Someone, somewhere must have thought it was a good idea. Picture the scene, a little earlier this year. Some bright spark arrives for work one dreary Monday morning at the headquarters of the Rugby League World Cup. The promotions chaps had a bit of a brainstorming session in the pub on the previous Friday afternoon and they were all sent away over the weekend to dream up some fantastic marketing ideas for the showpiece of rugby league.

Our public relations genius is the first in the office on this fine morning clutching a piece of paper. He has spent all of Saturday and Sunday working on this presentation, his passport he hopes to bigger things.

When our man's big moment arrives a hush descends over the meeting chaired by the marketing manager. Our man strides across the conference room to the overhead projector. He places a single sheet underneath it and turns off all the lights. On the sheet there are just six handwritten words: Play the first game in Belfast. His colleagues at the front see it first and start to snigger. By the time everyone has had a chance to have a look the sniggering has turned to raucous snorting.

After a minute or so of this the young man at the projector is starting to sweat profusely. He can see his short career in public relations pass before his eyes. But the marketing manager, silent up until now, clears his throat and gushes enthusiastically. "It's a great idea, a great idea. Let's do it people." The rest, as they say, is history.

And so it came to pass last Saturday, on a blustery and unwelcoming afternoon in Belfast, that the first game of the Rugby League World Cup between Ireland and Samoa kicked off at Windsor Park. To say that this seemingly historic occasion failed to capture the public imagination here is something of an understatement. Despite a publicity onslaught

just 3,207 brave souls turned up. This game was a damp squib worthy of the miserable conditions in which it was played.

A little perspective. While Ireland and Samoa were thrashing out their differences, Linfield, the traditional occupiers of Windsor Park, were across Belfast playing Glentoran. The bad-tempered meetings between the two teams, referred to rather optimistically as the "Big Two", have become part of the sporting furniture here but this game was still able to attract twice the number of paying customers. Even more pertinently around 12,000 people had been at Ravenhill the previous night to watch Ulster's last-minute mugging at the hands of Toulouse. If this was a popularity contest, then rugby league trailed in a distant third.

What can they have been thinking of with the decision to play a world cup game in Belfast? For a start the connections between the team calling itself "Ireland" and this country are fairly nebulous. With only one bona fide Irish-born player on the team the only real surprise is that nobody asked Tony Cascarino to come out of international retirement and play at full back. Given these difficulties it was fanciful in the extreme to imagine that there would be some tremendous outpouring of national pride and a spontaneous gathering together of thousands of converts to march en masse through the centre of Belfast to Windsor Park.

Then there is the game itself. The schism between league and union has been a feature of English sporting life for over a century but that conflict has barely created a ripple over here. Outside of the G&T and sheepskin coat brigade who throng Ravenhill on Ulster nights, rugby union draws from a small enough support and playing base. There is not room for two games grafted onto the same branch.

Union has traditionally been confined to a fairly static number of schools here and the rash of club amalgamations and cost-cutting exercises over recent years are an indication of how difficult the sport is finding it to make ends meet. The last thing it needs here is rugby league pulling up a chair to the table.

But league still has its advocates who point proudly to the physicality of the game and its crowd-pleasing big hits. This is man's stuff, they tell us. Again something must have gone a little awry if the powers that be thought this was destined to be the game's big selling point here. Ten minutes at a game of Gaelic football in Derry or Tyrone or an amateur league soccer match in Belfast would have provided them with enough evidence for the proposition that we need less pointless physical contact in our games here, not more.

And another thing. While the other world cup games in England and Wales are being played at well-equipped, modern stadiums, bringing a game to Belfast lumbered the organisers with the crumbling anachronism that is Windsor Park. There are many effective ways of enticing families out of their cosy livingrooms on windswept Saturday afternoons, but dangling the carrot of a fun day-out at dilapidated Windsor is not one of them.

Maybe, then, the great rugby league experiment in Belfast was doomed to failure from the start. The real surprise may actually be that the curiosity of as many as 3,000 people was sufficiently aroused to attend. But it was not a wholly pointless exercise because it highlighted once again some of the difficulties inherent in the way sport and the culture which surrounds it are promoted here.

The 30 years of political violence may have a lot to do with it, but there is no doubt that sports policy-making here is characterised by an incredible shortage of self-confidence and a disastrous lack of foresight. That can be the only explanation for the fascination with parachuting in weird and wonderful minority sporting events from outside without considering first if there is actually an audience for them and then if they can have any long-term beneficial effect.

The Ireland-Samoa game joins a lamentable list which includes powerboat racing and icehockey and you can be sure that at this very minute a package is being put together to entice some other unsuspecting minority sport to up sticks and relocate to Belfast.

All of this costs money, whether directly from government or indirectly through lottery funding. And yet nobody stops to think just for a second or consider that this might be better spent addressing the shameful underfunding of grassroots sporting initiatives and programmes. That is where the marketing men should really be directing their energies.