Football: Men of Derry in a different league: Richard Williams joins the team who prove that sport can cross frontiers

IT'S the heart of a Sunday night, and we're still almost 200 miles from home. As the coach pulls out of the dim street lighting of Monasterevan, away from the crossroads with a pub on each corner, Claire and Shauna are in the back seat, singing along with Dolly Parton on the country music tape like a pair of honky-tonk angels: 'If I should stay I would only be in your way-ay-ay . . . So I'll go but I know I'll think of you every step of the way-ay-ay . . . And I-I-I will always love you-oo-oo . . . '

A few hours earlier, in the flush of victory, the girls had traced a simple message in the road-grime on the white rear panels of the coach: 'Derry City FC Won Today'. Now their words are being carried the length of Ireland, from south to north, in one of the strangest journeys in sport.

Up at the front of the coach, beyond the seats filled with slumped and dozing shapes, there's the hiss of a ring-pull and a sudden surge of laughter in the semi-dark. Somebody's making a speech. Back here, as Claire and Shauna switch along with the tape to 'Just walk on by, wait on the corner, I love you but we're strangers when we meet. . .', Jim Gallagher is telling me what it means to be a Derry City fan.

'Nobody wants trouble here,' he's saying. 'We're just ordinary people. Nobody cares who you are. We've never had police in the ground. Just our own stewards. And we've never had trouble. Oh yes, the majority of the fans are Catholics. But anybody can come.'

Okay, then: is there a Protestant on this coach tonight?

'Yes.'

Who?

'Mr and Mrs Caldwell,' says Liam Gallagher, chairman of the Creggan Community Supporters Club (and no relation to Jim). 'They're Protestants. They've travelled with us for years. But religion's never mentioned. Only in a wisecrack, maybe.'

That would surprise some people, to whom Derry City is the football club that died in the early days of the Troubles, back in 1972, when a couple of its supporters - 'just young hooligans, not really supporters at all' - set fire to the visiting Ballymena United team coach in the car park at the Brandywell stadium. After that, the Irish League told City that they had to play all their matches away from home. Rather than accept such ignominy, the club left the league, which it had joined in 1929, and whose championship it had won in 1964/65, and shut down its first team altogether.

'It was a ridiculous situation,' remembers Liam Gallagher, who was watching the match at the Brandywell on the day the Ballymena bus got torched. 'All right, there was a lot of burning and looting going on at the time. But this was just a couple of hooligans. There was no animosity inside the ground towards the visiting team or its supporters. There never had been. And it was a great game, as a matter of fact.'

Nevertheless, for the next 13 years Derry City ceased to exist in any real sporting sense. It maintained an active social club at the Brandywell, located on the north bank of the River Foyle, in the Catholic heartland between Creggan and the Bogside, but the stadium itself became the home of thrice-weekly greyhound meetings, with junior football in the 'D & D' - the Derry and District League - at the weekends.

But in 1985 four of City's former players decided that enough was enough, and that the time for a resurrection was at hand. 'It was a sort of committee in exile,' Liam Gallagher says. 'I dare say they could have got back into the Irish League, but with the Troubles and all it didn't seem worth it. There would always have been a slight danger of clashes. So they just decided to keep away from it.'

Instead, in a remarkable piece of lateral thinking, the newly reconstituted committee of Derry City applied to join the Republic's League of Ireland, to play against the likes of Dundalk, Limerick, Galway United, and Dublin's Shamrock Rovers and Bohemians. And, as far south as you can get and still find a League of Ireland club, little Cobh Ramblers, whose ground was where Derry City found themselves last Sunday.

THE town of Cobh - the Gaelic spelling of Cove, which is how it was known before a visit from Queen Victoria led to the temporary rechristening as Queenstown between 1849 and 1922 - sits on the rim of Cork Harbour, a magnificent inlet defaced only by a steelworks and a prison.

The great grey St Colman's Cathedral looks down on a town that was a tiny village until the British came and garrisoned it during the Napoleonic Wars, building it up into a sort of miniature Brighton, with an elegant waterfront and a little Regency crescent and, now, a population of 10,000. From here, hundreds of thousands left Ireland - first in convict ships for Australia and later, in the mid-19th century, fleeing the potato famine by steamship, bound for America.

At the top of the town, a lung-bursting 130 steps up from the harbour front, a chill November wind whipped last Sunday across St Colman's Park, home of Cobh Ramblers FC, founded in 1922 and now in only their second season in the Premier Division since they joined the League of Ireland six years ago. The sight of the pitch makes you count the number of Guinnesses you had for lunch: there's a nine-foot drop from one corner flag to its diagonal opposite, which makes the ground look like a bed with a broken leg.

To most British football fans, Cobh is known, if at all, as the place Roy Keane came from. A local boy, Keane played a season for Ramblers as an 18-year-old before being bought by Brian Clough for Nottingham Forest in 1990. The fee for the powerful young midfield man was pounds 25,000 up front, with an extra pounds 7,000 when he completed his fifth appearance for the Republic of Ireland senior side, plus the takings - about pounds 10,000 - from a friendly match which Forest played at St Colman's Park. Just over pounds 40,000 in all. Three years and 114 league appearances later, Forest received pounds 3.75m when Alex Ferguson decided to add Keane's talent to his all-star squad at Manchester United. From that jackpot, poor Cobh Ramblers received not a penny.

John Meade, who used to play in Ramblers' defence and is a former chairman of the club, glanced around the humble ground, with its tiny dressing-room building and breeze-block walls, and sighed as he thought of the Keane fee. There are no seats at St Colman's Park, except for those in the dugout. Only one side of the ground has cover. He told me about the plan to provide shelter at three sides in all, and to install some seating. 'That's the dream, anyway,' he said.

Cobh Ramblers is 320 miles from Londonderry, and at least that distance in cultural and financial terms from the world of Derry City. At the Brandywell, where the former Manchester City winger Dennis Tueart masterminded the return to league activity in the mid-Eighties with a team including two Brazilians and a Zairean, the present star players may be on pounds 500 a game; last Sunday they included Neil McNab, once of Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City; Scott McGarvey, a former Manchester United starlet; and Luther Blissett, lately of Watford, England, and elsewhere. For Cobh's boys, the match fee is more like pounds 50 to pounds 100.

But the presence of Luther Blissett, making his fifth and, as it turned out, final appearance in Derry's red and white last Sunday, gave the match a more obvious note of poignancy. As they kicked off at St Colman's, Britain was watching a live transmission of the San Siro derby on Channel 4's Football Italia - a match that Blissett played in exactly 10 years ago, when he was a million-pound centre-forward with AC Milan. His Serie A sojourn, of course, was a fiasco - as, 10 years later, was his stay in the League of Ireland. On loan from Bury, he scored on his debut at Galway but achieved little else. Against Cobh, with 15 minutes to go and the score at 1-1, he was pulled off by City's acting manager, Tony O'Doherty, whose judgement appeared to be vindicated when 20-year-old Peter 'Pizza' Hutton and the sub, Barry Ryan, scored two late goals for a 3- 1 victory that took City to ninth place in the 12-team division, one place ahead of the Ramblers.

'Luther will be as disappointed as the fans that he missed so many chances,' said O'Doherty, a 47-year-old former Northern Ireland international who was a member of the club's 'resurrection committee' in 1985. 'He could have made a name for himself.'

'It's a very competitive league,' Blissett remarked a couple of days later, back home in England. 'It's hard and physical, and no one gets the time to put his foot on the ball. The players all seem to feel they have to make contact with the man they're marking, whether he has the ball or not. But I enjoyed it. It's probably as good as our Third Division. And the fans are enthusiastic.'

Eighty thousand in San Siro, 800 at St Colman's. And when Blissett and his colleagues came off the pitch, it took five minutes for someone to find the keeper of the dressing-room key. As they stood in the knifing wind, they were knocking the mud off their boots just to keep warm.

'WE'LL be going through the border at Monaghan tonight,' Jim Gallagher says. 'You'll see, they won't stop us at the checkpoint. They know who we are.'

Eight years ago, when City played Ramblers in the cup, 10,000 followed them to Cobh in a special train and 100-odd coaches. Now the novelty is gone, and the following is down to a single coach, half-full, and a few cars.

'The logistics of these away trips are horrible,' Tony O'Doherty says. 'But it was the only solution. The other clubs in the North understand that. They'd rather see Derry City playing in the Republic than not playing football at all.'

'Everybody enjoys the crack,' says Liam Gallagher, talking about the long trips every other Sunday. 'It wouldn't be comfortable, as things are, playing the clubs in the North. We'd attract trouble. We're no angels, but we've never gone looking for trouble. As it is, we can just go away and enjoy ourselves.'

It's midnight. At Monaghan, the coach slips through the British Army checkpoint and across the border with barely a pause. And in the dark, through the laughter and the singing and the football talk, you can hardly tell the difference.

(Photographs omitted)