ON recent months, GOAL! has come through all kinds

of qualifying rounds to win its place in the public eye. So, now that its first full show has been played out, how does it shape up against possible competition? Actually, it's quite hard

to determine what that competition might be because GOAL! is a hybrid, a compendium of cultural genres and styles that definitely hopes to be seen as new and different.

Forget the ''game of two halves'' business; this venture doesn't stop at trying to meld football and dance into a crossover vocabulary - it also tries to capture the unbuttoned atmosphere of the terraces, the pizzazz of big commercial successes (like Tap Dogs and River Dance) while still holding on to strong, contemporary dance values. Sometimes it comes close to succeeding . . .

To begin with: all credit to choreographer Kerri Jeffrey and producer Susan Crowther for having the gumption to think big. Eleven dancers and a massive set - a bank of huge video screens topping off a scaffolding ''terrace'' - manage to make the Armadillo stage look almost cramped! A pumped-up, hard-driving sound score (occasionally tinged with moments of anthemic sentiment) and a laser lighting display full of raking beams in pungent disco-rainbow hues give the set-up the feel of a rock concert or a Flatley extravaganza.

But all the excitation created by the light show actually cuts across the energy of the dance itself, masks it, even makes it seem anticlimactic. Which is a pity, not least because this is a team with no Gazzas on board, everyone is vehemently fit, whether they're airborne for a body slam or jumping and spinning at speed along the upper terraces.

The choreography - like the video backdrop - shifts perspective, from the exasperated ''hand jive'' of the fans, to team-training exercises and some slow, almost romantic passages which suggest football rules the heart before it reaches the feet or head. But not every pass finds the right mark. I'd say GOAL! deserves extra time, to tighten the choreography

and balance the staging before the replay at the Fringe in August.