A slice of wonder to illuminate Croker

Locker Room:From the attic these days you can see the floodlights being tested in Croker. It's lovely to look out across the sharp-angled roofs of Marino and see a great horseshoe of light beckoning in the gloaming of a late afternoon. The lights twinkle in elegant little crescents around the roof of the stadium, and behind Hill 16, so far as we can see, there is an appealingly quirky pylon which looks like it was designed by some guys with ponytails.

Whatever your position on the arrival of soccer at the gates of Gaeldom, we should be thankful for the additions to Croke Park's character and for the floodlit era which the arrival of floodlighting has ushered in.

(Of course if soccer fans are to continue to douse themselves in petrol and then play with matches when disappointed, the Steve Staunton/John Delaney era may, ironically, make Croker's floodlights redundant as the games are played under the light of immolating fans.)

The floodlights add a final patina of glamour to the new Croke Park. For anyone who regularly passes through British or European cities by train or by motorway, the inner fan is immediately awoken as soon as you spot the comforting silhouettes of the floodlight pylons looming over the football ground like conferring swans.

This is Wolverhampton and that must be Molineux. Birmingham, and over there you can see St Andrews. And so on. For a long time there was a rivalry of boasting among fans of Leeds United and Manchester City (neither of whom had much else about which to boast) as to which club had the tallest floodlights in English league football.

I don't know the answer to that, but I notice that the advent of the cookie cutter, all-enclosed stadium has meant that the great towering pylons are an increasingly rare sight, a loss to the character of sporting cities. Stadiums now just fringe their roofs with floodlights, and while that's a plainly pragmatic approach, football has lost a little of its beauty. Gone are the great angular Archibald Leitch stands surrounding a pitch presided over by four centurion pylons.

I'm in the habit, while driving down Clonliffe Road, of putting down the mobile phone and leaving the naggin of whiskey back into the glove compartment so I can catch glimpses of the GAA's cathedral, but since the addition of the lights my driving has become dangerous as I crane my neck this way and that to admire the place.

These days you have to go to eastern Europe to see the greatest floodlights. Stadiums like the Kirov in St Petersburg and the Puskas in Budapest have massive clusters of lights attached to stout pylons. They don't stretch lankily into the sky, there to be topped with bulbs, but stand strong and squat on a vantage point laden with lights, so that when in operation it looks as if the entire construction is made of light.

Standing gazing at these wonders is like sitting in a theatre before the stage is lit. Juices of anticipation just start flowing in your stomach. You want to see the dramas they create, the shadows they throw, how they look set against a bruised night sky; you want to gauge the rain against them, to gaze at the lights till the downpour becomes an iridescent torrent and you see what way the wind is transporting each drop. You want to stand a mile away on a rooftop and see what sort of canopy of brightness these immense structures throw up.

At the furthest point that you can detect the floodlights, can you still hear the roaring of a full house?

Croke Park adds a slice of all that wonder to its menu from February.

With the introduction of floodlighting at so many club grounds in the GAA, there's a danger, I suppose, that sheer familiarity will dim the glamour from illumination. If you grew up in the era of the much lamented Sportsnight programme on the BBC on Wednesday nights, however, I reckon that's impossible: the jaunty signature tune, the floodlight logo and the feline grin of Harry Carpenter or, later, Des Lynham often presaged a night of well-packaged highlights from oddly fluorescent swards across Europe. Leeds v Hadjuk Split, and then a look at Nottm Forest on their trip to Sparta Prague.

The first drama played out under Croke Park's floodlighting will be the National Football League game between Dublin and Tyrone. This is an event freighted already with great expectation. Tyrone have more in them than last summer showed. Dublin may have more in them. They may have as much again. Losing to Mayo may prove to be a watershed.

How do you ask players to submit yet again to the happy clappy theatrics of hugging and huddling and marching arm-in-arm towards the Hill when they have thrown away a seven-point second-half lead in front of a silent and shockingly unsupportive blue terrace, when every decision the line made went wrong and when Mayo were exposed a few weeks later as having easy-to-tear perforations in all their key areas.

Dublin will come out in February in their smart new jerseys knowing they need three or four new players in the first 15 and maybe nine or 10 rookies in the greater panel if they are to put an edge on their hunger.

They'll come out too knowing that Tyrone won't have forgotten about that overhyped business which came to be known as the Battle of Omagh. Tyrone, as much as Dublin, will want to use this league as a platform.

There'll be more of an edge to this particular first round league game than any in recent memory. The GAA are charging just €15 in, which is a bargain basement offer for the chance to be there on such a night.

Whatever it is that artificial light confers on winter league games, it removes a lot of the drudge from them. They make for better spectacle and better TV. Croke Park bathed in artificial light for the first time will be a thrill.

Yet curiously among an embittered rump of Dublin support there has been an amusing outbreak of mumbling and grumbling about the fixture. Many are the fat lower lips which are still in pout mode over the Dubs being urged to get out of the pub a little quicker and into Croker on time so that matches can start as scheduled. This seems a small courtesy to ask for, not least on behalf of the teams who time their build-up in the warm-up areas under the Hogan right down to the minute and who are then asked to go and sit down again because there's a good number of Dubs still hunkered over creamy ones who can't make it yet. Thank you for understanding.

There is upset too at the chastisement which followed the ludicrous scenes during the closing stages of the Leinster final when a goodly number of the summertime yahoos who become professional Dubs for the summer threatened the game with abandonment as they spilled deliriously onto the pitch celebrating Dublin's, uhm, historic 46th title. These incursions weren't comparable with the pitch invasions which generally follow big games in Croker for two reasons: winning Leinster was never going to be anything but a stepping stone for Dublin, and the invaders looked for the most part as if they didn't know where they were let alone what they were celebrating.

Yet it is not uncommon to hear Dublin supporters whingeing these days that they are being "used" on February 3rd when their team plays in Croker. Got given out to during the summer, and now?

Well, now we have to go to see a match under floodlights. It's compulsory apparently. All 50,000 Dubs who would normally attend games in Parnell Park in February are being frogmarched at gunpoint down to Croker where they will be relieved of €15 and subjected to stern fógraí over the PA.

Wake up lads! January is the most oppressively miserable and barren of months. February brings liberation! There is always something special about a floodlit fixture, be it in Tolka Park or the Hrazdan Stadion in Armenia. Dublin and Tyrone is scented with the intense recent rivalry between the counties and stands as the gateway to a new era. I look out the window at Croker's new lights winking and beckoning, and the next few barren sporting weeks can't pass quickly enough.

Something fresh, something new.

To paraphrase Field of Dreams, switch them on and they will come.