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Hmmmm
Lansdowne stands as fitting monument to rugby's snobs
By Kevin Myers
Tuesday November 25 2008
Only one thing is really significant from Saturday's sour and tawdry little affair in Croke Park: it is 68,352. This is how many people chose, on a grey November day, to watch Ireland play an unglamorous country which is marooned outside the two great annual world rugby contests.
Which is 18,352 more than the new Lansdowne Road stadium will accommodate. What kind of insanity is this? The IRFU is deliberately building a venue whose capacity is nearly 20,000 short of the known market demand for a visit of the Manchester City of the rugby world, never mind when rugby's commercial equivalent of Manchester United and Chelsea __ England, France, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand __ come to town.
Only an organisation apparently immune to the moral and fiscal rigour imposed by the bottom line would indulge in such a fanciful and f**less project. The real purpose of the new stadium is not to satisfy the demand to see the matches, nor to generate funds which could help promote the game across the country, but instead to satisfy rugby's obsessions with being a middle-class sport played in middle-class areas by middle-class boys.
This is not rugby: it is smugby, a grotesque indulgence in athletic snobbery, and at the expense of the welfare of the sport itself. It used to be said __ and indeed, I said it myself often enough __ the GAA was the most divisive sporting organisation in Ireland. Not any more. It is now vigorous, generous, far-seeing, and commercially-minded.
In Croke Park, it has built one of the most attractive and exciting stadiums in Europe. With a bit of willpower, the IRFU, and its poor little kinsman, the FAI, could have done a major and hugely profitable deal with the GAA, especially since the latter needs to have more sellout occasions to defray the enormous running costs of Croke Park.
Instead, the lords of irfu are going their own way.
It was one thing for the dauphins of Dublin 4 to go over to the northside for the occasional visit, a fraught anthropological jaunt into Balubaland of Dublin 7 where the natives eat their young, deep-fried, and bath but annually: quite another for the Tara Palmer-Tomkinson of sport to find herself co-habiting with the Royle family for the rest of her life.
So the Croke Park option became not a permanent and sensible choice for all concerned, but a brief and disagreeable exile for rugby, in which the southsiders crossing O'Connell Bridge (perhaps for the first time) were given nose-pegs, maps, a language guide and SAS survival manuals.
Meanwhile, a replacement stadium barely larger than the old one is being built in Lansdowne Road. Money for this monumental idiocy was extracted from the Ahern government __ whose weak, inept, and chicanery-filled policies towards stadium creation in Dublin have created a financially toxic legacy, whose true price will only be seen in the coming decades.
On the strength of an IRFU promise that the new Lansdowne Road development would cost just €365m, the Government assented to it, agreeing to provide €191m __ 52pc of the capital cost. But the irfu had not been 100pc kosher when it presented its projections, for these did not cover key elements to the stadium, such as underground carparking, catering, air-conditioning and pitchside television screens.
The stadium's actual cost is now at least €466m __ 28pc higher than the one which was the basis for the Government giving the go-ahead. At nearly €500m, this new stadium will certainly be a pricey palace with which to cosset the class prejudices of the irfu __ but will it be economically viable?
It certainly makes no economic sense. For each of the six major matches in a rugby season __ two in the autumn, and three in the international championship __ capacity will, on average, be about 25,000 below known demand. That is, 125,000 potential paying-customers paying sweet shag-all.
At an average of €50 a ticket, that's €6.25m that the IRFU is rejecting per rugby season while outside the ground the ticket touts will be doing a roaring trade. And among the locked-out will be the great mass of true rugby supporters, who weekly muddy their feet traipsing after the AIB League. The foregoing figures, naturally, don't include the lost revenue of the FAI, the irfu's ragged orphan-cousin, with a furry gobstopper in his pocket, holes in his shoes, and a woebegone look on his smutty, urchin face.
No doubt the Lansdowne Road project is a triumph for the irfu's wayward subconscious, even as the irfu decision-makers are sure they're doing their best for the game.
Either way, it's no coincidence Ireland is the only country of the old five-nation championship never to have won the Grand Slam in over 60 years. It's no coincidence that rugby in the virtually autonomous province of Munster, with its class-less passion and its genuine devotion to the sport, is so often triumphant in Europe.
And finally, it cannot be coincidental that the supporters of Leinster, which is the provincial quintessence of irfu class consciousness, winsomely flute from the stands: "Allez les bleus." Allez les bleus, my arse.
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. And it'll be worse for Irish games at the new "improved"Lansdowne Road.
