England qualified for another World Cup last month but on Sky Sports News they weren't cracking open the bubbly.
The station's chief football correspondent Kaveh Solhekol, suffering badly from Premier League withdrawals, was satisfied he was speaking for the man on the Clapham omnibus when he labelled international breaks as "boring".
England fans increasingly view the qualifiers the way Dublin supporters regarded the Leinster football championship circa 2014-24, and Kaveh sounded like a seasoned veteran of the GAA beat as he bemoaned the absence of "jeopardy" in the current structure.
The presenter interjected to note that England didn't always qualify quite so easily for tournaments when they were kids - memories of Steve McClaren standing forlornly underneath his umbrella and Graham Taylor bellowing "LINESMAN!!!" no doubt flooding back into her mind.
Or maybe she was harking back to the close shaves, like Beckham's last-minute free-kick against Greece or the time they needed Sweden to do them a favour against Poland to squeeze into the Euro 2000 play-offs ('the Poles have got to go to Stockholm and get something' as manager Kevin Keegan might have said at the time.)
But they've put all that behind them. Nowadays, qualification for major tournaments is, for England, about as arduous as showing your passport at the arrivals desk or renewing your driving licence.
Those who are constitutionally incapable of giving England any credit - which is a fair cross-section of the population - are quick to draw attention to their long run of handy qualification groups, a fair point even allowing for their status as perennial first seeds.
But given that they beat Serbia 5-0 away from home a couple of months ago, we might be forced to admit that they're also making it look easy at this stage.
England's travelling contingent - whose truculence hasn't been watered down by the succession of 5-0 victories - aren't bothered celebrating the wins themselves and have instead been spending the games airing their culture war grievances.
The current popular targets are Gary Neville - who appears to have slotted into the space recently vacated by Gary Lineker - and Keir Starmer, who the Guardian's Barney Ronay observed has become the first UK prime minister to be fully re-cast as "the enemy" by the England away support. ('NO SURRENDER TO THE PM!')
The cynics will surely point to Sky's lack of international football coverage under present broadcasting deals.
But we can't pretend that Kaveh doesn't speak for a sizable portion of the English football public.
For many years, Premier League obsessives have greeted the arrival of another international window the way Brenda from Bristol did when Theresa May called her snap election - 'YOU'RE JOKING - ANOTHER ONE!?'
Those people whose mental well-being remains tied to goings-on in the English Premier League have long regarded international qualifier windows as an intolerable disruption to the rhythm of their lives.
"Fans of lots of clubs in the Premier League and Championship are thinking, 'why is our enjoyment of football being interrupted by something that has no jeopardy, that is boring?'" Kaveh wondered aloud on behalf of the man on the terrace/ safe standing section.
The UEFA apparatchiks have been paying attention to this bellyaching, from fans and especially from broadcasters. According to the London Times, they're toying with adopting the league-style format now used for their club competitions, which they insist on calling the 'Swiss model' though which we prefer to call the 'Cavan SFC model'. This is UEFA's stock answer to all format concerns currently.
It's doubtful whether such a change would provide any more 'jeopardy' for bored England fans - and it's questionable whether they would want this in reality - though Kaveh noted that it might give them the odd fixture against Germany or some other worthy European blueblood.
It's a different universe to the one Ireland football fans currently inhabit. Over here, every qualifier comes freighted with significance and nothing can be assumed.
Whereas in England, the qualification process is a tedious and drawn out inevitability, in Ireland, qualification is still difficult enough to enjoy the status of a holy grail, while not yet so fanciful as to be a pipe dream - though we may have to reconvene in five years to see whether the latter still holds.
The Ireland-Hungary game attracted the biggest attendance of the entire first round of European qualifiers, and by a comfortable margin too, in a stadium which isn't close to the biggest in Europe.
Ireland's final home game of the group against Portugal was declared a sellout some time ago. Partly this is down to the FAI's unpopular, but probably prudent, decision to sell the home qualifier matches in bundles. Nonetheless, it's still a tribute to the high level of interest in a football team who are in the midst of their leanest period since the late 60s/ early 70s.
They are box office, despite it all.
There is a great yearning out there for the Irish team to be better, to be back reaching major tournaments. You can see it in the proliferation of social media accounts dedicated to tracking the performances of Irish - and tenuously Irish-qualified - youngsters in Britain and the continent.
"I know the loss in Yerevan was a sickener but get a load of this worldie from Jacob Double-Barrel for the Everton Under-17s." (This is usually two years before Jacob confirms, via Instagram, that no offence but his heart is set on the Three Lions and that he will not be making himself available for our friendly against Luxembourg.)
Again, we're back to the national team's outsized place in the Irish football firmament.
We can recall Gus Poyet expressing an almost bemused admiration for the steadfastness of the Irish fanbase, partly as a means of shaming the fickle Greeks who were largely ignoring his own team.
The dreadful home support for the infamous game in Athens in June 2023 was explained by the Greeks' own pessimism about their chances of reaching Euro 2024 but also due to the fact that local football public were preoccupied with their big club sides, your Olympiacoses and Panathinaikoses, etc.
This is the norm in many countries.
In our chat with Archie McPherson ahead of Scotland's participation in Euro 2020 (2021), the great commentator recalled his friend Walter Smith abandoning his post as Scotland manager in the middle of the promising campaign - in which they had already beaten France at home - to return to manage Rangers, a job he had already done, and with more success than he could feasibly hope to achieve the second time around.
McPherson observed the move reflected "the prioritisation of Scottish football and the domination of Celtic and Rangers".
By contrast, the prioritisation of Irish football has always had the national team at its centre.
Perhaps this could change over time. The League of Ireland's impressive growth in the last half-decade has seen it crack the mainstream. Anecdotally, we're finding more and more taxi drivers tend to be conversant in matters LOI than was the case in 2015.
Duffer, while he was in the league, tried his best to engender the same spirit that pervades across the water by parading his increasingly militant indifference to the national team at every opportunity.
One is hearing the question posed as to whether Stephen Bradley would really want to leave Shamrock Rovers for Ireland - whether this is the right thing for him now.
We're probably still a while away from a domestic manager spurning the national team gig for a local club side.
For now, international windows still have a main event feel, as opposed to in England, where they're a dreary interregnum, like a round of Carabao Cup fixtures.
International windows are many things for Irish fans these days - tense, agonising, usually dispiriting - but not boring.
