U2 will be playing into the Havelock Square end of the Lansdowne Road ground before a total of 80,000 fans tonight and tomorrow night in their latest homecoming concerts. They will thus be defending the goal which Ray Houghton missed narrowly with a late header against Lithuania earlier this month when they kick off at 9 p.m.
The band will be also playing under a giant yellow arch, 150 feet high by about 70 feet wide, (photographed, above, during construction yesterday by Frank Miller), though some cynics remarked that Houghton could not even have scored through that.
The sound system for the weekend's two concerts will pump a million watts of sound into the Dublin 4 night air. But conscious of the local opposition that led to a short-lived High Court ban on the shows last month, organisers insist that sophisticated sound dispersal will minimise the effect on nearby residents.
The stage is one of two on which the band alternates but available technology means there is still only one set of band members, and these arrived in Dublin yesterday after a concert in Leeds.
As is the wont of the band's spokespeople, tour director Jake Kennedy rattled forth some more impressive statistics. U2 are not the sort of rock group to drive a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool, if they can drive 75 articulated trucks with 500 tonnes of equipment and a giant plastic lemon in instead. A 300-strong crew was working throughout the night to set up the 120-foot high video screen and lay the 22 miles of cable needed for the concerts.
:quality(70)/s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/irishtimes/d408b07e-0ff8-4a26-8878-74aec64dccc4.png)