Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

SO there I was, a soccer man at a rugby match in GAA headquarters and, at the end of a memorable evening, the thoughts of one famous Ulster man were uppermost in my mind.

Van Morrison put it best: wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time? But, especially, we are keen to add, when Wales come a-calling for the first soccer game at Croke Park on March 24.

Between now and then, we will doubtless be inundated with musings about the last great taboo. We’ve had the first rugby match, we’ve had England, we’ve even had ‘God Save The Queen’, and somehow Ireland, the team and the very nation itself, not only survived but thrived. Winning, you might even say, by a cricket score.

But the real garrison game has yet to cross the threshold and, in the run-up to the European Championship qualifier, be sure that a few die-hards will wax balefully on the theme of a bridge too far.

I think, for example, of an older GAA man of my acquaintance who was always happy to indulge a bit of the rugger on the grounds that it was a code full of the manly virtues, played by daredevils who would probably have made fine gaelic footballers if only they hadn’t somehow lost their way one morning and ended up at the wrong school.

But the soccer? All that tippy-tappy stuff and hardly any scores and fellas rolling around on the ground at the merest hint of bad breath from an opponent. Not to mention all that kissin’ and huggin’. Yeuch.

Which is fine. Each to their own, after all. The important thing is that the Rubicon has already been crossed. After last Saturday, the issue of foreign games at Croker is now more a matter of personal taste than political persuasion. There may be a sense that the GAA is still happier to share a bed with the IRFU than the FAI but the deal has been done, the room has been booked and there’s no going back now.

Sport won the day at Croke Park on Saturday and, for good or ill, sport will also make the headlines on the Saturday when the footballers take up residence for the first time in their home from home.

It is bound to be a slightly strange experience for the boys in green, like one of those interior decoration shows on the telly where the family vacates a dingy two-up, two-down and returns to find it transformed into something resembling a five star hotel.

Ah, but will they be happy? When the news first broke that Croke Park was throwing open its doors, Damien Duff made the point that what was good for Irish footballers might be even better for French and German and Italian footballers, seeing as how they have long felt perfectly at home in the kind of soaring cathedrals which have always tended to leave visiting Irish supporters slack-jawed and, if truth be told, a touch ashamed.

And while Wales may not be among the world-beaters, the wonders of Croke Park won’t seem entirely off the scale to players who can call the splendid Millennium Stadium home.

So Steve Staunton’s men need to settle in fast. And the crowd is bound to help. On a quiet day in Dublin, when old ghosts are about, you might fancy you can still hear the faintest echoes of the Lansdowne Roar and, before that, the Dalymount Roar, but the noise levels generated by a full Croke Park are of an entirely different order of magnitude.

However, it’s unlikely that the Green Army will be able to match the proud, passionate intensity of Saturday’s rendition of ‘Amhran na bhFiann’, belted out as if fuelled by all the unleashed energy stored up during the respectful – and, if truth be told, partly tense – hearing of ‘God Save The Queen’.

‘The Fields Of Athenry’ rolling around the stadium in a great, swelling noise, wasn’t too far behind either, and it would be nice to think that the battle hymns of the soccer fraternity will be given a similar lusty airing on March 24.

For that to happen, of course, the footballers on the pitch will have to give the fans something to sing about. On Saturday, the rugby boys almost made it look easy.

Unfortunately, there can no such optimism about Steve Staunton’s men, after the double-whammy of Cyprus and San Marino. These days Irish rugby is all about lust for glory while Irish soccer is in the business of damage limitation.

Or so the consensus goes. As ever, we live in hope. Croke Park on Saturday, as it has been so often down the years, was a place fit for heroes. Rog and Drico and The Bull responded in kind. Now it’s over to Shay and Robbie and the Duffer to try and do justice to a truly magnificent setting.