LockerRoom: What a week. What a weekend. The oul ticker had scarcely resumed beating after the spills and thrills of Bydgoszcz when we went and spent most of Friday night with the militia on Dollymount Strand scanning the horizon for raftloads of foreigners attempting to come here and steal themselves a nice little slice of The Great Irish Dream.

All the while, of course, we cast fretful glances back towards the capital of Europe waiting to hear the first stirring crunch of Irish truncheon against trouble-making foreign Womble skull, waiting to see a telltale plume of smoke rise up from a city about to be laid waste.

We'd been to Bydgoszcz (wasn't that an old Tammy Wynette number?) and we'd seen some things. We'd seen how the Middlesbrough of the Eastern Bloc was slowly opening restaurants and wine bars and refurbishing itself. We'd seen their nice squares and old buildings, and though the city had plentiful remnants of its old kippiness about it there was obviously something going on. Some energy at work. We could, of course, tell that they'd be eager to abandon all that and head for new lives in Dublin straight away this week.

Would we be better patriots by retreating to the city to go mano a mano with the Wombles, then regrouping to defend our luxuriously appointed welfare offices from the grasping hordes when they arrived? We decided it was better to seal the frontier and deal with the insurgents later.

In Bydgoszcz last week (surely the EU will send them vowels as a matter of urgency), they had a stage set up in the main square and on Saturday night they were going to be celebrating accession. Then, on Sunday, every man, woman and child was abandoning the town and heading for Ireland where the population was expected to exceed 87 million by teatime. Poland, like many states in the region, will be entirely empty by the time you read this. Germany has permission to annex freely for parking space.

Anyway, on the beach I was second in command with a detail of Sportswriters (For Freedom!). We're slow, but we know precisely how Johnny Foreigner thinks. We've been in his backyard. We know his likes and dislikes. We know he's lazy and that, traditionally, he doesn't like it up him.

We know that he craves the Irish way of life. Who can blame him, poor blighter? The climate. The freedoms. The unspoilt culture. The chance to grow old near the Red Cow roundabout. The spiky national sense of independence. The inalienable right to sit back and be nannied. The right to be constantly "brought into line" with the rest of Europe. He wants our money and wants to despoil our cultural landscape. Now.

What would You're a Star be if those slick country fellas were to be replaced by avaricious Eastern Europeans playing balalaikas? Louis Walsh doesn't want that. Sorry Miroslav, but nobody does.

In the Sportswriting Unit (like Navy Seals but land-based: we waddle about the land like seals) we've seen the enemy first up. Last week, for instance, in the heart of Poland, there were two men with short hair leaning over into the press box as we attempted to work. They insisted on shaking hands. They bugged LockerRoom for an opinion on the match. They'd served with the Irish in Lebanon and they thought the Irish were mighty men altogether.

Fearlessly, they invited LockerRoom back for supper because the Irish in the Leb six years ago were so mighty. Suspecting it was a dastardly trap, LockerRoom went and got Brian Kerr quotes instead. It was a close-run thing, though. Too close.

Midweek friendlies late in the season are like that. People are tired. They get careless. There's a good case for making friendlies like last week's private. Even the press conferences are jaded. It's illegal now for anyone except Kenny Cunningham and Kerr to speak to the media, and while the two lads have a certain way with the one-liners they're generally cagier than a relegation-haunted back four.

The highlight of last week, by a country mile, was the return and departure of Roy.

So, given that the country had been sundered by the issue of Roy for two years, given that it is the national team, given the level of interest, one would have thought a press conference involving Roy would have been set up. Not for us horrible, slime-dwellers in the media, but for people who read the papers and listen to the news and care about such issues.

If Sunday evening was too early, then Monday morning would have been fine. Even if Roy wasn't travelling. Just 10 minutes. A statement. A couple of questions. Instead, the void was filled with rumours and speculation and Roy looking lost and alone at another airport. By the end of the week Roy was being frogmarched into a room for MUTV (the Al Jazeera of the Old Trafford world) to reject all the same rumours and speculation.

We've seen worse things, of course. These trips are a curse. Foreigners everywhere. They don't understand our open, free way of life. Once, years ago, on a night train from Tallinn to St Petersburg, this column was slipped a Mickey Finn and wound up accidentally being befriended by an Estonian whose wife was studying in Russia. For three days in St Petersburg they hounded and pestered this column, taking him on tours of the city, teaching him bits of Russian and Estonian, attempting to feed him. Bastards.

We came to our senses only when it came to catching a train from St Petersburg down to Vilnius, where Ireland were to play the following day (we'd played Latvia in Riga seven days earlier). We went to the train station, there to board a train chartered by an Irish travel agent. We climbed aboard and said goodbye in Russian, one of three words we had mastered. Suddenly there was a posse of the greatest fans on earth in the doorway behind.

"There's a bleedin' Rooskie gettin' on the train. Call security, lads."

And pushing. And pointing.

"No train for you. You no go on train. Irish train. You no go."

We looked at the gallery of irate faces, grown men disturbed and not a little frightened at the thought of having to share a train through Russia with a Russian. And we realised we were home.

Generally, though, we like to isolate ourselves from contact with foreigners when travelling abroad. We live in a little bubble of hotels and coaches. For a few days each time we go away it's like being in a reality TV show where you get to live like real pro footballers. Of course the hotels are cheap and the buses wheezy, so you actually live like a third-division footballer. Nonetheless, you get to isolate yourself from the world, you get a feel for the sense of removal which footballers must have. Every place is a foreign country.

And that's the most interesting thing about the process of watching Kerr and his quiet revolution: the tension between the tendency for being closed off which money and comfort brings and the desire to be more open, more fully rounded people which Kerr and Noel O'Reilly used to attempt to instil into underage teams.

There are positive instincts wrestling right now with the fears and insecurities of old pros. A fear of the world outside and an unwillingness to accept that perhaps it won't be like the rumour-mongers say it is. As much as the development of the team, that's the fascination with Ireland at present. Who will win the battle between the glasnost tendency and the "They're all out to take it away from us" boys?