SIDELINE CUT:The popular profile Irish rugby built up patiently and steadily over the past decade can quickly disappear if things aren't managed correctly

WHOEVER thought that empty seats in a stadium could look so shocking? We see them on Match of the Dayevery Saturday when the humdrum clubs of the Premier League get their 420 seconds on television. But this was Ireland playing in South Africa in what was supposed to have been a long-awaited homecoming to Lansdowne Road. The people stayed away in their thousands and, with due respect to Samoa, they will do the same this afternoon.

All of those empty seats gave a lot of people the shivers for reasons that had little to do with rugby. It was like wandering into a parallel universe where Irish rugby had lost everything it worked hard to create.

Just like that.

The Irish Rugby Football Union were rightly lambasted over their ticketing policy for these November internationals and are going to have to engage in a swift and imaginative reappraisal of their policy with their clubs and their public. Irish rugby has gone through a phenomenal decade. The success of the Irish team – and the panache with which they sometimes played the game – mirrored the national mood through a fast, loud, moneyed decade. It has been an exceptional time for the provinces also.

Ulster started the ball rolling, Munster rugby went through a similar revolution in popularity and Leinster came up with the ultimate rebuke to the old slur that they were more style than substance by winning the European Cup two years ago.

The IRFU’s sometimes stormy relationship with Connacht was the one discordant note throughout an incredibly assured decade for the sport. And even though Connacht’s future remains in its not-quite-assured state, they offered another example of their resilience and progress in their thrilling defeat of Samoa on Tuesday evening.

Much of the talk after that match was about last Saturday’s international. One interesting explanation for the dismal Irish first-half performance was that the players were stunned when they ran out onto the field to find the place half-empty.

There is no doubt it must have been an incredibly deflating moment for the team. These are players who have become accustomed to playing in front of packed and raucous galleries at both club and international level. In return, they always played beyond the acceptable boundaries of professionalism, applying the lion-hearted spirit of the amateur era to the superior fitness and technique they attained through the professional set-up.

The best players became celebrated figures, appearing on billboards, on talk shows, on bookshelves. And they brought a lot of joy and pride to many people. It is almost forgotten that the late Mick Doyle described Ireland’s 1993 victory over England as “an 80-minute rugby orgasm”. It was, of course, a wildly juvenile way to describe a match but Doyle couldn’t think of anything else because his heart was screaming with the sheer joy of having watched something so unlikely. Ireland winning a rugby match was once that rare.

That all changed in the last decade, at first slowly and then in a rush.

The day of transformation may have been when Brian O’Driscoll scored three tries in Paris in 2000. He made it seem no big deal, with the baggy jersey that seemed a size too large for him and he did these little signs with his hands afterwards which were eccentric and indecipherable – the kind of thing a French back would have done.

Even then, following rugby had become a vogue pursuit and that was in the beginning. In the following years, the Saturday kick-offs featuring big Munster, Leinster or Ireland games were a bonanza for the pubs. The team shirts became fashion items. Tag rugby became a suburban phenomenon.

Ross O’Carroll Kelly, the fabulous creation of Paul Howard, turned his squandered rugby adolescence into the material that has made him the most popular brand name in Irish fiction. Few Irish people can’t quote a few lines from the R O’CK lexicon and even though it is most eagerly consumed by the very people it originally set out to pillory, the edge remains.

Irish rugby became more than a sport, it became a popular cultural fad and it all culminated on that surreal day in Croke Park in 2007, when Ireland beat a weakened England team and in doing so managed to make right all the wrongs of Bloody Sunday. Or so that fiction went. But they were fast times and beneath all the hoopla and the excuse to go out and party, they contained moments of spellbinding rugby.

And something about last Saturday seemed to signal the end. The empty seats and the desperate efforts of the stewards to bring those present down towards the front to make the production look a bit more presentable were just the most obvious symbol of that. But there was a terrible flatness to the evening.

Ronan O’Gara’s appearance for the 100th time in an Irish shirt was another reminder that time is finite for that illustrious generation of players. And O’Gara’s bloody-minded effort to make magic out of a miserable occasion hinted at the fact that once they leave they may prove irreplaceable. This is not to suggest Irish rugby has fallen off the face of the earth. Next week’s game against the All Blacks should produce an instant return to the high times, with a ferocious green effort against prized opposition and the chance for another illustrious November scalp.

But it seems inevitable that these autumn internationals have lost much of their original glamour and that they are, when push comes to shove, just challenges matches that have generated a lot of revenue. If the Irish team is going well in the Six Nations, the demand for tickets will be as strong as ever.

Still, it is inevitable that Irish rugby will not always be able to field the teams it has done for the last decade. If Irish rugby has gone through a boom, then recent bitter experience provides plenty of evidence of the cyclical alternative. Saturday’s match against South Africa offered a terrifying glimpse of the ghostly possibilities for Irish rugby in the years to come. The popular profile Irish rugby built up patiently and steadily can quickly disappear. When the teams win less, when they are no longer fashionable, the fan base diminishes.

People are going to go to see Ireland play the All Blacks next week, but they are grumbling about it. From now on you can bet that Irish sports fans are going to be more discerning about how and where they spend their money. The challenge for those in the boardrooms of the IRFU (and the FAI) is to rethink the gate receipts that were probably projected when Irish people spent money like there was no tomorrow. They are going to have to act with courage and imagination.

They are going to have to work to keep their fan base. Lower the prices. Treat fans like customers. Maybe play a friendly international at Ravenhill or Thomond Park. As Gerry Thornley rightly suggested in these pages on Tuesday, if a match is clearly not going to sell out, then give the tickets away to charities and schools. And do more than that; run buses for them, give them a tour of the stadium, have some youngsters meet the players. The goodwill created by small gestures will eclipse the smartest advertising campaigns.

What was it the Englishman said about the difference between English and Irish rugby? That in England the situation is always serious but never critical while in Ireland it is always critical but never serious. Those involved with Irish rugby worked too hard to lose that disparaging tag to let it all just slip away.