Chris Lloyd reports from Eindhoven on the end of a dream for Middlesbrough fans.

CES is dancing in his red and white Boro shirt. All around him, the white and red colours of Sevilla are jigging, leaping, cavorting - wildly, madly. The music is pumping; the street bars are throbbing, with beer being liberally passed overhead from one out-stretched hand to the next.

Ces, though, is dancing to a different beat. His is a slow, sorrowful shuffle. He takes off his battered hat, ties his scarf around his wrist and bravely tries to rotate it around his head, just as the Sevillans are swirling theirs in their delirium.

"This could have been us," is all he can say. He's in the Sevilla square, gatecrashing their post-match party. He's a welcome guest, slapped on the back till he's blue, but he can't join in.

Five minutes down the road is the Middlesbrough square he has left behind. It is empty. The lager stalls are closed, their fluorescent lights flickering out one by one.

On the plaza, a sea of plastic glasses, their sides shattered like Boro's dreams, is all there is to show for the thousands who stood here two hours earlier in great expectancy. Ticketless, but that barely matters as the game kicked off on the giant screen in front of them.

But as the goals went in -- one, two, three and then four - they faded away. There was to be no comeback, no unbelievable resurrection, not this time.

"We came all this way, spent all this money, and didn't even play," said George Dunn, from Thornaby, surveying the wreckage of what might have been. The marble seat he's slumped on is still warm from the heat of the day, but his heart has gone cold.

"Write what you like, lad," says another fan. "Make it up. There's nothing left to say."

"We've got to be good losers," says another. There were moments of silliness - a bonfire in the middle of the square and then, after the fourth had gone in, a scrap between two women, their faces full of fury.

But there was no drunken disorder. Defeat on this scale has a sobering effect. There was defiant applause on the final whistle, and heads were held as high as possible.

"I didn't know they were as good as that," says a departing fan, the noise of the victors' party filling the air.

The Boro drift off into the warm night, hopes dashed, dreams dead.

It's a long, long way home from Eindhoven to Teesside.