For grandeur of vision see new Wembley

Locker Room: The British, for all their annoying little faults (bit twee, can't handle their drink, tendency to invade their neighbours) certainly handle legacy better than anyone else.

We don't do legacy or posterity over here. Now that the tide of obscene wealth we all attempted to paddle in over the last decade has gone out, what are we left with on this snot-hued little island? A great health service? The triumph of a top-class education system? Some wonderful, state-of-the-art, landmark buildings? Nah. Not on your nelly.

We have Croke Park, beloved all right but not monumental, not possessed of any detail of structure or whimsy making it instantly iconic. The very name is freighted with history, of course, and since the doors opened people say nice things and we know Croker certainly meets the criteria of a great stadium. But, but, but . . .

When it rains just about everyone gets wet and the Hill 16 end at the old Nally Stand side with its unfinished look and its growing assortment of higgledy-piggledy grey structures has the scruffy look of a teenager's bedroom. Not complaining. Just saying.

The difficulty with stadiums lies in the imperatives. Making them look significantly different from each other on the inside is difficult. Perforce if you want to wrap something around a rectangular playing area the shape is roughly the same.

The demand for a prawn-sandwich-brigade level and two-million retail outlets determines a lot of what else we see. The lowest level of almost any modern stadium slopes gently away from the pitch so the corporate and premium levels above can hang out over it and still there will be plenty of concourse space for people to mingle and drink and buy stuff. So the genius is usually in the external detail.

We don't get stadia (Dortmund is an exception) these days that feature massive cliff faces of humanity looming sheer and daunting over the players. Wembley even when full on Saturday with almost 90,000 people in it wasn't raucous or intimidating, and it was hard to know which had the more soporific affect, the crowd's amiable listlessness on the game or the game's sunkissed languor on the crowd.

Up close and from the outside, the new stadium looks, as many people said on Saturday, like an airport terminal. What makes it great though is the arch. The great white arch looming 115 metres over the roof of the building is a feature which immediately puts to bed any nostalgia for the dumpling-like old twin towers.

The old Wembley was disappointing to happen upon. Forced along with everyone I knew to emigrate back in the 80s, I lived near the stadium and worked in it occasionally. I remember a couple of us not long after we moved into the area literally going in search of the stadium, which for all its capacity and history didn't exactly loom over the environs.

We found it hidden away behind the old conference centre and barely visible above Wembley Arena. It was dowdy. And later, when, employed there as the menials' menial, you sneaked out on to the pitch at lunchtime the stands seemed a million miles away.

On Saturday, as you came from Heathrow and turned on to the North Circular past the dull, eternal rows of houses which characterise that patch of London, the great arch above the new Wembley Stadium quickly insinuated itself into the consciousness, not so much dominating the skyline as complementing it, a curious white fragment of human ingenuity trespassing high on to the blue horizon.

The arch makes a statement about a great sporting city, a country prepared to back its love of sport up with something a little more than a louche reputation for being boozy event junkies.

Wembley in the end cost £793 million to rebuild (the original Empire Stadium, as it was known, cost £750,000 to build). The dowdy old stations at Wembley Central and Wembley Park have been done up too and the whole thing was supposed to be open for business back in 2003.

I'm not sure that we as a nation would ever recover from such a splurge. It would turn brother against brother, father against son and so on. We did Croke Park up piecemeal, getting the money in for one bit and then moving on while staying open for business. And still you get people in the GAA and outside the GAA moaning about it. And you get jokers like John O'Donoghue carrying on as if he personally gave his communion money to help build the thing and thus has a right to tell the GAA when it should shut up about certain matters he has made a pig's ear of.

And even though we have a national lottery set up for precisely such projects, a fund pillaged over the years to pay for health services in this our time of plenty, you get the virtuoso whingers performing the saddest songs ever written about the fragment of public money which went into building a stadium for our greatest living cultural asset, Gaelic games.

In London they just tore down the old Wembley and chucked up the monumental new structure and nobody claimed that because there is a spanking new stadium in Wembley there must surely be a badly run A&E service out at Northwick Park Hospital.

They do legacy well, the Brits, and we for all our claims to be mossed over with history don't really do it at all. London, you have to concede, is a living museum of the ages and it is organic too. From the Blair years, whatever they represented, there will be the Millennium Dome, the London Eye, the Gherkin and Wembley and whatever massive changes the Olympic Games bring over the next half decade. That's just London. There was no meanness of vision there, never has been.

Saturday's cup final was a poor game but it was a fine occasion. For a while we sat outside in the sun reminiscing about the old days living here when London took so many of us in and absorbed us uncomplainingly. We sat and looked at the new Wembley and the fans treacling around the circumference gazing up in wonder. We thought back to the mean, crabby, uninspired election campaign we've sat through for the past few weeks and couldn't but envy the Brits the generosity of their ambition, their capacity to dream big dreams and to master grand designs.

Then we whinged about the price of a Wembley burger. We're small people made for a small country really!

FREE ADVERTISEMENT! Back in the day perhaps the two greatest GAA schools in this city were a few pucks of the ball away form each other. Joey's in Fairview and Ardscoil Rís on Griffith Avenue remain the only Dublin schools (amazingly) to have won the All-Ireland colleges football title. Besides a fantastic rivalry, now like Joey's, as a GAA force in decline, the schools gave huge amounts to Dublin GAA.

And within the schools there were men who gave huge amounts. Next Saturday at 5pm in St Vincent's GAA club, two such men - the great Brendan Leahy of Joey's and JJ Murphy of Ardscoil - will be honoured when teams of past pupils from both schools play a game for a trophy named after two great coaches and teachers.

Appearances from luminaries like Tommy Conroy and Eamon Heery (to name but two) are promised in the blue and gold of the Joey's galacticos. Whatever ragballs Ardscoil can muster will duly turn out for them. Drinks and music on the bar afterwards.

Unmissable, the most fun grown men can have with their clothes on, etc.