Saturday, May 15, 2010
NOSTALGIA hanging heavy in the air above Dublin 4 just now, the other day I dug out my old copy of Simon Inglis’ definitive ‘The Football Grounds of Europe’ to see what the expert had to say about Lansdowne Road back when his sumptuous tome was first published in early 1990.
The author was impressed by the "dramatic, new" East Stand, which had been opened just six years earlier, "charmed" by the irregularly shaped end terraces and a bit sniffy about the "coarse grass" on the "bumpy pitch".
But then what option had the FAI, he asked rhetorically, other than to go "old school tie and cap in hand to the rugby chaps" for the loan of the pitch. After all, he pointed out – and here’s the zinger, folks – the prospects of hiring Croke Park for the more important football internationals were about "as likely as there being stock-car racing at Lord’s".
In fairness to Inglis, at the time he was writing those words you could have stood on the roof of the East Stand and still not seen that day coming. Now, 20 years on, Irish football has been there, done that, said thanks very much and finally come full circle to find a new home on old ground.
So it’s goodbye and hello to Lansdowne Road – or the Aviva Stadium as we will now have to get used to calling it. And be assured we will. Some might find it hard, and some diehards even downright impossible, to get their heads around a new name after all these years, but that will matter not a whit to the coming generations who will fill the soaring stands – and a select few of whom will even get to grace the pitch – in the decades to come.
That much was brought home to me on a Dart journey a few months back as the new stadium was rapidly taking shape when, a few stops before Lansdowne, my carriage was invaded by a gaggle of schoolboys.
Chaos reigned until the new stadium came into view, at which point they all rushed to the windows for a better look and, spontaneously, broke into a fist-pumping, terrace-style chant of ‘AVIVA, AVIVA’.
Somewhere a marketing man swooned.
Still, for the terminal romantics amongst you, it could be worse. As I pointed out to a television crew making a documentary about the new stadium, it’s not so very long ago that senior club football teams in this country were battling for the right to be named champions of a yoke called ‘Pat Grace’s Famous Fried Chicken League of Ireland’. Aye, try chanting that one the next time the mood takes you.
The new stadium’s name might be brash and the truly impressive surroundings unrecognisable but it’s surely no small thing that the new home of our national football and rugby is still tucked in where the river meets the railway track, meaning that the address remains one of the most evocative in Irish and indeed world sport.
Invited inside by those TV cameras for a sneak preview a week before yesterday’s official media tour and ceremonial opening, the empty stadium left me grasping for superlatives but also acutely conscious that it was, well, empty.
Like a seaside town in winter, there’s always something eerie and just not quite right about a deserted football ground. Fantastic architecture stands for nought without heaving crowds to give it life. And crowds are only animated if they have something to get excited about. In short, the Aviva Stadium is a magnificent thing but it will only truly work as a theatre of dreams if the boys in green do honour to the stage.
For proof, you don’t have to look much further than north across the Liffey where Croke Park seemed to grow even bigger as the venue for that unforgettable Six Nations game against England but was then quickly cut down to size when the round ball men took their turn.
The dismal doldrums of the Steve Staunton era meant that only at the 11th hour did Croke Park really feel like a proper home to Irish football. And that feeling lasted no longer than the quick-fire three minutes which elapsed between Sean St Ledger’s goal and Alberto Gilardino’s equaliser in the World Cup qualifier against Italy, soccer’s penultimate outing at GAA headquarters.
As someone said at the time, for three minutes the recession was over. And, sure enough, with the whole stadium rocking and not a single bum on a seat, for those giddy 180 seconds Croker evoked the most golden of days at Lansdowne Road, like those 1990 World Cup qualifiers when the old place was thronged, the singing deafening and the team, with every new win, irresistibly bound for unprecedented glory.
The 1-0 victory over Spain was emblematic in every way, the grass coarse, the pitch bumpy, the crowd demented, the visiting aristocrats ruffled and the Irish as committed and rugged as only they could be under Jack Charlton. Little wonder a key qualifying game was decided in the home team’s favour by an ugly OG. Did we care? Did we hell. Que sera, sera, we were going – in due course – to I-tal-ee.
But even though we didn’t realise it at the time, the seeds of the Aviva Stadium were already being sown. The game against Spain, lest we forget, came so soon after the Hillsborough disaster that John Aldridge, who’d stood on the Kop as a boy, was still too traumatised to play.
In due course, the Taylor Report would usher in the era of the all-seater stadium with what has been lost in terms of atmosphere replaced by levels of comfort and security which have utterly transformed the experience of attending a football match.
But, however sophisticated the surroundings, the basics remain the same: two teams, one winner and supporters who will be left either ecstatic or enraged.
The ghosts of Lansdowne Road will be watching closely as the Aviva Stadium awaits its real destiny.
- Contact: liammackey@hotmail.com
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