The stall, opposite the entrance to the Byzantine church in the tiny town of Demre on the Mediterranean coast, sold cards and books. The owner, without looking up from his calculator as he applied an appropriately Byzantine mathematical formula to my handful of postcards, asked the automatic tourist question: "Where are you from?"

"Ireland."

His head snapped up at once. "Which Ireland?"

"What?" The question took a moment to penetrate my heatsodden brain.

Well, he persisted, was I from Belfast? No, I said. Dublin. He nodded sagely. "Belfast problem," he declared, with surprising vehemence. Sure, I agreed. Political problems, bombs, terrorists . . .

"No, no, no." He was getting quite agitated now. "Football problem. Same group as Turkey, in the European Championships."

This, I assured him, was no problem at all, and to prove it, I launched into an enthusiastic account of a) the Irish North-South soccer divide and b) how I had, as it happened, travelled to the Northern Ireland versus Turkey match at Windsor Park a couple of weeks earlier, in the company of a good-humoured busload of flag-waving Turks.

He listened carefully. "And the goals," he wanted to know. "Did you see the goals?" "Sure I did. Bizim kuc uk Arif . . ."

Our little Arif. The phrase just slipped out, more a product of my extremely basic Turkish than a sign of any great intrinsic affection for the Galatasaray striker; but it brought tears to the eyes of this man whom I had never met before in my life. He grabbed the postcards and pushed them into my sweating hands. "There you go. No charge." True, it was a small amount of money to forego - but in a tourist season so dismal that I might well have been his only customer all day, it was a big, big gesture. The mixture of ferocity and sentimentality is also, in my experience, typical of the average Turkish soccer fan: all scowls and Piff! Bow! Wham! guff on the outside, but with a centre of the consistency of runny honey.

But wait, you cry: what about the Irish fans who were spat on in 1991, and diddled out of their match tickets, and all the rest? Where were the soft-centred Turks then? I can't really say, because I've only been going to soccer matches in Turkey for the past three seasons, and then mostly to Galatasaray's Ali Sami Yen stadium in Istanbul, where the security is watertight and the crowd is on my side. I can't really imagine what it will be like in Bursa on Wednesday, either, except that it will be very noisy and bloody cold, with sleety rain a distinct possibility, and I wish, oh how I wish, that I was going.

I've only once been involved in anything remotely resembling trouble at a Turkish match, and that was when, in the 30-degree heat of a Sunday afternoon last May, a band of merry men in Antalyaspor shirts decided it would be brilliant crack to hurl themselves down from the upper reaches of the stand on to the unsuspecting Galatasaray supporters beneath. It was more madness than badness, but it's undeniably unpleasant to be watching the game one minute, only to find yourself shoved to the ground by a heap of hairy appendages the next.

By and large, though, I've found that, in Turkey, an interest in football - and, in particular, an interest in Turkish football or even, let's face it, the ability to rattle off a couple of names - acts as a kind of unofficial passport, opening the way to countless beaming smiles and small kindnesses.

There's a foreign exchange office near the Blue Mosque where, if you can hold forth on the relative merits of Umit and Okan in midfield, you'll get a few extra lira for your dollars. A jeweller, spotting the club badge on my shirt, recently knocked a fiver off the price of a ring I was interested in; and I was once waved coolly into the military museum in Istanbul, through a foyer bristling with soldiers in combat fatigues and armed to the teeth, despite the fact that every time I stepped through the security barrier, I set off a startlingly loud alarm.

"Well," shrugged the ticket collector, a smiling girl dressed like a supermodel, "I reckon that if you're wearing a Galatasaray scarf around your neck, you're not about to blow the place up."

Of course, Turkish football does have explosive tendencies, and a first encounter with a Turkish stadium in full cry can be daunting. The first match I went to was at the Inonu stadium in Istanbul. It was scheduled to begin at 2.30 in the afternoon, so a good four hours before kick-off we sauntered down that glorious hill on the shores of the Bosphorus to investigate the possibility of getting tickets - only to be greeted by a concerted roar from the thousands of fans already jammed on to the terraces within.

It is quite normal, indeed expected, for Turkish fans to turn up hours and hours before kickoff, and sing, chant and drum their way through the endless waiting period in what seems, to visiting eyes, like an act of simple lunacy.

However, when you find yourself in a queue outside a Turkish stadium, you begin to realise there's method in that madness. Early arrival is, in fact, essential. So assiduous are the police searches at big matches that it can take a very long time indeed to make your way to the top of the meandering line; and when you do get there, prepare to hand over all your earthly goods, for - as my outraged son discovered - the cops will happily remove coins from your pocket, batteries from your Walkman, the cigarette lighter from your jacket and the pole from your flag. You will, though, be allowed to take into the stadium the miraculous seat-shaped pieces of polystyrene which can be purchased for a few pence and which (copycat Irish entrepreneurs and travellers to Bursa take note) keep bums from freezing on even the most miserable night. And when you do get into the stadium, stand still and listen, for one of the most incredibly uplifting sounds in all the world is that of 20,000 sets of Turkish vocal chords batting two-part chants back and forth from one end of the place to the other, the tuning and timing perfect - as well it might be, since, if you look carefully, you'll see that the whole thing is orchestrated by a semi-professional "conductor" who stands with his back to the pitch for the entire 90 minutes and never, ever, sees a match.

Not that he's the only one. As the row intensifies over the outrageous fee being demanded by Star TV for the rights to the Bursa match, it's perhaps worth pointing out that since Star TV bought up pretty much everything that moved in the Turkish game at the beginning of this season and transferred it to its new, all-singing, all-dancing, digital soccer channel, Teleon, which nobody in Turkey can afford, nobody in Turkey sees much soccer these days either. So when the war of words really hots up - hasn't it, already? - spare a thought for my friend Ayhan. A gentle man if ever there was one, a man who eats, sleeps and drinks football and who, despite having been a footie fan for nigh on 40 years, doesn't even get to see the goals on the telly any more. The boot is sometimes on the other foot, and that's for sure.