Hi °C | Lo °C 
I'm not one of those people who runs around telling folk "I told you so." No, sod that. Actually, I am one of those people.
And I did suggest in last week's column that a powderkeg situation was developing within the Northern Ireland football squad.
Suffice to say, therefore, that the incident on the plane home from Iceland, although shocking, was not really a big surprise.
What it was, though, was appalling, unedifying and totally unacceptable.
No matter what provoked it - and, from what I hear, that was trivial enough - there is no excuse for the punch-up involving Keith Gillespie and George McCartney on the London-bound jet last Thursday morning.
Gillespie, ignoring the irony, claimed on Friday that "the incident has obviously been sensationalised by most of the press."
Wrong, Keith. In many ways, it was actually played down.
Had this been, say, England's Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand on their way back from a crushing defeat, it would have merited at least ten pages in every national tabloid.
There would have been several blow-by-blow, so to speak, eye-witness accounts.
Members of each player's family would have been doorstepped for their opinions, columnists would have had a field day - and, I suspect, pychologists would have been hauled in to give their tuppence worth.
There would have been historical features on "famous bust-ups of the past" involving high profile footballers, and of course the "leader " columns of most of the papers would be espousing the theory that the incident was symptomatic of today's society in general.
The thing is, Keith, that when two professional footballers - from the same team - get involved in an unseemly brawl it will invariably mean banner headlines in any country.
The fact that it all started over a missing passport is laughable, almost pathetic.
But, given the circumstances of the previous few days leading up to the shameful incident, you have to say that such a development was almost inevitable.
At least Keith stood up and apologised for his part in the unseemly affair, and admitted that the whole "punch-up on the plane" thing was totally unacceptable.
The Gillespie-McCartney brawl put the lid on the worst week for Northern Ireland football in recent years.
Could it be worse - two defeats, against two teams that were there for the taking, precipitated by two own goals, the upshot of which is almost certain failure to qualify for next year's Euro 2008 finals.
I have to admire the optimism of some members of the Green and White Army, who still think we can win our last three games - two of which are away to Sweden and Spain.
Dream on, lads. It's over - and, the way things are shaping up, I've no confidence in us winning even one of those matches, let alone all three.
Now the talk is that, come November and the end of the qualifying campaign, the Northern Ireland boss himself, Nigel Worthington, will be jacking it in.
Well, no manager should be judged over such a short period of time, taking in only a few international games.
But there are strong suggestions that the dressing room has already been lost - and, as everyone in football knows, that's an almost impossible place to claw your way back from.
The omission of defender Stephen Craigan from the team that faced Latvia surprised not only the travelling Northern Ireland media and fans - it stunned most of the players themselves.
After a dodgy start to the campaign in the home match against Iceland, the Motherwell man has been simply outstanding.
But that didn't cut any ice with the manager - and, despite the poor defensive display in Riga, Craigan once again found himself on the bench when the team was named for the Reykjavic encounter a few days later.
The back four had been rejigged to accommodate Jonny Evans - a terrific player, no doubt about that.
But Evans, who got injured in pre-season, had not kicked a ball in anger before the Latvia game.
Not only that, but right back would not be the position most Northern Ireland fans would prefer to see Evans occupying.
Worthington himself admitted after the Latvia defeat that he always knew Evans would be rusty; presumably, therefore, he felt that selecting a less then fully fit player was worth the gamble.
Then, when it didn't pay off in Riga, Evans got another chance - and Craigan remained frustrated and nailed to the bench.
Add to this the manager's assertion that any 'down time' the players had would be confined to the team hotel, and you can work out for yourself that the atmosphere would be both claustrophobic and inharmonious.
Of course, we would not be discussing these things today - and the punch-up on the plane would probably not have occured - had Northern Ireland got, say, four points from those two crucial games.
Winning tends to blind you to other things - but, unfortunately, losing tends to magnify anything that may have contributed to the setback in the first place.
Last week I suggested that Worthington's strict "no going out" policy could come back to haunt him in terms of team morale and, subsequently, performances on the pitch.
And, despite those flippant remarks at the start of this week's offering, I take no pleasure in being right about that.
The Gillespie-McCartney brawl, funnily enough, came a couple of days after 'Worthy' had dismissed media suggestions that the Northern Ireland camp was not full of happy campers.
"If this is a squad of rifts, there should be more," he told Sky Sports.
A classic case of famous last words, methinks. . .
