Clergy's charity tested in full

The seminary run by the Society of African Missions (SMA) at New Bodije in Ibadan has long been one of focal points for the small Irish community in Nigeria's largest city.

They priests there see it as something of an unofficial duty to welcome visitors from back home and with that in mind they spent part of last week calling around to make sure that the Irish team and journalists who arrived in the city for the World Youths Championships would make a point of dropping in.

Well yesterday the folks from back home calling . . . and how. In the heat of a Nigerian afternoon Fathers Damien Bresnahan and Tim Cullinane looked on with bemused expressions.

Out on the pitch at the back of their grounds (a decent surface but well short of the regulation size for teams of this standard) an Irish team with serious hopes of becoming world champions over the next few weeks got their first real run-out since arriving here, against South Korea, the Asian champions who rather fancy their own chances of heading home from this tournament with a bit of silverware.

Afterwards the six reporters following this Irish side camped out beside the seminary's only direct-dial phone and the smile on the priests' faces gradually began to melt. "Help yourselves lads," was just the phrase we'd been hoping to ruthlessly abuse.

None of this, as it happens, was the way yesterday was supposed to turn out. There had been problems with a venue for the game because Brian Kerr wanted to prevent the Australians, who will play Ireland on Saturday week, from seeing his players in action and that meant forgetting about playing it on one of the many training pitches adjacent to the magnificent Liberty Stadium in the centre of Ibadan.

Instead the Cantonment military base (home to the Nigerian Army Christian Fellowship whose motto is "Occupy till I come") was agreed on but the fact that the game had been brought forward 24 hours due to FIFA's insistence that the Koreans be on a particular charter flight to their group's base in the north was never communicated to the authorities there.

The resulting chaos involved the Irish and Koreans speeding in separate fleets of mini buses through the battered streets of the city accompanied by army escorts.

A long way behind, trailing from one proposed venue to another, was a bewildered media contingent and their many Nigerian minders. The progress was not helped by stops along the way to purchase petrol on the black market because the Hiace was about to break down and no fuel was available from the filling stations.

Eventually, and thanks in no small part to luck, we all ended up at the SMA's house. For the local organisers that was clearly all that mattered. The game was going ahead, wasn't it?

So, as they like to ask of visiting team officials on the verge of weeping, "what's the problem?". All the signs are that the general population agrees.

The local people are also warmly enthusiastic for their country's staging of this tournament, despite the fact that the estimates of the cost to the economy range up to half a billion dollars.

For most, it seems, the championships will be a diversion from the day-to-day grind of getting by in Africa's most populous nation. An expensive one perhaps, but a diversion nevertheless.

Their enthusiasm in the streets and around the stadia is remarkable and if the home team does well, as it should do, over the next few weeks then so much the better for everybody concerned, not least the people pulling the strings amongst the tournament organisers who appear to have done well out of their parts in the staging of Nigeria '99. Others haven't done nearly so well.

Several hundred residents of shacks on just one beach near Lagos have already lost their homes in an attempt by the local authorities to beautify the place.

They were interviewed by the international media at the weekend and left journalists stunned by their expressions of gratitude that the metal and wood with which they had built their homes had been left so that they could rebuild after the final in three weeks time.

Elsewhere similar attempts to impress visitors have been underway for some time (one initiative involved the establishment of a task force to ensure that the shirts of pedestrians are ironed) but it is only really in the stadia, which German contractors have renovated at huge cost to the government here, that the results are particularly noticeable.

At the Liberty Stadium here in Ibadan, for instance, the telecommunications system may still be, despite firm claims to the contrary by stadium officials, well short of the international norm, but the seating and the playing surface easily compare with the venues at France '98, in the Liberty's case there is even a physical resemblance to the stadium in Bordeaux.

The French, of course, had their problems last summer, what with air and rail strikes, a controversy over their ticketing arrangements and their difficulties with visiting fans. The Nigerians, though, are already encountering far more basic difficulties.

Their own team, along with the Irish, has missed the deadline for the accreditation of players for instance and the tickets for all of the games, which have been printed in London, are long overdue.

FIFA have been keeping a remarkably low profile so far but the federation will be slow to either forgive or forget if they feel the tournament reflects poorly on them. On the pitch there seems little chance of that but outside of the stadia the reasons why this tournament should never have come here seem all too apparent.

The long queues outside petrol stations due to receive deliveries alone make a strong case for the money being better spent.

Last year the country, a huge exporter of oil, started to import petrol and the problem has contributed to unreliability of the electricity supply - the authorities have guaranteed six hours a day (before, during and after games) during the tournament, but the breaks this week have been frequent and there is widespread scepticism.

As he sat in the Premier Hotel on Tuesday Brian Kerr, a lifelong believer in the value of sport generally and football in particular to society, wondered aloud how a nation in such trouble could justify something like this tournament.

There was nobody around who was offering any answers.