The Ulster Titans, Northern Ireland’s first gay friendly rugby team

With no matching kits, no clubhouse and no permanent pitch, it is hard to imagine that this team of 15 are international players training for their first tournament against clubs from all over the world.

A sports team fighting adversity and striving to be the best in their field is a regular weapon in Hollywood's blockbuster arsenal. Audiences mark these down as a moral tale and a flight of cinematic fantasy, but now Northern Ireland has a real version of this formulaic story.

The players leaving training muddy and bruised every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday are members of the Ulster Titans, Northern Ireland's first gay-friendly rugby team. They have been the targets of politicians and general cynicism, but have still played in the knockout stages of a world club championship, the Bingham Cup.

The team's winger, Duncan Neil (25), a technician at Belfast’s art college, can see why there have been so many raised eyebrows at the mention of a gay rugby team. He says: “I am a cynic and if someone had turned round to me and told me about this team I would have thought that it would collapse, but having been here for some time now we have made it clear that we are going to make it work and we are going to be involved in rugby as it is in Ulster."

By choosing rugby as a sport they have not made life easy for themselves. Duncan adds: “I had played at school but hadn't played for nine years. It is a really complex game.”

He was in the minority. When the call went out for players in this new venture, most of those who answered had never played before.

The team's hooker, Neil Davis (30), a sales manager for Capita, had never even picked up an oval ball before.

"About four or five years ago I had got into watching the World Cup and the Six Nations,” he says. “At the Pride festival last year a few guys came up to me and asked if I wanted to play. They told me I didn't have to have played before and that enthusiasm and energy is all that counts. I thought it would be a safe environment to try something new. I had always played badminton.

“There is no way I would have turned up to another team and said ‘I have never played before — is there any chance I could join a training session?’. It is to do with accessibility. It is about the game.”

Life for any new team in any sport is tough but for a gay team in rugby the stakes seem all the higher. Sean McEvoy (38), the club's chairman and outside centre, runs a coffee shop on the Stranmillis Road. He says: “I think it is important that it is gay-friendly. Rugby has this macho image and everyone has their own idea what rugby boys out on a Saturday night should look like so we did have to think twice about whether it was something we were comfortable with.

“We were worried that people out there thought you would get a bunch of mincing fairies coming on in pink strips screaming whenever the ball came near them. That's people's perception of what will happen and what they see when we play is that we are out for the ball and out to score tries the same way they are. They learn rapidly that they might have misjudged the situation.

“Also, the people playing rugby now are lads in their 20s and I don't think the whole sexuality thing is such a big deal for them. It is becoming less and less important.”

The Titans seem to play hard and let their rugby do the talking. The hooker, Neil, managed to break a six foot six player's collar bone two weeks before the Bingham cup. “There's no fear,” he remarks.

They have to be strong off the pitch as well. Their road to international rugby has coincided with a renewed spotlight on Belfast's gay community. Iris Robinson's now infamous comments caused a stir for the Titan's players. Neil says: “We didn't want to get embroiled in it. We want to focus on the rugby, not the gay element to it. When Iris Robinson made her comments they were about the whole gay community and my reaction was as an individual, not as part of the team.”

Outside centre Sean agrees: “As a team we didn't react because we are not politicised particularly.”

However, in February, statements by DUP MLA Edwin Poots were directed squarely at the Titans. He accused the team of apartheid in sport, claiming it would be unacceptable to produce an all-black team or an all-white team so why was an all-gay team acceptable. The then Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure said that to him it was equally unacceptable to produce an all-homosexual rugby team.

In the calm manner of a man who has faced flack from 20-stone prop forwards, Sean deflected these comments. At the time he said ostensibly that the Titans are a gay team but are by no means exclusive. In fact, one of the team co-founders is heterosexual.

Sean said: “He made one comment and we made one back and left it at that. I like to think we came across as open minded and fair whereas he came across as narrow minded and bigoted. We just left it at that. We are here to play sport.

“I think so many teams and clubs have originated from the community and have been established for scores, if not hundreds, of years. They were originally started from a section of society, be it geographical or people working together. To my mind this is just another team coming from another section of the community but it is the 21st century and we do get a lot of support.”

It was buoyed up by this support and being followed a BBC documentary team that the Titans made their way to the Bingham Gay Rugby World Cup. After only three 15s matches in their entire history and their unconventional winter training sessions, the Titans travelled to Dublin to play in a tournament against 37 other teams from around the world. This was the fourth biannual tournament dedicated to Mark Bingham, one of the heroes who stormed the cockpit of United 93 on 9/11 and a gay rugby player. The Dublin warriors had brought the trophy home previously and were this year's hosts.

Sean and the rest of the team thought it was too good an opportunity to miss, but having only been a team for 15 months by the time of kick-off in June, any hope of success was a long shot. Three days in and three defeats later it looked like they had bitten off more than they could chew. Sean says: “There were two matches a day and by day three some of the guys had taken such a pummelling and a beating that it was amazing they were still going. The camaraderie between the team and a common goal was what kept us going.”

Duncan believes that those initial losses gave the team an impetus to progress further in the tournament. “When we won our first match we thought ‘this is it, we start winning or we are out’. By the time we got to the final stages we thought we might as well try and take it home with us.”

If you want to follow the Titans’ progress through the Bingham Cup, don’t miss BBC NI’s new series, starting tomorrow. Meanwhile, this team of internationals will go back to filling their generator with diesel and working on their scrimmaging on the cold winter evenings in Belfast.

A Queer Try, BBC NI, tomorrow, 9.30pm