Mixed emotions for faithful as soccer nears end of the Road

SOCCER/Farewell to Lansdowne: Tom Humphries recalls the good, bad and ugly of Irish soccer's relationship with Lansdowne Road

It finishes with a whimper really. Ireland's soccer history at Lansdowne Road, or Fortress Lansdowne, as we used to call the place in happier days, ends with maybe the last banker fixture available to us - a game with San Marino. As hosts to the smallest country or jurisdiction participating in European football competitions, we'll go out (surely) with a consoling win. It's hardly a carnival though.

The grimy old place will scarcely be missed except perversely for its grime. As Damien Duff mused recently, Lansdowne Road was about the last international venue in the world where the pampered modern player might feel discomfited. The sparse facilities, the angular stands, the chill breeze, the trains rattling along over the dressingrooms. The place's deficiencies became our strength particularly in the golden years when our style was such that we didn't need a surface to play the ball on.

We never got the clinching points for a tournament qualification at Lansdowne Road. It was the last resting place for a few Irish management careers and the old precinct heard some shameful booing and some awful silences at times. Never did soccer lay down a long passionate history there, nothing like that associated with Dalymount and its intimate confines.

"The atmosphere in Dalymount was better," says John Giles, who played in the first modern game staged in Lansdowne, a 2-1 defeat to Italy in 1971. "The crowd was so close, the atmosphere was great, the crowd were very, very close. That was a special atmosphere. A lot of lads from my day would have grown up with Dalymount. It was the place, it was our place and Lansdowne was the rugby ground. We grew up watching the matches in Dalymount."

Giles's successor as Irish manager, Eoin Hand, agrees.

"The preference was Dalymount, we always felt we were playing in the home of soccer. It was our place. Everywhere I went on the pitch there when I was playing were faces I knew watching and voices I knew shouting. My career went between the two places. Now the old Lansdowne is done with it's move-on time."

Lansdowne ushered us from the age of hope through to the age of expectation. There were good times there but nothing like Givens's hat-trick against Russia in 1974, the Giles debut against Sweden in 1959 or the defeat of West Germany in 1956.

In Lansdowne for soccer there were no great debates about apartheid, about who would play there and who wouldn't. There were some good nights but always accompanied by the lingering sense of tenancy and impermanence. The death of terracing and the triumph of the prawn-sandwich-eaters robbed Irish soccer of a chunk of match-day passion. And of course there was the shame of the place having hosted the abandoned international with England in 1995.

Oftentimes the pitch resembled an especially arid part of the Gobi desert and again perversely when the IRFU spent €400,000 making things nice in 2002 we seemed to miss that which made Lansdowne different.

For journalists, covering midweek soccer internationals meant until comparatively recently an ongoing war with the stadium's over-zealous security people, who insisted on locking up and switching off all lights at 10 o'clock. It was common when finishing speaking with a copytaker for a journalist to ask that his love for his family be recorded before shuffling cautiously out through the pitch blackness to negotiate the vast concrete stairwells and fumble for an exit somewhere.

The powers-that-be never quite got the hang of players' press conferences after games. Journalists spoiled at away games would gather in Lansdowne in a little corridor full of vents and ducts and maintenance gear and wait for the Irish players, who with a few beloved exceptions (come back, Cas and Niall) would gallop through like the agitated bulls of Pamplona grunting and shaking their heads. And then there would be Ian Harte saying, "Eh, no thanks, lads," as if he had been offered a free amputation.

Still, it was fascinating to travel to grounds in places like Tehran, Tirana and Skopje and to not find worse media facilities. It meant never being disappointed.

There was a time when players and ordinary mortals drank in the little pavilion at the Lansdowne Road end after matches and it was actually possible on a good night to slip in and engage the odd player in real conversation. In latter years Lansdowne has become ghostly after matches.

Eoin Hand remembers in the aftermath of the French game in 1981 being with Terry Conroy as the flush of success washed over the city. "I said to Terry, 'Where can we go to get out of here for a bit of peace and quiet?' There were just crazy celebrations going on all around. We wound up going out to Leixlip to the Hitching Post, thinking we'd get a quiet corner. As soon as we walked in I was grabbed and this gang started giving me the bumps. On and on, hitting the ceiling, nearly getting sick. That was the quiet night. It was bigger than we thought back then."

The irony was just 25,000 turned up on the first night the FAI opened the shop for business in 1971 with the defeat to Italy. It was a crowd Dalymount could have accommodated, but ominously for Pisser Dignam's field, the gate receipts were better at Lansdowne. Yet it would be six years before the FAI signed a formal leasing agreement for internationals. (Incidentally Waterford had played home European games at Lansdowne against Manchester United and Celtic in 1968 and 1970 respectively.)

It's hard to know when the charm and novelty of Lansdowne ended. It's dilapidation became an irritation and the increased incidence of booing and impatience from the stands marked the dawning of a different era.

Maybe it ended in 1995 with the England riots and their choreographed triumph of jackbooted ugliness; maybe years later on that Wednesday night which marked the end of Mick McCarthy. Remember the shrill booing which greeted the full-time whistle, the chants of 'Keano, Keano, Keano', the peevishness of McCarthy's press conference words - all these things which were the entitlement of their authors but were unbecoming nevertheless. Irish soccer had lost its way badly.

There were great days and sad days; at times they coincided. The great rush of excitement of the late 80s under Jack Charlton are still blighted somewhat by the memory of Liam Brady being hauled off by Charlton after 35 minutes in that friendly against West Germany in September 1989. It was the day Frank Stapleton equalled Don Givens's old Irish scoring record and it was filled with hope. Yet we knew in the new era of pragmatism and success the silky genius of Liam Brady had as little place as lovely old Dalymount had. Everything moves on, ceaselessly.