Lightning fails to spark send-off

Seven years ago, Damian Duff sat down for a chat with thi snewspaper and spoke about how you could feel Lansdowne Road’s creaky old bones shaking from the toilets in the dressing-room as the DART thundered through the West Stand.

“It might be a kip,” he said at the time, “but it’s our kip.”

Duffer must have yearned for the old Lansdowne last night in the Puskas Ferenc Stadion, a ground that looks every one of its 58 years and more and one that has hosted everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Steven Spielberg and the Mighty Magyars of the 1950s.