Don't tell Jan Wolffensperger the future's orange. 'No, it's now,' he smiles outside his bike shop, showing off his orange clogs, his wife Annie's special orange flan and his daughter Petra's orange hair.

He offers you a ride on his orange tandem through orange-festooned picture postcard streets, past the orange house with the orange satellite dish and his mate with the orange moustache.

Welcome then to Orange Town - deep in the wooded Dutch countryside, a pretty little village hitherto known as Hoenderloo, but for the duration of the Euro 2000 to be known only as Oranjeloo.

Weird really doesn't do it justice. Fancy a meal at the local restaurant?

'Sorry, there's no apple sauce but we have a new flavour,' grins the cheery waiter. No, no, please don't tell me.

Want a drink? Go around to Wim's house. He's erected the Jaap Stam café in his front garden where a cardboard cutout of Dennis Bergkamp was last seen serving a Sky TV crew.

A football match? Take in the Holland-France game being acted out by tiny models on Sandra's lawn, but watch out for the terrifying stuffed dummy by the front door who looks alarmingly like Frank Rijkaard.

More spooky still is the thought that the real Frank Rijkaard drove through this place the other day.

The Dutch coach confessed to feeling humbled 'that a little village of 1,700 people has turned itself completely orange just to welcome us.'

The unique shrine was also a reminder for him, even in bizarre miniature, of the extent of national fever surrounding the Euro 2000 cohosts and favourites.

Memories of the self-destruct button, which gifted Dutch outfits of yesteryear have tended to push, are not allowed to intrude.

Victory appears not so much demanded as presumed. Behind his wheel, how odd it must have felt for Rijkaard to see one unreal world blend into another.

His squad are based nearby up a wooded lane in a plush, secluded hotel and training complex called the Golden Tulip.

It sounds and looks idyllic, but the ugly barbed wire fences and high-profile security presence shock the senses after being treated to the unforced openness of those sunny, but odd orange folk. Nobody is allowed in, save the strictlyscreened media.

Wolffensperger, the jolly organ-iser who clearly revels in being cast as Mr Orange, says he hopes the players will come down to meet the townsfolk.

Not a chance. Sorry, says Rijkaard, but the team have a job to do. Apart from the security-conscious Turks, the Dutch are expected to be the only squad who open no training sessions to the public. It has to be that way, shrug the organisers, or the quiet lanes would be clogged by tens of thousands.

So, just under two miles from their Oranjeloo disciples yet truly a world apart, the Dutch have imprisoned themselves from the clamour of a nation, perhaps the most expensive array of footballing talent ever assembled working invisibly.

Oh yeah, Oranjeloo. Chelsea 'keeper Ed De Goey remembered seeing pictures of it on the box.

'We're locked in and the only thing we know about the outside is what we see on TV,' he shrugged.

'Here, we can work in peace, but unfortunately, it's not very good for the people because they want to see us. Maybe on some occasions we will be allowed out.'

For good behaviour on the pitch, presumably. Should they lose against the Czechs in Amsterdam on Sunday, they will be glad for parole to be turned down.

On the eve of a tournament drenched in almost as much elephantine hype as France '98, this stretch provides two telling snapshots of Euro 2000 Dutch style - the way it should be and the way it could be.

There's the extraordinary passion in Hoenderloo, mirrored throughout the quiet communities here who are hosting teams and their followers and embracing them with gusto.

In Ermelo, for instance, the locals have tried to make the place feel like little Lisbon for their Portuguese guests, putting on special menus and evening dos for their media hordes. They want it to be a carnival and it feels like it.

Then you look at the barbed wire around the Dutch camp, feel the security grip and remind yourself that, in the venue cities, the excitement goes hand in hand with some genuine trepidation. Oranjeloo is Pleasantville - nothing disturbs its nice, ordered, one-coloured view that Euro 2000 means only football and fun.

No apocalyptic visions here. Nobody worries about the fact that 90 per cent of surveyed Dutch police are alarmed about the prospect of serious trouble in the Championship or that Eindhoven Police Station might have to close on Monday night because there will so many officers on the England hooligan-watch beat. That's another planet.

But even in Holland's bigger centres, no fears can quell the manic optimism. In one town, a bloke has been arrested for painting his house orange and the pavement outside red, white and blue. In Oranjeloo, you fear it would probably be a capital offence not to.

So, across the border, a journalist was told to go find similar demonstrations that Belgium was equally obsessed with the event. He drove for hours and reported back that it was mission impossible.

It's not that there is no enthusiasm there - hundreds have been flocking to the Red Devils' training at their Tienen base, which is as open as Holland's is exclusive - just that it is so obviously more muted.

It's the difference between a country with a footballing superiority complex and one which expects nothing.

Belgium have the first game tomorrow and, for once, they promise the King Baudouin Stadium in Brussels - renowned for its soulless atmosphere ever since it emerged from Heysel's rubble - will be a cauldron for the visit of Sweden. But Belgians reflect wryly that they know their place, that it is Holland who inevitably got the last game in Rotterdam and that doubtlessly, it will be their cocky neighbours, too, who appear in the European Championship Final.

Where Holland has dreamers, Belgium has cynics. Like the bartenders of Charleroi, understandably planning to shut up shop when the English and Germans come calling, like the punters who had to queue in the rain for five hours to pick up pre-paid tickets in Liege, like the senior politician who this week slagged off the whole event as a money-making show-business exercise which treats the paying public with contempt.

Their watchword is 'realism', the favourite expression of the avuncular Belgian coach Robert Waseige, who shrugs that the quarter-finals would do for him. In the Dutch camp, though, realism collides with fantasy.

'The expectation of Holland is logical,' says Rijkaard, puffing contentedly on a ciggie in the Press tent as if he had never contemplated anything else but triumph. 'We have great players, a great team.'

While Edgar Davids and Bergkamp indulge in some fantasy football in an enthralling one-onone game up the road, Mr Orange hasn't time to regret what he's not allowed to see.

He is too busy planning a special night out for the locals, taking a boat down Amsterdam's waterways, once Edgar and Dennis have orchestrated the triumph on 2 July.

And those who can't make the trip? Well, they'll just stay in Oranjeloo to paint the town red.