Cricket creates oasis of defiant calm

It might as well have been a million miles away. They started to arrive on Friday, half an hour before the first ball was bowled, in their Saabs and their Volvos, in their pressed blazers and their sensible sweaters. Cricket people, seemingly oblivious to everything that was going on around them.

They walked in a strange procession across the pastoral Strangford Road from the car park to the ground with the obligatory picnic hampers and flasks. But they also had the extra burden of deck chairs and sun loungers - the clubhouse and stand at Downpatrick were burned down in an arson attack three weeks ago and the radio appeals went out to spectators to bring their own seating. A pragmatic solution to an atypical problem.

With the pale morning sunshine battling gamely to see off the low-lying Downpatrick cloud, the Strangford Road ground made for an absolutely beautiful, tranquil venue on this strange Friday morning. The scarred ground where the clubhouse used to stand was covered with white hospitality tents and portacabins had been brought in to serve as makeshift offices and dressing-rooms.

To the left of the scoreboard on a small square of grass a group of young boys had begun their own impromptu game complete with half-size bats and tennis balls. Close your eyes and you could have been in any sleepy English village.

That this venue could stage an international sporting event so soon after being ravaged at the hands of the arsonists was a true triumph of persistence over paying fulsome praise to full of praise for the nearby Saul GAA club for helping them out with showering facilities. Co-operation and pooling of resources like this is commonplace between GAA, rugby and cricket teams in towns throughout the North, but is seldom reported.

There was moral support as well, with political and sporting dignitaries milling around as the teams limbered up along the boundary. IFA president and long-time cricket aficionado Jimmy Boyce stood surveying the scene, as did the Security Minister, Adam Ingram. Mr Ingram refused to answer reporters' questions about the wider political situation and concentrated instead on highlighting the neat irony that the visiting South Africans had recently come out the other side of a very similar sort of societal trauma.

Rumours had been rife during the previous few days that the South Africans were on the verge of pulling out of the Northern end of their Irish visit but it appears that it was the captain, Hansie Cronje, who calmed down some of his more nervous team-mates and insisted that the game go ahead.

Cronje had a galvanising effect on Mike Hendrick's team when he played for them as a guest during last year's Benson and Hedges competition and it's probably no exaggeration to say that without his influence this game wouldn't have gone ahead.

It's customary to point out in cricket match reports that the visitors started slowly, but given the circumstances it was perhaps understandable that they might have had their minds on other things. Paul McCrum took the prized wickets of Cronje and Cullinan and the South Africans were positively wobbling on four for two.

All along the boundary the few hundred cricket men and women marked their scorecards, sipped coffee from their flasks and clapped politely in all the right places. But there was still no getting away from the slight air of unreality about the entire day. It wasn't exactly fiddling while Rome burned, but it was pretty close. Casting your eyes around this oasis of calm you could have been forgiven that the most pressing issue of the day was whose turn it was to wander round to the hospitality tents to get the drinks in.

Even in a "normal" year the 12th weekend is one during which almost all sporting activity is suspended. The GAA, for example, always schedule the Ulster hurling and football finals on the weekends immediately before and after in the knowledge that virtually everyone is in Donegal anyway. Preseason soccer friendlies don't traditionally start until the following week. But the cricketers seem to potter on regardless.

Cricket is at best a peripheral sport here and draws both its players and its supporters from a small, fairly unrepresentative section of the community. Crowds can generally be counted on the fingers of a couple of hands and media interest is minimal, so any wide-sweeping extrapolations from occasions like this are absurdly off the mark.

It's cosy and easy to suggest that games like this can serve as some sort of unifying force in a place like this. But the problem with that simplistic analysis is that it ridiculously over-estimates what sport here can and cannot do. As the presence of the politicos at Downpatrick suggested, it's a vehicle to be used and abused as circumstances dictate.

With Jonty Rhodes threatening to cut loose after the early tricky period and the hint of rain in the air, we decided to leave the cricket people to their own, slightly surreal world. On the way back to Belfast, just outside the small village of Saintfield, there was a pile of smouldering tyres and wood strewn across the pockmarked road. A group of women with pushchairs and boys with scarves wrapped around their faces stood beside the ramshackle barricade. But they let us through.