SO that was the Friendship Trophy was it?

Two days after another role model striker returned to the Island to bag a brace against the Nicaraguans, football was thrown into chaos by machete-wielding, and apparently gun-toting, thugs.

The week had started so well with the legendary Shaun Goater coming home to score two goals in a 3-0 victory against the Central Americans to keep Bermuda's World Cup campaign on track.

He flew home the next day but John Barry Nusum continued where the Goat left off with a double strike in Friday's 2-1 win. Throughout both games it was all singing and cheering and national-colour wearing and joking and doing the conga and getting players and coaches to wave at the crowd.

Two days later, all that was ruined by up to 40 people intent on using football as an excuse to carry out astonishingly brazen acts of violence with a vicious array of weapons that made a mockery of last year's amnesty.

The pictures that were splashed all over the media on Monday tell the sorry tale. Men lying on the ground, men posturing with weapons and all with the backdrop of the green of the Wellington Oval pitch.

Yes, gang warfare does go on in Bermuda and yes, it is a problem. But it happening at a football match, a final, in front of women and children, in broad daylight ? that is what is so shocking.

Everyone involved in football on the Island has lined up to condemn it.

Shaun Goater, so shocked and appalled by the events that he took a day to digest them before being able to comment, said it was a sad day for football.

Kenny Thompson, who has done so much to bring a feel-good factor to the Island with his national side's unbeaten streak, said it was a "society problem" but admitted it would have a negative impact on the ground.

David Bascome, Sports Minister Dale Butler, everyone in the Bermuda Football Association, Eagles coach Gary (Tuba) Mallory, in the most emotional of terms given he lost his son to similar acts of violence, and players from both teams involved in the game have all spoken out against the senseless behaviour that threatened a premature end to the 2003-4 season.

The BFA are right to commit to finishing the season. It would have been wrong to allow a minority of gang members to have robbed players and fans of a winner of the Premier Division nor a winner of the Friendship Trophy, whose name will carry so much more weight in years to come.

Football will prevail, it always does. It did in England when teams were banned from European competition after Heysel it did in the 2002 World Cup in Korea where the violence of 1998 and 2000 were forgotten and it will do so here in Bermuda.

The sport will always remain bigger than the thugs who use it as an excuse to carry out revenge attacks. But the question is how many people will turn out for future games with the threat of being sat next to a man allowed to bring a sword into the ground.

It might be a society problem but it is the BFA who must act. It is their sport being brought into disrepute and it is their sport who have provided the news pictures of the year for all the wrong reasons. Whether it is security cameras, metal detectors or just a bigger policing budget, something needs to change. Emergency measures should be able to get us through this season, but for next year and the year after, we are going to need a seachange in policy towards security.

Although BFA president Larry Mussenden said Sunday's game was not considered a "high-risk match", many could have predicted it.

Sporadic outbreaks of violence around football had reared up throughout the season, the hooligans needed a crescendo and with so few games left, and four teams present at Wellington Oval, this, for them, was as good a time as any.

It was a disgrace, it was shameless, it was senseless and it was probably preventable. Football has been tarnished but it will recover.

But how quickly and to what level is in the hands of the game's administrators, the Police and society.

Weapons like that should never be able to be taken into grounds again, the only arsenal we want to see on the football pitch is the Gunners' youth team playing in Shaun Goater's grassroots festival next year.