We need some time apart
Thursday, November 15, 2012
By Brendan O’Brien
It passed most people by at the time, but apparently Ray Davies was in Dublin a few weeks back.
Davies was the lead singer and chief songwriter with The Kinks during the Swinging Sixties and the geezer who climbed out of the black cab during the closing ceremony at the London Olympics to serenade his home town with his classic number ‘Waterloo Sunset’
Anyway, for some strange reason known to very few people, poor old Ray was booked to play at the O2 which, despite the fact that it was set up in what the marketing mooks like to call its ‘intimate venue’ format, seemed an odd choice long before he flew in just over three weeks ago.
Vicar Street and the old Grand Canal Theatre are the usual Dublin haunts for the man from Muswell Hill and tickets have rarely been hard to find so, sure enough, when he made his entrance at the O2 it was to an arena splattered with empty seats and ringing to the odd, embarrassed cough.
“Hello Dublin,” he said. “I do love these intimate gigs.”
Hats off to his sense of humour but one hopes there was someone there who has been to Lansdowne Road in recent times to gee him up and tell the guy who wrote classics like ‘Lola’ and ‘All Day And All of the Night’ that this was a pretty common occurrence in the capital these days.
Davies, at least, could be guaranteed to provide some entertainment. Ireland v Greece — tagline: all that’s missing is a bailout! — was never going to get the collective juices flowing after a year that might have been fantastic for Marco Tardelli but was pretty darn forgettable for everyone else who cares for the national team.
And, nothing against our Greek guests last night, but Giovanni Trapattoni summed it up best when he remarked that “the team is their biggest star” in his address to those hardcore fans who deigned to turn up and fork out an extra fiver for the match programme.
To be fair, it wasn’t bad as these things go. Winter took the day off and Ireland even managed 20 minutes of pretty passing and no little pressing before Greece acclimatised and decided the evening would pass in far more congenial fashion if they got on the ball and did a bit of work themselves.
Pretty soon, it was strangulation by triangulation all over again with Ireland finding themselves bypassed by the opposition’s geometry but there were seeds of hope sown in the sight of guys like James McClean, Seamus Coleman and James McCarthy taking lead roles and Ciaran Clark and Wes Hoolahan finally returning to the fold.
Still, it’s hard to think that an attendance which looked to be around 17,000 would have been all that greater had Trapattoni named all of the above as well as Stephen Ireland and Andy Reid in the starting XI and it is hard not to think that the FAI hoisted themselves on their own petard.
It is on nights like this that thoughts turn inevitably to the 10-year deal agreed between the FAI, the IRFU and Aviva back in 2008, part of which stipulated that all senior internationals in both codes would be played at the Ballsbridge venue for the duration of the partnership.
Business may be business, and sporting organisations can hardly be blamed for attempting to maximise their income streams, but the inability to take a game like this to Thomond Park — as they did for the visits of Australia and South Africa before Lansdowne’s facelift was complete — represents a needlessly conceded own goal.
As Declan Kidney’s boys will no doubt find on Saturday when they face Fiji in an uncapped fixture, Thomond offers no guarantee of a full house despite its smaller capacity but that is due more to the sterility of both representative sides in recent years and the fact we now see far too much of them.
Last night’s fixture was the footballers’ 26th inside the last two calendar years, almost half of which (12) were friendlies, but breathing space is imminent after Fifa’s decision last March to adopt a new international match calendar from 2015 on which will reduce that number by eight over a 24-month period.
If last night’s crowd is anything to go by, they won’t be missed.
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