IT'S huge. St Anne's Park in Raheny on Dublin's northside is, undeniably, huge.

There are soccer pitches and GAA pitches and tennis courts and all sorts.

There's even a pitch'n'putt course, amply spaced out within the park's leafy glades.

All of which is nice and natural and oh so good for the lungs of a crisp spring Sunday afternoon but not a whole pile of help when you're wandering around trying to find four teams of soccer players you've never met before.

And then suddenly, in a faraway corner, standing tall and willowy and attached to a backpack beside a small group of blue-clad people flutters the green, white and red flag of Italy. And not too far away, among a larger crowd - 20, maybe 25 people - buzzes a small, bald man in a blood red tracksuit that can only mean the Polish side are here. And a bit beyond that group, dressed in baggy jeans and designer tops and wearing baseball caps and bandanas are a group you're going to take a guess at being the Congolese team. And in the foreground, already changed into white jerseys with green trim are unmistakably the Libyans, something cleverly worked out upon hearing the two nineyear-olds beside them shouting "LEE-BYA, LEE-BYA, LEE-BYA" and waving the only national flag in the world to be made up of just one colour.

Welcome to quarter-finals day in the Brian Kerr Intercontinental League.

Gil Berkowich pulls up a chair beside his partner Terri and starts to tell how it is.

Everyone in this article has a story to tell but without Berkowich, none of them would be told. At least not in this part of the paper.

To begin at the beginning, Berkowich is an Israeli working in Dublin. He and Terri (she's a South African - just as everyone has a story here, so everyone has a nationality) have lived here for six years or so and they're happy. Gil is an effusive sort, the kind of energetic c'mon-everybody worker bee that gets things done for the most part because people feel bad saying no to him. Like the rest of us, he'd play ball from dew till moonlight if pesky things like work didn't get in the way.

Back home, he played at night with his mates when he could. And when he managed to make time for it, he ran games between Israelis and Arabs. Opposing sides sometimes, mixed teams where possible. When he moved to Dublin, this city of so many races and cultures, he asked around where he could sign up for the local league that the immigrants played in. He got exactly the response you think he got. What league?

At first glance, Frank Buckley is an unlikely looking saviour. For some reason, you expect the head of Sport Against Racism in Ireland (SARI) to be a sharp-suited type, possibly with trustifarian leanings, almost certainly with a southside Dublin accent. Buckley could pass for a roadie. The hair is straight and long enough to tie back but short enough not to bother unless he's trying to look respectable. The accent is straight out of The Commitments.

He set up SARI in 1997 and the nine years since have been a constant struggle, one that's grown exponentially year by year. If, like most of us, you live your life in a nice quiet bubble and don't believe there's much racism in Ireland, an hour in the company of Buckley and Ken McCue, SARI's international officer, will open your eyes. They're idealists, though. At its most simplistic level, SARI is there to point out that if you and an opponent are chasing a ball to the endline, how you look or how funny you talk is of no concern to anybody.

They've tried various schemes through the years.

SARI have been running their annual Soccerfest for since 1997, a weekend tournament in Dublin with 32 teams taking part surrounded by facepainters and stilt-walkers, clowns and lantern-makers, kite-flyers, calligraphers and Chinese rope-jumpers. With the ever-growing eastern European population in Dublin, Soccerfest has even been expanded in recent years to include a chess tournament.

But nothing has been as successful as this.

Buckley knew there were enough interested players to sustain a World Cup-style tournament in Dublin but the problem was there weren't enough hours in the day for he or McCue to run it themselves.

Which is where Berkowich came in.

To call the first year of the league a roaring success, you'd have to have had a fairly liberal interpretation of what success constituted. Of the teams involved, only two turned up with sets of matching jerseys.

Players had no shin-guards.

Berkowich refereed the games himself. But it's the old dogswalking-on-their-hind-legs scenario. That's it's done well isn't as important as that it's done at all.

This year, though, Berkowich was leaving nothing to chance. The first thing he did was print up a couple of thousand flyers and he walked the streets handing them out.

Down Moore Street, around Parnell Square, the Ilac Centre, Capel Street, Bolton Street. Mountjoy Square (or Red Square, as some call it now), Parnell Street where two out of every three shop windows has Chinese writing.

He stuck them in internet cafes and coffee shops, Asian food stores and restaurants.

Anyone interested only had to get in touch with the number on the bottom. His number.

"The interest was massive, " he says. "I had so many people getting in touch with me I had to get a second phone just for my normal life. Because there were so many, I knew they might be hard to organise properly. So before a team signed up, I gave them a sheet of rules that they had to sign so that we could keep everything in order. I decided that there had to be professionalism about the whole league or it wouldn't work so well."

And so. Each team had to state their colours before the league started and had to be able to guarantee that all players wore matching jerseys.

Any team with a player sent off had to pay a �?�10 fine before the start of their next game, otherwise they wouldn't be allowed play. Each team had to provide medical back-up for each game. And so on. Finicky stuff but vital if all plates were to be kept spinning.

In return, Berkowich agreed to run a weekly-updated database that - no joke - puts the Eircom League to shame. Sunday has, for the most part, been game day (with the odd Saturday here and there) and every Monday morning, regular as rent, an email has landed in the in-box of each team with.

And the email doesn't just contain the weekend's results and league tables. There's a colour-coded list of the league's leading scorers, with totals divided up between kicked and headed goals.

There's the Total Fairness Competition Chart, a list and league table of all the red and yellow cards that have been handed out. And there's the fixtures for the following week as well. Most Sunday nights, the email takes Berkowich until 4am to finish.

"But it's worth it, " he says.

"If you put in time like this, the teams realise that you're not just messing about. They realise that this is something that can be done right. So they turn up on time and they listen to you. They respect the league which means they respect the other teams. That is what the league is for."

He tells a story about one of the Polish teams. There are three in the tournament, so hearty is the country's Polish population now. In one of their first games, back in February, they turned up to face the Libyans. The Poles, it turns out, aren't a million miles removed from Irish. They work all week and a Sunday afternoon kick-about is an opportunity to lay back and relax. More people attend the matches with the Polish sides in them than any other games and they always bring with them a few slabs of beer.

Libya is an Islamic country, though, and Berkowich felt that maybe knocking back a few cans in front of them might offend. So he had a word. "No problem, " the Poles said. "It's okay if we go in the trees?" Berkowich said sure, why not. And so you had the pretty comical scene of a match going on while a Polish speakeasy was doing brisk business under the oaks 100 yards away, the crowd getting all the more vocal as the afternoon progressed.

There have been dozens of little vignettes to warm the heart. Both the Somalian team and the one from Ivory Coast represent countries in the midst of civil wars back home and both contain players from opposing sides of their respective countries' divides. "Back there, they'd have had to point guns at each other, " says Buckley. "Here, they're trying to catch their opponents offside."

The games are underway.

One one pitch, Polska are handing Italy a trouncing.

They're a goal up after two minutes, another thanks to a penalty after seven. It will eventually end up 7-0. Polska - too big big and way too skilful for an Italian side made up of players who definitely like a bit more time on the ball - will meet one of the other Polish sides in the semi-final at the ninth annual Soccerfest on the May Bank Holiday in Crumlin.

The next pitch over, Libya and Congo are going at it like their lives depended on it. The Libyans have by far the outstanding player on the pitch in their tiny number seven, Abdul Mohammed. There isn't a book for all the tricks he has and the two Congolese centre-halves trying to keep him quiet are fighting a losing battle. If it wasn't for Sam, their acrobatic goalkeeper - "Sam what?" you ask. "Just Sam, " he laughs - Congo would be four down by 20 minutes in. In the end, Libya take a dinger of a game 4-3. They'll meet South Africa in the other semi-final.

It will be a day of fun in Crumlin in a fortnight, This year, they've added cricket, camogie and tag rugby to the programme, just to see how many people they can get involved. Like everything else in life though, money is the problem. Berkowich set the entrance fee for the league at �?�200 a team but he still spent well into four figures of his own money on it. Buckley and McCue have long since stopped counting.

In a way, though, that sums up what SARI are about, what the whole league is about. Just as the injustices, the bitter word and the cultural clashes count for nothing when two of you are going up for a header, so the money is the furthest thing from your mind when you're defending a corner.

And SARI have been defending corners better than anyone for the guts of a decade now.