Back in the 1970s, somebody on the BBC children's television programme Blue Peter came up with the bright idea of burying a time capsule to be opened on the first day of the new millennium. The idea was that the metal box should include news stories, photographs and tape recordings of the time and that these would give people an indication of what life was like 30 years before.

Reading and listening to the rolling coverage of Donegal Celtic's much-publicised football match with a team representing the RUC over the past fortnight, you would have been forgiven for thinking that someone had opened the Blue Peter time capsule a year early. This was less a news story, more a relic of times past. The whole episode is one from which nobody and no grouping - save for the Donegal Celtic club itself - has emerged with any credit.

The whole sorry saga was triggered by the draw for the Steel and Sons Cup semi-finals which paired Celtic with the RUC in a game fixed for next Saturday, November 14th. The Steel and Sons Cup is one of the more prestigious amateur soccer competitions here and is given added kudos by the fact that the final is played on Christmas morning, thus guaranteeing considerable local media coverage.

When the draw was made it attracted little attention. But in the way that journalism works here, somebody came up with the bright idea of contacting Sinn Fein for a reaction. Donegal Celtic play their home games on the Suffolk Road, right in the heart of rich Sinn Fein territory in West Belfast, so a forceful soundbite was duly delivered. "Sinn Fein is publicly calling on Donegal Celtic not to play against the RUC," said local councillor Gerard O'Neill.

Donegal Celtic took a firm line from the start. "People should stop and think before they speak their minds about this game," said the club's manager, Paddy Kelly. "What effect will it have on Donegal Celtic if we are seen in the public eye to be dictated to when matches of this kind come up?"

With clear divisions emerging, the club delayed a decision on whether or not to play a number of times. Last Friday the pressure intensified further with the input from Gerry Adams, the Westminster MP for the area. "No nationalist, indeed no democrat, should have anything to do with the RUC," he said.

So when 179 of the club's 320 members arrived at an extraordinary meeting last Sunday it was abundantly clear that the decision whether or not to play was in the balance. Members of the Relatives For Justice group met them as they went in and lobbied for a no vote. In the event it is believed that 100 of those members voted in favour of the game being played and so the team will be at Castlereagh Park in Newtownards next Saturday morning to play their semi-final. The democrats had spoken.

That in itself is an indication of changed times because Donegal Celtic has been here before. Two years ago they were paired with the RUC in the Irish Cup, but Celtic withdrew in the face of threats they said had been made because the tie was to take place at the New Forge, home of the RUC.

The arguments advanced about the acceptability or otherwise of the RUC as a policing force in the North were made as forcibly then as they are now. But the new variable in the 1998 version is that the very future of the RUC is now a topic for political discussion.

In fact, a public meeting organised by the commission charged with looking at the issue of police reform was held in West Belfast while this row over a football match was rumbling on. Sinn Fein eagerly took the opportunity to open up the argument on another front.

But the siege laid on the club was not one-sided. Donegal Celtic is an ambitious club and has a clear view of its future in senior football here. Any progress towards that goal has been stymied by political factors, not least the geographical location of the ground, and so the last thing the club needed last week were discouraging noises from the football authorities here. And yet, when the possibility of Celtic not fulfilling the fixture was raised, the thinly-veiled implication was that a withdrawal would have a detrimental effect on the club's rise through the ranks and could lead to a ban from all competition. This introduction of this rock to counterpoint the hard place that Sinn Fein had already manufactured was the last thing the club needed.

The members, though, held their nerve. What is interesting now is the fall-out, as politicians of all hues fall over themselves to trot out the same old cant about "keeping sport and politics separate".

One Ulster Unionist councillor, who has been strongly advocating political non-interference in sporting matters, clearly forgets the street protests of a few years ago when `residents groups' around the Oval, home of Glentoran, blocked the streets to prevent Catholic Cliftonville fans from walking to a game. Double standards, how are you?

Sinn Fein's input into matters sporting is at best selective. Much is made of the need to isolate the RUC and have nothing to do with what the party regards as the unacceptable apparatus of the state. But yet when that same state offers substantial grants from Lottery funding to redevelop GAA grounds throughout the North, there are none of the same objections about excessive state interference. It's reminiscent of the tale of the budding young American politician whose first public statement to prospective voters was: "I have my principles. And if you don't like those I can certainly change them."

It would be nice to think that the Donegal Celtic decision was born out of a tremendous outpouring of goodwill and reconciliation. In reality, the decision was probably a bit more pragmatic. The threat of a ban undoubtedly loomed large and there was also the small matter of an application for a £500,000 grant for ground improvements from the Lottery. Money, clearly, can still make itself heard above the din.

This won't be the last time over the next few years that a squalid little row mixing sport and local politics bubbles to the surface here. Anyone who doubts this should already be ticking off the days until Rule 21 is shunted centre-stage once again.

For now, though, another sporting boil has been lanced. Donegal Celtic's final public utterance was a request that the proceeds from next Saturday's game be donated to a fund in aid of the family of the Quinn brothers, murdered in a sectarian attack last July.