"Participate, Celebrate, Tolerate" read the Sports Council cards being handed out around Windsor Park on Saturday, but inside a good proportion of the 14,270 capacity crowd appeared to be under the impression these were options and that a fourth - "None of the above" - had been omitted at the printers.

Merrily, the local supporters at the Kop end of the ground worked their way through the list of "don'ts" on the reverse side of the card. By the end, they'd serenaded their few hundred visitors with the theme songs from various war films, referred to them as Nazis ("Can you hear the Nazis sing") and inquired about "What's it like to lose the war". All par for the course up Windsor way, although it was a little surprising afterwards to hear Steve Lomas and Lawrie McMenemy pay tribute to their supporters for their "magnificent" efforts to raise the team.

McMenemy, to be fair, just seemed to have left his judgment back in the hotel for the day. Reckoning the crowd had been good was one thing, but when he endorsed Pat Jennings' reading of the game - ". . . `a bit of a mugging,' he said, and I'd have to agree with that" - it became clear the Englishman was letting his enthusiasm for the job get the better of him.

What, in fact, the Germans did to the Irish on Saturday wasn't so much a bit of a mugging as the sort of thing the Spanish Inquisition used to do to heretics - hot poker up the rear end included.

True, for 11 minutes they had looked like the dispirited and disorganised team which we had heard so much about last week, and Chesterfield defender Mark Williams even went very close to scoring.

But in the 12th they broke for the first time and Marco Bode showed the Irish debutante a thing or two about finishing. Towards the end of the half, Bode killed off a disappointing game, this time with a cracking free kick.

After the break, the inability of the Irish to cope at set pieces was emphasised once again when Newcastle's Dietmar Hamann made it 3-0 with a free that took a bad deflection off Steve Morrow on the way to the net from the edge of the area.

"I didn't think the result was a fair reflection of what went on in the game," said McMenemy, "but what chances we had we didn't take, and against a team like the Germans you're not going to get away with that.

"People have been talking about this being a German team in transition, but let's face it, I'm sure there have been other German teams in transition and it's never stopped them qualifying for a major championship, not even once."

Asked what it would take to get Northern Ireland to next year's European finals now, McMenemy laughed: "Well, four wins on the trot would help, I suppose."

With such a limited defence, and in the continuing absence of a reliable goal-scorer - Iain Dowie's failure to put away either of the two clear-cut chances which fell to him late on simply underlined the problem - McMenemy clearly knows that there's next to no chance of that happening. About as much chance, in fact, as there is of Windsor Park becoming a place where families from both of Belfast's communities could gather in a spirit of participation, celebration and toleration in the even vaguely foreseeable future.

Northern Ireland: Taylor (Fulham); Patterson (Dundee Utd), Williams (Chesterfield), Morrow (QPR), Horlock (Manchester City); Gillespie (Blackburn Rovers), Lomas (West Ham), Lennon (Leicester City), Rowland (QPR); Dowie (QPR), Hughes (West Ham). Subs: Kennedy (Watford) for Rowland and Sonner (Sheffield Wednesday) for Lennon (68 mins), McCarthy (Birmingham City) for Gillespie (83 mins).

Germany: Kahn (Bayern Munich); Matthaus (Bayern Munich); Babbel (Bayern Munich), Worns (Paris St-Germain); Strunz (Bayern Munich), Hamann (Newcastle Utd), Jeremies (Bayern Munich), Heinrich (Fiorentina); Neuville (Hansa Rostock), Bierhoff (AC Milan), Bode (Werder Bremen). Subs: Nowotny (Leverkusen) for Matthaus (half-time), Jancker (Bayern Munich) for Neuville (68 mins), Preetz (Hertha BSC Berlin) for Bode (78 mins).

Referee: G Cesari (Italy).