GOALBALL:When a match has to be played in complete silence, writes MALACHY CLERKIN, it adds a certain note to the day

“It goes without saying that you can’t cheer during the action. The reason it goes without saying is that they have volunteers holding up signs telling you as much. When there’s a break in play or a goal is scored, they hold up signs telling you to clap and cheer.

THE BABY stopped play. It’s not often you can sum up the downright through-the-looking-glass-ness of a morning’s sport with a single sentence but no, that just about covers it.

We were a few minutes into Finland versus Brazil at the Copper Box in Hackney, the second match in the men’s goalball competition and somewhere up in the crowd a gurgle became a whimper and a whimper became a squawk and, all of a sudden, we had a crying baby. Which meant that all of a sudden, we had no goalball.

Seriously. The baby stopped play. If you’ve ever looked with pity at the poor bedraggled mother on the aircraft who’s trying to shush a bawling bundle while taking daggers looks from the other passengers, think how it must feel to stop an international sporting event in its tracks. But that’s goalball, just about the oddest sport you’ll ever watch before lunchtime.

It’s like a cross between indoor soccer and a party game dreamt up in a library after a Christmas party got out of hand. On a floor roughly the size of a volleyball court, two teams of three players face off against each other.

They take turns throwing a ball along the ground to the opposite end, trying to score into goals that run the width of the court. There are two halves of 12 minutes apiece and the team with the most goals wins.

So far, so what, right? The twist is that nobody on the court can see a thing. All players have some level of visual impairment but to make it fair all round, everyone has to wear black-out eyeshades.

The only way they have of knowing what’s going on is by listening for the bell that rattles and tinkles within the ball itself.

Hence the need for total silence.

Hence the fatwa against crying infants.

It goes without saying that you can’t cheer during the action. The reason it goes without saying is that they have volunteers holding up signs telling you as much.

When there’s a break in play or a goal is scored, they hold up signs telling you to clap and cheer. It’s crowd control as imagined by Hanna-Barbera.

So you walk into the arena and the first thing you do is turn your phone to silent. You apologise wordlessly as you try to find your seat. You worry whether clicking your pen on is going to ruin four years of preparation out on the floor. And then you sit and you watch and all you can think is how much you would pay to have a go at playing a bit of goalball.

First up yesterday morning was Britain against Lithuania. Not 15 minutes away across Olympic Park, the velodrome would convulse for the rest of the day to the sound of thousands of Brits making as much noise as they could muster.

Here, at nine in the morning, the crowd was doing precisely the opposite. The game was played out to the sort of quiet that makes you afraid to shush the very few who aren’t being quiet enough.

Truth be told, it wasn’t as though the home side were giving the crowd much to make noise about. But then, even to the extremely untrained eye, they didn’t have an awful lot of say in the matter.

Lithuania are the world champions although the Brits hung in for the opening period and even nabbed a goal to keep the score at 1-2 after five minutes, it wasn’t long before they found themselves on the end of a hiding.

They key to the prowess of the Lithuanians was their spin throws. (Aficionados please note, The Irish Times is well aware that there is probably a better, more jargony term for the move than ‘spin throw’. If so, we will be delighted to use it in our next Goalball match report. There’s a fair chance you’ll have to wait four years but a promise is a promise and our word is our bond).

Basically, in order to discombobulate the defending team, they pirouette with the ball in hand before their throw. Since the defenders are listening for where the sound of the bell is coming from, the idea is to throw them and make them miscalculate the direction they should sprawl themselves in to save the shot.

It’s a basic goalball move but nobody did it with more snap and pace throughout the morning than the Lithuanians.

They were 7-1 up at half-time and moved to 11-1 ahead early in the second half. The game ended at that point, as it does in all goalball matches where one team goes 10 goals up.

It looks like being a long week for the British side, who patently don’t have the same level of expertise as some of the other countries.

The baby-interrupted Brazil-Finland game that came after that match was a cracker though, one that Brazil eventually held out to win 6-5. They had been 3-1 up at half-time but Finland made a real go of it after the break and the tension in the Copper Box as the final few throws came down was almost indescribable.

At least out loud it was.