A warning from the future at Lansdowne Road

Sport has got it badly wrong in the new reality where people are going to count every cent, and the era of building big stadia, and expecting to charge high prices to fill them, is over.

I SPENT an idle hour at the weekend watching bedraggled ranks of teenagers in orange and pink hair queuing in the rain outside Dublin’s O2 Arena.

The attraction at The Point was Paramore, a group about which I know little apart from the fact (and I am still trying to fathom why I know even this) that their music was chosen to lead off the hugely successful Twilight film, a spin-off from the vampire romance novels which attract the same fierce devotion from followers as once did Star Trek and Twin Peaks.