FORGET the squabbles about the anthems and the flags. It will be the prayers offered up in the dressing room before kick-off that will have Archbishop Croke turning in his grave. As Munster's towering Donncha O'Callaghan observes his pre-match ritual of sprinkling himself with holy water, Ulster's elegant winger, Andrew Trimble, will be sitting in a quiet corner reading Psalm 84 from his bible. How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord almighty. . .

Outside, waiting in the history-haunted stands, Northern unionists will sit shoulderto-shoulder with Southern nationalists in Europe's thirdbiggest football stadium, cushioned by bewildered Frenchmen who imagine they are here for a game of rugby. Ecumenism comes scrummaging and rucking and mauling into the crucible of Irish history this afternoon, 87 years after the Black 'n' Tans murdered 14 people in Croke Park on Bloody Sunday. Of the 80,000-plus visitors to the GAA's sacred ground, history will leave the most enduring footprint.

But not everyone is celebrating. "I'll be watchin' nothin', " resolves a Crossmaglen football man, slumped disconsolately on a barstool in his local pub. "They shouldn't be playing that f**king match there. Wouldn't they leave it the way it is. The GAA's only interested in money. Them that started it with wee clubs, they wouldn't be on for that at all."

In the neat village green, the tricolour flies above the flags of the four provinces. This is deepest south Armagh, where the infamous 'Sniper On Duty' sign on a border road was absorbed into modern history's iconography. Crossmaglen has three outgoing nationalist members of the Assembly. The President's husband, Martin McAleese, a Sigerson Cup Gaelic football medallist, had a dental surgery up the street until he upsized to Áras an Uachtaráin. Four of the six roads out of town lead to the Republic.

On the side of the Culloville Road hulks the most notorious security barracks of the Troubles, a corrugated iron fortress occupied by the British army in 1971 that continues to dominate the landscape.

Behind it stretches the Gaelic football pitch of Crossmaglen Rangers/Raonaithe na Croise, winners of 11 county titles, four Ulster titles and three All Ireland club titles. One of its most famous players is the deceased Cardinal Tomás �? Fiaich.

Intimidation Stories abound about intimidation of club members by the neighbouring soldiers, with tanks churning up the club's entrance and military helicopters landing in the middle of the pitch, even mid-game.

Motions of condemnation were regularly passed at GAA conventions throughout the Troubles. In Dáil and Seanad debates, accusations of assaults and provocative arrests of Rangers supporters were read into the record.

It is hardly surprising that Armagh was one of only five counties to vote against abolishing Rule 21's ban on security-force members when the motion was carried in November 2001.

"It was a terrible time here, " says Brendan, who played underage football with the club.

"Police kicked us. Soldiers kicked us. Your mother and father, not knowing you were frightened, would be saying, 'go 'way on down to train.' You'd come down and get the butt of a gun and 'you're f**king Ra.'

There were plenty like me."

Brendan has a son who plays rugby in England but has declined invitations to play in Northern Ireland. "A Catholic from Crossmaglen playing rugby?" says his father. "Are you mad? It's an upper-class, toffee-nosed Protestant sport.

It's the same as playing golf."

Crossmaglen's antipathy to 'foreign games' in Croke Park, and the English rugby match on 24 February in particular, is a complex web of politics, religion, history, social class and sports purism. Yet, for all its vehemence and vitriol, there is room for old-fashioned pride.

At the suggestion that there might be loyalists in Ballymena - Paisley country - who are as repulsed as themselves by the prospect of an Irish rugby team in Croke Park, a man calling himself Kevin, splutters: "They don't like it, huh?

It's a f**king honour for them."

Text-jokes have been whizzing around this island in the preamble to Ireland's Six Nations against England. One goes: "Ireland will be at a serious disadvantage if Brian O'Driscoll is injured but England will be coming without the big guns they had the last time they visited Croke Park."

Bets are being taken that the result will be 19-16, in Ireland's favour, of course.

In Crossmaglen, though, it's no laughing matter. "Hill 16 is named after the Easter Rising and we're going to have loyalists up there singing 'God Save the Queen', " protests Kevin. "There are still soldiers driving around here with guns and helicopters landing.

There's a ceasefire. It's supposed to be over but they'd land on top of your house if they wanted. The GAA has betrayed us. They've a very short memory."

The only female in the pub is behind the bar, filling pints. "I don't see why people are against it. I'm a soccer woman, " volunteers the young woman.

"I follow Liverpool and I go to Anfield for matches regular."

The brief silence that follows is broken by Brendan: "I'd be up there for the occasion, if I could get a ticket, " he admits, glumly.

"Aye, " says another man, "it's as hard for a Catholic here to get a ticket for one of them rugby matches in Croke Park as it is for a Protestant."

After issuing directions for a shortcut route to Ballymena, with dire warnings to "be careful, it's a dangerous town", the lament of the men of Crossmaglen is echoed in the North's bailiwick of unionism.

"I've tried all my GAA contacts and failed to get a ticket, " despairs Ulster and Munster fan, Fergus McIntosh. "I think all the GAA people are so keen to see a non-GAA event in Croke Park, they're all going.

What's not good about it? It's got a capacity for over 80,000 people and it's on the northside.

I've a friend who's a member of the Baptist church and they're having the installation of a new pastor on Sunday. He was agonising about whether he should go. He told me he felt the Lord was telling him he should be at church but he said, 'Bugger it, I'm going to the match anyway.'" According to Guy McCullough, secretary of Ballymena rugby club: "Demand for tickets for this match and the English one is up by 35% to 40%.

People are looking to be a part of history being made."

Ballymena, arguably Ulster's most illustrious club, boasts a membership that includes Andrew Trimble - the Presbyterian theology student at Belfast's Bible College - the legendary Willie John McBride, current internationals Isaac Boss and Paddy Wallace, former Ireland winger turned peace campaigner Trevor Ringland and ex-international lock and DUP councillor "Big" Davey Tweed, who has accused Catholics in Ballymena of conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Protestants.

Probably the most accomplished of the club's members is Syd Millar. He made 37 appearances for Ireland as a prop, coached and managed two Lions tours, was in charge of the Irish team for the inaugural World Cup in 1987, got an MBE followed by a CBE and now, aged 72, after two hip replacements and triple-bypass heart surgery, is chairman of the International Rugby Board whose headquarters are in Dublin.

Ballymena was affiliated to the IRFU in 1887, the same year Crossmaglen Rangers was founded. Some Ballymena members have clubbed together to hire a bus for the trip to Croke Park.

"People who have never been there are looking forward with tremendous excitement to it.

Everyone's very keen to see the new stadium, " McCullough adds. "I've a friend who's a hurler and his eyes light up whenever he talks about Croke Park. Very few dyed-in-thewool rugby people have seen it before. The IRFU have produced a little document that folds up as small as the tickets, which the Ulster branch have distributed. It has a street map, showing the Luas and Dart stops, though the funny thing is that any landmarks mentioned are all only 15 minutes from Croke Park."

It will be a second visit to the GAA's HQ for former rugby international Trevor Ringland, an RUC officer's son and Triple Crown winner in the 1980s. "A friend in Queen's University who is mad into the GAA was always inviting me to an All Ireland final and I said that when they got rid of Rule 21, I'd go, " recalls the Ulster Unionist Party's adviser on sport. "Fair play to him, the morning after they abolished it, he rang me and offered me the choice of hurling or football. I negotiated a great package for the football final. I went down there as a unionist and people were buying me pints of Guinness. That's the way to win me over, rather than the other way with bombs and bullets."

Anthem Three of Ringland's closest friends were injured in the border bomb that killed Lord Justice Maurice Gibson and his wife, Cecily, in 1987. All three were rugby internationals - Nigel Carr, Philip Rainey and David Irwin - en route to Lansdowne Road for a match.

As chairman of the crosscommunity organisation, One Small Step Campaign, Ringland sees sport as an avenue to a shared future. "We had a player seriously injured in our club and we got a call from a Gaelic club in the Ards peninsula to play a charity match to raise money for him. We played rugby for one half of the match and Gaelic football for the other half."

In recent weeks, Ballymena RFC's floodlit grounds at Eaton Park have been used for training by Antrim hurlers. It is a tangible step towards reconciliation that gets overlooked in the welter of debate about the singing of anthems.

"'The Soldier's Song' is the anthem of the Republic of Ireland so it's not an all-Ireland anthem, " Ringland is adamant.

"'Ireland's Call' is a solution to the problem and it's something we can all sing along to. I remember for the first World Cup in 1987 it was decided to play 'The Rose of Tralee', a typical Syd Millar compromise.

There we were standing in a windy field in Wellington listening to the worst rendition I've ever heard of 'The Rose of Tralee'.

"Somebody wrote in a newspaper the next day that maybe we should have had 'God Save the Rose of Tralee'."

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