I had just finished telling my shocked partner the details of my twenty seven year love affair with sweeties when Liveline came on. Joe was struggling. Nothing identifies the character of the lesser brained sports fan than the shrill call, usually heard in the long grass of radio phone-in programmes, to the effect that sport and politics don't mix. Everytime we hear the light refrain the thought occurs that naivete and stupidity have at last been mated successfully.

If you went to the game in Dalymount in 1955 between Yugoslavia and Ireland you engaged in a political act. And well done. If you feel, however, that permitting Yugoslavia to play football here next month is no different or that waving a white hankerchief during the playing of the Yugoslav national anthem will somehow make things alright you are sadly deluded.

By playing against Yugoslavia, by attending the game and treating it like any other match we will be engaging in a political act even more shameful than that which we engaged in May 1974 when the national team went to Santiago, Chile and played in the national stadium before the blood had dried on the slaughter which occurred there.

WE became the first country to visit there in the space of a year. We went for a friendly. There was a lesson there already.

The Soviet Union were supposed to visit for a World Cup game the previous November but conceded the points instead. Chile duly kicked off and scored into the empty Soviet goal but it was the Russians who emerged with all the honour.

It doesn't really matter in the current instance whether or not you approve of NATO's hawkish, morally imperfect behaviour around the Balkans or if you are disturbed by the inconsistency with which the policemen of the world wave their truncheon, the fact is that we are being asked to partake in the frivolity of international football at a time when the state of the rival team is on the one hand being bombed and on the other is engaged in unspeakable acts of ethnic cleansing.

Lets not pretend that right now sport and politics don't mix, Yugoslav players all over Europe have made it patently clear that they do mix by striking, by displaying banners, by urging each other to fight for the homeland.

Lets not flatter ourselves by thinking that the waving of white handkerchiefs in Lansdowne Road will be a topic of alarmed conversation in the bunkers of Belgrade or that Yugoslav television will linger wondrously on our peevish little faces as we make our facile little gesture. Let us not effect to imagine that the game won't be exhibited as an example of the Milosevic regime's happy relationship with another small and oft beleaguered country.

Sport and politics has always mixed in Yugoslavia. Soccer and politics have been siamese twins since the foundation of the state. The first club to be founded in Yugoslavia back in 1911 were Hadjuk Split named after local fighters who had railed bloodily against the Ottoman empire.

This is a country where teams play for the Marshall Tito cup, where they abandoned half completed games in 1980 when Tito died, where partizan are still the army team and where Milosevic stopped his comrade and rival Arkan (Zeljko Raznatovic) from buying Red Star Belgrade because ownership of the club would give Arkan too great a power base in the capital.

Instead Arkan whose Serbian Volunteer Guard or Tigers (formed from the dregs of Red Star supporters clubs) were to the fore in the slaughter of muslims throughout Bosnia and have been reported to be in action in Kosovo bought an apartment which overlooks the Red Star ground and a team which now rivals Red Star.

He took over Obilic two years ago pumping in sufficient cash to get them to the head of the Yugoslav first division.

(The club by the way is named for a Serb hero who stabbed a Turkish commander to death before the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389).

IT'S NOT just cash which has bouyed what was once a humble division two team. There has been a good mix of bribery and corruption as well. The man they call Commandant has been seen grinning with amusement as the thugs who patrol his terraces chant "score and we'll kill you" at rival forwards.

Two of the panel selected to play Croatia last month were from Obilic. No doubt the chattels of Arkan will be selected for Dublin too.

Sport and politics don't mix bleat the woolly heads on the airwaves. We have no quarrel with the ordinary people of Serbia they say grandly. Well perhaps the worst of them are only obeying orders and swallowing propaganda but we have an obligation to ourselves not to allow soccer and our team to be fed into the grinder.

We owe sport a duty of decency.

Ask the dead of Vukovar and Bjeljina where muslim civilians were slaughtered by Arkan if they might make a murmur about this game proceeding as mass graves are being filled elsewhere. In Bjeljina it was that Serb TV filmed Arkan leaning across the body of a dead muslim to embrace Biljana Plavsic, soon to become serb president of Bosnia.

Before we wave our hankies and do the Mexican wave why not ask the players of FC Pristina if they are currently over the moon?

Or what about the trembling refugees whom we grudgingly allow to seep into out bloated little country? What do they think of us playing footie with the boys from Belgrade? Do they fret that the linen in the corporate tents will be crisp enough for us to dine on?

No doubt the FAI have moral concerns here but the issues of fat money and three points appears to have paralysed them. The team just plays football, see. Yet when the socialite Diana of Wales died in a car crash a couple of years ago the team weren't beyond expressing their profound grief by wearing black armbands during a game in Iceland. And Mick McCarthy seems, regrettably, to have no difficulty misplacing his inate decency to appear grinning in newspaper shots taken outside a courtroom in which a journalist who once urged a Lansdowne Road crowd to boo Roy Keane had just been sueing another journalist.

Synthetic grief, issues of journalistic pique and the assisted sale of Opel motor cars are matters in which the team or management are permitted to take sides in. About ethnic cleansing they are perforce silent. If that is the case let the government put an end to it now.

Politics and sport always mix. In grants, in swimming inquiries, in civic receptions, in anthems, on days of sheer flagwaving nationalism. They mix. Always. It is time for politics to intervene on our behalf. After all the Irish team do not belong to the FAI, they represent all of us and take our name with them onto the field.