Not bowled over by prospect of covering Derry game

On soccer:The problem dates back to the early, rather grim days of my freelance career when rugby featured on the wide-ranging rota of sports I covered in order to make ends meet. On a particularly awful Saturday afternoon, I was packed off to the Bowl by the Sunday Press to watch UCD play Sligo in a fairly meaningless (to me at least) All Ireland League game, writes EMMET MALONE

That end of Belfield had yet to be developed at the time and the Bowl was completely exposed to the elements. So, on a bitterly cold day in driving wind and rain I eventually gave up on taking notes (my hands had, in any case, become too numb to write) and attempted to shelter behind the only thing available, a pole 10 metres from the sideline.

None of this would have been especially memorable but for the fact that when I called the paper to phone in a few short paragraphs some editor unexpectedly took the call and announced that, with just about everything else having been called off due to the weather there was a lot of space to be filled. They now wanted 60 paragraphs on the match instead of the six or so I had intended to provide. My subsequent whimpering prompted the target to be revised fractionally downward but after phoning over a piece consisting of endless quotes - primarily about the conditions - I still left Belfield that evening exhausted and feeling like I'd filled the following day's paper pretty much single-handedly.

The experience haunted me for some time after and while I'd since been in the adjacent sports centre countless times, watched games at the hockey stadium and played football on the nearby astro-turf pitches, I'd never set foot back in the Bowl itself until half an hour before Friday's Derry City game.

Then, within half an hour of my game having gotten under way, the sense of déjà vu began to be cranked up by events in Inchicore. Word from Richmond Park was filtering through of the protracted stand off over strips and it seemed that if the start was delayed there beyond the point when a match report could be filed by the paper's deadline then it might just fall to me once again to fill the extra space.

As luck would have it, the lunacy subsided just in time but the question of who is to blame for the first PR calamity of the new campaign has yet to be resolved. By the sounds of, all of the main parties can take credit for a part of it. The problem, it seems, was that the referee, Anthony Buttimer, who has, as they say, a little bit of form in this department, objected to both sides playing with the same coloured sleeves on the basis (generally acknowledged by other referees) that the clash would make particular types of incidents - most notably handballs, more difficult to adjudicate on.

Now, other referees might have pressed on, especially when things started to become difficult, and it is far from unheard of for teams to play out games with such clashes of sleeve colours without matters descending into chaos. Still, the rules state the matter is one for the match official to decide and just about everybody acknowledges the referee was within his rights to handle the situation in the way he did.

After that it should have been a fairly straightforward case of falling back on the rules of the league which state that if there is a clash of colours then the visiting team should use their change strip. There are two related problems here. The first is that despite the fact that the rules state that these two strips should be "different in colour and design", both of Sligo's have white sleeves and because Rovers' home shirts were an even closer match to St Patrick's Athletic's, they hadn't bothered to bring them. At some point, it seems, the league must have approved the shirt design despite knowing that the sleeves might at some stage be an issue.

Nevertheless, Sligo should have brought both strips because at least then the rules would have been entirely clear-cut on what should happen next which is that where both of the visiting side's strips clash with the home team's then the hosts should play in their away strip.

Instead, the home club's officials appear to have dug their heels in and time was wasted getting shirts in from a local amateur club only for these to be rejected too. During this time paying customers, a grouping St Patrick's Athletic (like all Irish clubs) could do without alienating, were left waiting for more than half an hour on a bitterly cold night and in the end everybody's credibility was undermined by Sligo having to take the field in their opponents away jerseys because the Dubliners still refused to do so.

Ultimately, it all amounted to what might well be described in the parlance as yet another own goal and, for having afforded me a refuge well away from it - not to mention, hosting an entertaining game with a couple of cracking goals - I'm glad to say I've finally made my peace with the Belfield Bowl.