WHEN IT was all over, the time that he calls the best six weeks of his professional life, Terry Venables couldn't work out how he was supposed to feel.

"A lot of people ask me about that," he said this week, "and I haven't found an answer". He had spent the night after the semi-final defeat at the team's hotel in Burnham Beeches. "Then on the Thursday I went home, and I just felt numb. If you lose on penalties, there's the feeling that you haven't won, you haven't lost.

"So you don't feel anything. There's the dissatisfaction of not taking away either feeling. Even though losing is an awful feeling, you understand it. But you're just left up in the air. You think, well, we didn't really lose that game. But you're not in the final, so of course you lost the game."

Two days later, a far worse thing happened than watching his England team beaten by Germany in the penultimate round of Euro '96. "A friend of mine passed away. Bobby Keetch. I'd known him since I was 14."

On the Thursday night, Keetch, who played for Fulham and QPR in the 1960 had come into Scribes West, Venables' Kensington dining club. "We were going on for dinner but I felt a bit knackered so I said, `We'll do it tomorrow night'.

"So me and my wife and him and his wife went out to dinner on the Friday, and we had a great night. He was going to come in to Scribes on the Saturday night. I remember saying, my last words to him, `Don't let me down, you be there'.

"`Yeah, I'll be there.' He had a brain haemorrhage the next day. Talking like me and you on the Friday, fine, not a problem."

He clicks his fingers once. "Just gone." Venables had known the flamboyant Keetch since he was 14, when they trained together at West Ham. "I miss him like mad. I've never really met a character like him. Great sense of humour, enjoyed everything. We'd got really close in the last few years. back to Wembley for the Germany-Czech Republic final on the Sunday, but his heart wasn't in it. "Yeah, I had to go, to collect the Fair Play Award. I didn't really want to because I'd had that shock the day before. But they insisted that I should go. I wasn't really with it, to be honest. I didn't enjoy the game. It was a mix of very,, strange emotions over that month or so.

One of those emotions was pride in the team's performance. "After that `We're out' feeling, I felt proud because although it wasn't the spectacular win we were after, you've got to say it was successful. I do, anyway. We know it's not a complete success unless you win the thing, but I always say that the more you get to the semi-finals and finals, then you'll start to win.

"It's got to become a regular habit, like it is with Germany and Italy. I thought in the World Cup 1990 we did exceptionally well, but when we got to the penalties we missed two and scored two. We scored five, and we're still complaining because the sixth one didn't go in!"

Not many complaints, surely. "No, no. True. But I think there was a great disappointment. We all had that we-should-have-won, we-were-the-better-side thing. And there was `Why did we miss the penalty? Who should have taken it?' But when you got over that, I don't think anyone has really complained."

Since then he has been made aware of the nation's feelings, in an outpouring that continues unabated. "On the street it's been incredible. Because you don't watch television or read the newspapers much while it's happening, you miss something that everyone else is getting. And my life has been richer for it. Although I felt that there was still work to do, and although it's not complete until you've had a go at the World Cup, I can still walk away feeling really satisfied, ending on a high. I feel a lot better for it."

He brightens. "Funny story. I was at the Carlton Tower the other day, trying to park. The commissionaire there, I know him, he usually parks my car for me. But there was quite a lot of road works, it was hard to get in, and they looked busy. So I pulled on to a meter.

"So he came over and said to me, `What are you doing parking there?' I said, `Well, you looked busy, but I've made a mistake anyway because I've looked and I've got a penalty.' And he said, `Well, who's taking it this time?' I said, `Thanks very much!' Ha ha ha! He done me in style."

THE message of these stories is that whatever else the protean Terry Venables may be, club owner or karaoke singer or novelist or businessman or litigant, he is first and foremost a football person. It is the quality that irradiates his latest book, a meditation on post-war English football called The Best Game In The World.

Books like this, rushed out with the aid of a ghost writer after a major tournament are seldom worth attention. But Venables's deep knowledge of the game, and the discreet ministrations of his amanuensis, the Sunday Telegraph football correspondent, Colin Malam, make it enjoyable and thoroughly worthwhile.

Venables says he wanted to have the feeling of a good pub conversation, but there is more to it than the lists of favourite players and the picking of all-star teams. Chapters on players, teams, managers, chairmen, agents, the media, Europe and England are rich in tactical and personal insight.

And the concluding passage, on England's European campaign, contains not just an honest behind-the-scenes account of his stewardship, but a riveting analysis of the team's tactical evolution during that brief but intense period.

"I think I learnt a lot during that competition," he said. "That's why it got better as it went on."

It certainly started indifferently enough, with the draw against Switzerland. "Everyone had expected us to win against Switzerland, maybe struggle against Scotland and lose against Holland," he said. "In fact the reverse happened. In the first game we played well in the first hall, better than we thought, but then we dropped off. So we did a lot of good talking and a lot of good work on the training ground, which brought us to the Scotland game.

"I was very encouraged in the second half against Scotland, the way we shifted the ball and the point of play around very quickly. That great individual goal of Gazza's and that great team goal of Shearer's, where we had about 11 passes moving it across the pitch and coming back out the other side, and Neville timing his run so well and a perfect cross and a clinical finish.

"I thought there was a devastating bout of passing for quite a while in that second half. I thought we were going to get more and more goals, and we took it straight into the Holland game, which was, for me, an outstanding victory, possibly the best I've enjoyed."

By then the staff and players had formed what is usually described as a club atmosphere. "That's what you're after," he said, "but I always believe that whatever you're after, you shouldn't mention. I keep hearing people say, `We want a club atmosphere'.

"It doesn't work like that. In fact I think, you need to keep the word out of the way and just try to bond people, make sure they're interested, make sure they're caring about what they're trying to do, make sure that there's a light atmosphere."

To him, the notorious Far East excursion represented a vital positive factor. "That's what I thought before, and I'm sure of it now, for all the criticism. The players needed to get away. Otherwise the whole thing would have been too long. I never had a problem with any players, right the way through. They were really solid, they really enjoyed each other's company. It was always fun, and whatever problems came up were not laughed off, that sounds silly, but ridden over.

"The attitude was, `We're not going to let that touch us. We've got a job to do.' Looking back, at the end, then you could say it was like a club." In this connection, nothing in the book comes through with more force than his real fondness for Paul Gascoigne.

"Does it? I feel for the guy. He gets criticised a lot - he did this wrong, he did that wrong - and no one can do that unless they know what it's like to be him."

Even the Shearers and Linekers and Platts, he says, the kind of big-name players who are always in the spotlight, aren't followed everywhere with the same persistence as Gazza.

"Every time he looks outside the window, they're there. In the main he handles it fairly well. But, like all of us, there comes a time when it's one too many. You go lose your temper or do something silly. I think he's improved, though, over the years. You can always pick out incidents where you could say, well, that didn't look like an improvement to me. And he will continue to do that.

"But it's always interesting to see how much the rest of the group like him. And that's not easy for the top man or the man with the most recognition or the man with the most publicity. Usually there's suspicion from the other players. They're looking for a mistake. With him, they're not looking for a mistake.

"When you've seen those times in training where he picks the ball up on the 18-yard line and dribbles through the whole team and knocks it past the goalkeeper, and the rest of the team all clap. . . I've never seen that before from anyone.

"I don't know how the press can get it so wrong. At the beginning of Euro '96 they thought the public had gone against him. They hadn't. The public love him, even with all his silliness, and things that are not quite on the shelf as far as what you feel. . . Underneath, they know him. And what they perceive is what the players, seeing him from a different angle, also appreciate the generosity of his spirit.

"He's a giver, a big giver." Venables took a particular pleasure in the players' readiness to adapt themselves to tactical variations. "They took a great interest. I was pleasantly surprised by the experienced players who had already formed their habits over the years. When you're asking them to do different things, it could have been a bit of a contest. But it wasn't too much. Quite surprising."

Such flexibility, which he sees fully formed in the players of Ajax, is what English football will need in the future, rather than the simple imposition of a national tactical system.

"I don't think you need to have one way of playing. I think you can indicate a preference, but you often have to change during a game. Ideally you want the players to do that themselves, you want them to have more knowledge about it than you've got."

But the lesson of Ajax is not quite as simple as it might seem. "For the last two years that side has been quite outstanding. Until, like everything, they get big eyes and think they're big stars and they want to go abroad and they leave behind what got them there in the first place. That's the way it goes. Then they've got to keep replacing them.

"That's why I don't believe it when everyone says to me, `Well, they do it from seven years of age.' I say, let's examine whether that's right. Finidi George wasn't seven when he went there, or Litmanen, who I think is maybe the best player in the team. Kanu wasn't seven. I think he'd only been there about 18 months. It just goes to show that you can work with intelligent players and they can improve and fit into a system very quickly."

Yet independence can be dangerous. "In a way the Dutch also developed monsters, because if the players didn't have it the way they wanted it, they didn't want to play for the national side. Ruud Gullit himself got subbed at Wembley and then didn't want to play for his country any more. I don't know if he'd be too thrilled with that today, if his players did that.

"But what I like is that the Dutch examine themselves. They're tough in their questions and criticisms. I think we're a little inclined to go, `Well, I'd better not say,' sliding along until we get a massive defeat and then the panic's on."

AFTER Euro '96 he had a holiday before facing up to a year in and out of the courts, combined with the need to think about a new job. "I had a really good rest. And because the football had been so exciting and I'd rested well, when I got back I was ready to go again. There were some quite exciting propositions from abroad, but I felt I'd have had to keep coming back.

"That wouldn't work. I thought, see what's happening here. But everyone was set up for the season, which is normal.

"Then they asked me to help out at Portsmouth. They had a particularly rough time last year, and I think Terry Fenwick and Keith Waldron and those guys are potentially very good. It's just helping them with a bit of direction, just to keep my hand in, keep interested. I thought since I was going to be sitting at home all day, apart from going out to see the lawyers, I could do a couple of days a week down there. And I've said up front I don't know how long it can go on, whether it's a short while or a long time."

He is waiting for a big club to come in. The right big club, that is. When we met this week it was in the middle of speculation connecting him with Manchester City and one of his old clubs, QPR.

"I had a couple of things offered to me at the weekend," he said, without being specific. "Very hard. But at this moment the timing might not be quite right, and if I've got to make fast decisions I'd rather. . . when you're making a big decision, you need a bit of time. And I can't see the panic. I've got lots to do. I've got plenty of interests. A bit of free time, not enough, but I can enjoy that, too. I've got an open mind."