SOCCER:YOU COULD tell last night that the international season is winding down just a little when Sky gave their viewers a heads-up for their next big live game: the under-21 clash of Belarus and Iceland. Get to the pub early, otherwise you'll never get a seat.

No offence, of course, to these young Belorussians and Icelanders, they’re probably fine players – and the truth is we’ll all end up watching, anything to fill the football gap until the sporting botheration that is summer crawls to an end.

But the under-21 clash of Belarus and Iceland just wouldn’t – and be honest here – leave you tingling in quite the same manner as one of the great footballing encounters of our time – like, say, the 1994 World Cup clash of Ireland v Italy at Giants Stadium.

“It calls to mind the 1994 World Cup clash of Ireland v Italy at Giants Stadium,” said Sky host Pete Graves as he welcomed us to “to the somewhat unfamiliar surroundings of Liege” for the 2011 end-of-season friendly clash between an understrength Italy and and an even understrengther Ireland.

We could see what Pete was trying to do there, wake us from our largely disinterested slumber and urge us to look upon this match as Giants Stadium: The Sequel (even though we have met the Eye-talians since then), prompting us to whip out our mouldy inflatable bananas and burst in to a rousing Olé Olé chorus.

And for a while Kevin Moran, his guest in the studio, let him get on with it.

By half-time, though, you sensed Kevin felt Pete was over-egging this particular inflatable banana. “We talked about the famous win in 1994,” said the Sky man, before sort of likening Keith Andrews’ rather splendid goal to Ray Houghton’s Giants Stadium pearl.

“Ah, yeah,” said Kevin, “but the importance of that game . . . well, it’s completely different tonight.”

And with that Pete let 1994 rest, even if it pained him to do so.

By then we thought he’d told us that 250,000 Italians lived in Liege, which sure puzzled Wikipedia because they have the city’s population down as 187,086.

But – and we owe the fella a heartfelt apology – he’d actually said that that many Italians resided in the whole of Belgium. And it seemed most of them had turned up for the game.

We’ll be honest, when they announced Leige as the venue the gist of the response was: (1) “Wha?” (2) “Are you having a laugh?” (3) They’ll be lucky to get three men and a pigeon inside the stadium.

Not so. The Italbelgians turned out in force, and there was more than a handful of Irish too. Impressive.

Also impressive, it should be said, was the number of Irish players who dragged their weary bodies to Liege for international duty, when others couldn’t make it to Macedonia for a match that mattered. But, hold your whist.

Team news. Gianluigi Buffon and Antonio Cassano subs for Italy, which meant their bench was technically stronger than Ireland’s first XI, which featured the marginally less experienced David Forde, Stephen Ward and Andy Key-ho. Which, naturally, meant our boys would give them a hell of a beating, with Andrewsonio’s goal paving the way.

Ray Houghton, in the commentary box, was well-impressed, not least early in the second half when he noted: “Two Irish players going for the one ball, that’s encouraging to see.” Well, you knew what he meant; the lads were well up for it.

And then, whoah: 2-0. Simon Cox. By then Italy were just thanking the heavens that Ireland hadn’t put out their first team.

At full-time Andrews boasted about his wondrous goal: “Their wall was a joke, to be fair,” he told the Sky man. “All the crap that’s been going on about players not turning up, it hasn’t been a big deal to us, we’ve just got on with it,” he said, blowing kisses to absent friends.

No, not Shay Given, Robbie Keane, Aiden McGeady, John O’Shea, Richard Dunne, Damien Duff, Kevin Doyle and the like, although how will those poor divils get their places back after last night?

Back in the studio Kevin was close to apologising to Pete for dismissing comparisons with 1994. He was well chuffed. “I can’t speak highly enough of Ireland’s performance, they were just absolutely superb in all departments,” he purred.

And with that Sky plugged the Barclays Asia Trophy in Hong Kong. On July 27th. And gave us a quick, but needless, reminder about the under-21 clash of Belarus and Iceland. Bring it on.

Crikey, after last night how could you not be in the mood for more football?