DISCOMFORT ZONE:Theatre critic PETER CRAWLEYhits Tolka Park for an encounter between Shelbourne and Sporting Fingal

SHELBOURNE 1. Sporting Fingal 0. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Nor does the helpful statistic that on a cool, bright evening last Friday there were 1,113 supporters in Tolka Park to watch Sporting Fingal put up a spirited defence against Shelbourne FC, aka “Shels”, aka “The Reds”.

My editor couldn’t have picked a better worst man for the job. It isn’t that as an arts writer I can’t access sports journalism. I can even follow the sport itself. It’s just that I’m not a supporter. Apart from the occasional final, quarter-final, or penalty shoot-out of burning national interest, I never have been.

So, of the 1,113 people who have come to cheer on one team and actively upbraid the other, I count about 70 Sporting Fingal fans, swallowed up by the huge Riverside Stand, while one impostor, namely me, for whom a team has never informed a scintilla of his identity, tries to belong to an “us”: the 1,000-plus supporters in the Richmond Road stand.

I think I fit in well, frowning purposefully at the referee, nodding sagely when somebody comments on the quality of Bisto’s recent game. (Who’s Bisto? He’s not credited in the programme and if it’s a nickname, nobody on the pitch resembles gravy.) In reality, though, I couldn’t look more out of place if I were wearing a white tuxedo and watching everything through opera glasses.

It’s a good game. Possibly. Both teams appear to be trying. Shelbourne have most of the possession, but they can’t capitalise on their attacks. A heart-stopping moment comes early when Sporting Fingal are awarded a penalty for reasons I fail to grasp. (Side note: every incursion on a player by another, no matter how minor, seems to result in a full-blown tantrum. Say something unflattering about a player’s shirt in passing and the guy will still drop to the ground, pounding his fists and gnashing his teeth. It’s a huge stage, I know, and a player must perform for both the referee and the galleries, but can you be booked for overacting?)

Anyway, the penalty slopes low and right of centre, the goalie, Dean Delaney, drops to the ground, stopping it dead, and the stand erupts.

The stand erupts quite a lot. The spectator’s job, I work out, is to clap after everything that happens, good or bad, as a sign of encouragement and appreciation. It’s like a performance with constant audience feedback.

Soon after, a Shels player crosses the ball in front of Fingal’s goal, but there is nobody there and it trails away infuriatingly, like a joke without a punchline. Everybody sighs and then claps.

I am beginning to feel personally invested, but I have that nagging sensation that I’m rooting for Goliath in a match against David. There isn’t even that much at stake today. Shelbourne, I read, are at the top of their league table, halfway through the season, with a four-point cushion and a game in hand over most of their rivals. I have absolutely no idea what that means, but on the surface, this game just seemed to be about plumping that cushion.

How Dermot Keely can get so excited over this is anyone’s guess, but he’s the manager. I have to confess that I spent most of the match just watching his virtuoso displays of rage. Patrons are sternly warned on entry to Tolka Park that abusing players will not be tolerated, but no one has told Keely, who yells instructive obscenities at any player who will listen. Eventually, I decide that his creative range of expletives form a sophisticated secret code.

I try to observe how this torrent of recalculations affects play, but to be honest, I can’t. The beginning, middle and the end are only determined by the clock. If there’s a formation (4-4-2?), I don’t see its pattern in the messy spontaneity and bright improvisation of the game.

I could glibly pretend that there was some theatrical analogy in all this. The match’s unity of time and place subscribes to classic Aristotelian values. The reliance on subtext is more contemporary: Shelbourne, founded in 1895, are playing a team that was officially launched last year, in a league to which Shelbourne have been relegated because of hubristic overspending; if this is a psychodrama about pride and redemption, the drama is at a sub-turf level.

The only goal of the match, a subtly effective free kick that Richie Baker arcs elegantly into the net from firmly outside the penalty area, strikes me as a stirring meeting of talent and accident. But the rest of Shelbourne’s game becomes achingly conservative. So defensive, in fact, that Sporting Fingal become the much more exciting side, and when a late attack falls apart, leaving Fingal as exposed as a cheating lover hanging naked from a bedroom window, Shelbourne can’t act fast enough to make something of it.

Even writing that makes me a little guilty. Loyalty is the soul of club football. Criticism, which is my sport, smacks faintly of betrayal when you raise it on the terraces.

I enjoy visiting Tolka Park and envy its easy sense of community (neighbourhood kids come looking for their friends in my section, as breezily as if they are calling to someone’s door).

But when it comes to soccer, I’m a faker, too detached to ever belong to this “us”. And as I look out on the desultory showing of disappointed Fingal fans, I am hit with a softer, sadder sensation: I’m not even “them”.