Runners offered glimpse of sanity

Snapshots from a weekend: For 72 hours between last Friday and Saturday all sporting life was here and it produced emotional reactions that ran the gamut from life-affirming to shame and back again. From the soccer international to the National Football League, with the small matter of a World Cross-Country Championship in between, this was a crash-course introduction to everything you wanted to know about Northern sport but were afraid to ask.

It had all started so well because Friday was a day laced with positivity. For the first time in recent memory there was tangible proof that the Irish Football Association is at last serious when it says it wants to move from a non-sectarian stance to a proactive, anti-sectarian position.

The media utterances of IFA secretary David Bowen are generally carefully chosen and sporadic but there he was all over the local press delivering the message that the IFA was committed to ridding the Windsor Park terraces of bigotry and sectarianism on international occasions.

"People who sing sectarian songs are not welcome at Windsor Park," he said. "The visit of the European champions is the perfect showpiece for our fans to show that every colour, creed or religion is welcome at Windsor." The effect of the events that unfolded over the next 36 hours was to turn all those honourable intentions and worthy words to just so much dust.

But it's still Friday and hope is still springing eternal. All over south Belfast there were pockets of pencil-thin runners in brightly coloured garb out on training spins along the prosperous tree-lined roads and avenues. In a city which, during the dreary months of winter, can be as drab as any in western Europe, their presence was a welcome dash of cosmopolitanism. The full impact of the fact that Belfast was hosting a recognisably prestigious international competition and was doing so with the minimum of fuss and self-congratulation was beginning to kick in.

There were also some lovely cameos. With its open green spaces and long rolling paths the Ormeau Park was an obvious honey pot for athletes looking for some last minute fine-tuning. One group of Latvians clearly got a little overexcited and ended their run wandering around the park a little lost and disoriented. But at times like this there is always a Belfast man who knows. Using his trusty walking stick to point the way, he somehow managed to transcend the language barrier and send them off in the direction of their digs at the Queen's University Halls of Residence.

Dieter Koser's experience of Belfast "hospitality" was a little less benign. The 47-year-old had made the long pilgrimage from Frankfurt to Belfast to support his country in Saturday's European Championship qualifier. On Friday night he spent some time in bars in the city centre before going back to a house party in the Donegall Pass area of town.

At around 4.30 on Saturday morning he was found lying in an alleyway suffering from severe facial injuries and a punctured lung. Two local men have subsequently appeared in court charged with attempted murder. This was not the new era of toleration and open-mindedness that David Bowen has been advocating.

Any slim hopes that things would be different inside Windsor Park the following afternoon were equally groundless. Right from the kick-off, the air inside the stadium was heavy with almost non-stop singing and chanting delivered, if anything, with more gusto than usual.

There were the usual renditions of The Sash and The Billy Boys, but just so that our visitors didn't feel left out they were serenaded with ditties laden with references to the Nazis and to the second World War. All this enlightened stuff is meat and drink to Windsor regulars but just so that the watching and listening public were not denied access to this great advertisement for Northern Ireland football culture, the game was also live on local television and radio. Every syllable of the unceasing diatribe was clearly audible. Effective PR this was not.

The closing renditions of Rule Britannia added to the sense of cultural confusion but did little to lift the overall mood. As a counterbalance to the positive steps forward taken by David Bowen and the IFA, this was a concentrated gallop in the opposite direction.

In the middle of all this, just in case anyone forgot, there was also a game of international football being played. It, too, followed, a drearily predictable pattern. Germany won pretty much as they pleased despite some trademark huff, puff and bluster.

INTO Sunday and there was little humanity on display at the Athletics Grounds in Armagh as the traditional enmity that smoulders between the home county and Tyrone was played out in all its gory detail. Everything you wanted to know about Northern sport but were afraid to ask.

In truth, it wasn't just as bad as that primarily because the encroaching gloom of a drizzly, end-of-March afternoon was lifted by the artistry of Armagh's Diarmuid Marsden. If Armagh are to present a credible challenge this summer - and five seconds listening to their ever-optimistic followers will convince you all that and more is possible - Marsden will be the central figure around whom everyone and everything else will have to pivot. He has now taken his rightful position on the short list of footballers in this country that you would travel a distance to see ply their trade.

One passage from Sunday's first half is frozen in the memory. Marsden ran 30 yards to pick up a pass out towards the right-hand sideline. After a quick glimpse skywards he launched a towering effort into the teeth of a strong crosswind. The kick had all the craft and finesse of a perfectly executed wedge to a links par three on a breezy day. It sailed effortlessly over Finbarr McConnell's head and between the Tyrone posts.

Any prayers in Armagh this Easter will be delivered with the fervent wish that Marsden's injury-prone hamstrings can stand up to the rigours of an Ulster championship and beyond.

At the end we inched slowly out of the Athletics Grounds towards the warmth of our cars thinking sweet thoughts. The faintest scent of summer in our nostrils was all the proof we needed that better times are slowly but surely on the way.

Into Monday and back to porridge. On a Radio Ulster phone-in there's a politician arguing about the inequalities in funding for local soccer when compared to Gaelic football. In the newspapers Lawrie McMenemy exhibits all the wrongheaded optimism usually reserved for England cricket coaches by opining that his Northern Ireland side were "mugged" by Germany. There are no runners on the streets, or in the parks or in the pubs and our city is a poorer place. We miss them because they offered a brief glimpse of the sporting normality we can only dream about.