Burnt bridges rebuilt through shared passion

It's just over 20 years now since some of the worst scenes of violence ever witnessed at a National League ground took place at Oriel Park when Linfield came to play a European Cup qualifying round game in the border town. On that night things quickly got completely out of control at the ground and while the match went ahead, the behaviour of the northern supporters prompted UEFA to move the return leg to the Netherlands. The southerners won that one 2-0 to embark on what remains, at three rounds, the longest run by a club from these parts in the competition.

The club's third opponents were Celtic, who Dundalk came within a whisker of eliminating. Now when people from the town get talking about the glory days it's pretty much a toss up which gets top billing, the late miss by Tommy McConville that let the Scots off the hook or the rampage embarked upon a month earlier by the northerners.

The violence that marred that game seemed like a very distant memory in Dublin on Sunday when, for the first time, a combined team representing both Dundalk and Linfield took the field.

It's only a matter of months since the "Dunfield" initiative was hatched by club officials enjoying a post-match dinner after a pre-season friendly, but already there has been a major coaching session for youngsters from the two local communities in Windsor Park, friendly games between the clubs' under-13s and 14s in the north and some joint training sessions for the respective youth panels.

On Saturday, though, a group of youngsters from the two clubs got together in Dundalk for a night out and the following morning they travelled down to Dublin where they played an exhibition game at the annual Sport Against Racism in Ireland's Multi-Cultural Sports Festival at Blackhall Place.

The game wasn't up to much, it didn't produce a goal for a start, and had to be cut short because the incredibly successful tournament was threatening to fall behind schedule, but nobody was under any illusions about the scale of what had been achieved by simply getting the team onto the pitch. Like the tournament itself, the match was one of those occasions when a sport that all too often ends up dividing people went a long way towards building some important bridges. At a time when football on both sides of the border has found it difficult to get the public funding that it deserves, the two clubs have managed to secure guarantees for £160,000 from the European Fund for Peace and Reconciliation on the basis that they would provide the additional £40,000 initially sought.

Now, says Jim Murphy of Dundalk who has been central to the organisation of the project "we have something that is more important than football by itself. What we've been doing through football has simply been a catalyst for something far broader. "For the players, football is the main thing, but really what it is about is bringing young people from different backgrounds together and letting them see that they have more in common than they might have imagined otherwise."

Dundalk's youth coach Tommy Connolly, who held the same position when Linfield visited 20 years ago, certainly recognises the significance of the move and feels that planned moved into the areas of women's and under-age girls' football will further cement the project's grounding in the community.

His opposite number in Belfast, Brian Carothers, is equally enthusiastic, pointing to the fact, as Murphy does, that a tremendous transformation has taken place at Windsor Park without any real notice having been taken outside the club.

What you could notice until recently was that players from clubs like Dundalk and Linfield could never get on together but now that that's started to change we can start to ponder the greater issue - why it is that an island of five million people is still handicapped by having one league too many?