotically cold winters, drink vodka without ice, sing dirges about obscure, dead nationalists and come to a standstill because their team has qualified for the World Cup.

While the expressive tricksters from South America and the purists from Italy and France looked at this novel and unfashionable second-round match with mild disdain, many of us in Ireland knew a country was suffering a nervous breakdown. Downtown Kiev was like a ghost town.

Every pronouncement by Oleg Blokhin was pondered over as a coded message, a communication to the people. When the national anthem sounded, while the rest of the world half listened to a brisk marching arrangement, Ukrainians heard music from the heavens. When the cameras panned in on Andriy Shevchenko, 1,000 girls swooned.

Ukraine, once the soul of Soviet soccer and now the only representative of that splintered confederation to feature at the World Cup, were playing for unforgettable glory, for a place in the last eight, for a moment in soccer history when they would stand beside Brazil, Argentina, France, England and all the giants of the game and gaze at themselves in wonderment. Every single pass and throw and tackle was a wonderful, agonising experience for them.

Men old and hard enough to remember the last days of Uncle Joe might well have wept like babies when Shevchenko, of all people, missed the opening shot in the penalty shoot-out. At that moment, every citizen in Ukraine must have been physically hurt by the vicious certainty the dream was about to come to a bitter conclusion. And then, after several sweaty, unbearable minutes, they were through. And nothing would be the same again.

Many Irish people watching those penalties would have found themselves wandering back to the distant summer of 1990. Genoa: a name burned onto the retinas of Irish sports fans of a certain generation. We said it was a day we would never forget, and it is true there remains something powerful and magnetic about any replay you might see of Packie Bonner's fated penalty save against poor Daniel Timofte from Romania. The game itself, the excruciating, draining 120 minutes of walkabout, cagey soccer has long paled to insignificance. But the mounting drama of the day, orchestrated by the sun-reddened, presidential (for we would have put him in the Áras then if we could) figure of Jack Charlton, took us to a place we had never been before as a nation.

When Dave O'Leary stepped up to take that climactic penalty, it was easy to believe we were bequeathing the world one of the finest sporting moments of the 20th century.

The Ireland bandwagon was a charming entity back then and we charmed nobody quite like ourselves. With the good-humoured shenanigans of Germany 1988 carrying momentum through the smooth qualification to Italia 90, Ireland approached that World Cup caught between the romance of the occasion and the half-voiced ambition that the team was good enough to go on and do something.

The sheer novelty of just playing against Egypt was enough to blind most people to the awfulness of the game, to the extent that Eamon Dunphy's famous outburst was misheard then and for years afterwards.

Although for us it was something magnificent and noble to watch, Ireland's painstaking and gritty progression through the early phase of that World Cup must have been dull fare for those watching on television in Peru or China and our victory over Romania the makings of a dud quarter-final against Italy.

A bunch of us watched that famous game against Romania in the Crown Bar in Cricklewood on a day so gorgeously sunny that the dark Victorian interior was, for once, lit up and the room swam with particles of dust. We were just a bunch of cubs watching this prophetic match among the hardened emigrants who drank for Ireland that day, giving the moment added pathos.

It was memorable, following that World Cup during a summer spent tooling around on the building sites of London. Not least for the night, in the Lion's Head pub on Ronnie Kray's old stomping ground in Bethnal Green, one of our number permitted himself a meek but audible cheer when Roger Milla's Cameroon took the lead against England. There were a few inquisitive glances from the three-lions-on-the-shirt brigade up the front but nothing was said.

We left after England's honour had been restored and were rewarded for our temerity with a good, old-fashioned roadside kicking minutes afterwards. It hadn't even gotten dark yet.

The next day Johnny from Dunmore, the foreman, listened to the explanations of the cuts and bruises before remarking, "Yez must feel like queer, stupid bastards now."

Two nights later, McGrath hit the post against the Italians, Bonner parried the ball the wrong way and Toto Schillachi cleaned up and inadvertently lent his surname to a generation of Irish lads who showed a half-decent instinct for scoring goals. And with that, Ireland were out of the World Cup.

These things come full circle so last night it was Ukraine's turn to take on the illustrious Italians, the scarcely believable prize of a place in the semi-finals just 90 minutes and a moment of Shevchenko magic away. For the rest of the world, it was probably the least entertaining of the quarter-finals but for Ukraine - though they lost on the scoreboard - it was a night of magical pride, a night when the world sat back and watched them, for better or worse.

It is nice to feel like a major player, even if the moment is ultimately illusory. Style did not matter to us in 1990. It was the sheer pleasure of seeing ourselves sharing the big stage that mattered. We in Ireland know that much now, and know also we cannot go back to that childish summer when we were proud as hell and delighted with ourselves. What was the chant? Ole, Ole, Ole. Or whatever they say in Ukraine.