Solid grounds for Lansdowne's survival

SIDELINE CUT/Keith Duggan: With all the world's great sporting theatres past and present - the Boston Garden, Old Trafford, Yankee Stadium, Lisbon's Stadium of Light, Ballyshannon's Mercy Hall, Candlestick Park, Croke Park, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field, Wembley, Madison Square Garden, Wimbledon, Parc des Princes, Augusta, Imola, etc. - there is a single common denominator.

All these venues possess the capability to give thousands of people absolute shivers of excitement and become, over time, as strongly associated with the sporting events they host as the athletes participating in them.

In Ireland, the stadium that possesses the strongest potion of such rarefied magic is also the place that is most frequently derided. It has long been fashionable for the visiting Six Nations coterie to sniff and moan about the dilapidated state of Lansdowne Road. A number of rugby hacks are particularly disdainful of the old ground and they thread gingerly about its confines as if concerned for the leatherwork on their loafers. Lansdowne Road is generally called a "kip" in print at least once a season. And perhaps (just for the record) it is a kip but, wow, is it a glorious kip, a dive that ought to have a preservation order placed on it. It has been at its best twice in the last year, for the frankly absurd 10-man Irish victory against Holland in the match that defined the Mick McCarthy era and weeks later for the temporary humility inflicted on Clive Woodward's brilliant and soulless interpretation of English rugby.

To be at Lansdowne Road for those transcendent sporting acts was a joy because the ground, which bottles the noise generated like the old roman coliseums and is structured so the crowd tower over and intimidate the visitors, is so involving.

People lost themselves at those games. But even on more prosaic occasions, Lansdowne Road is a great sporting venue. It lends itself equally to frosty nights, with the stands dark and princely above Dublin's low-lying city lights, or balmy mid-June afternoon encounters, when the queues for concession stands are sweltering and interminable.

Even Lansdowne's hindrances have charm. The rattling Dart is a wonderful incidental feature, reminiscent of the commuter carriages that run above Gaelic Park in the Bronx and of the famous train that used to stop on the upper level of the Boston Garden, the beloved old shambles of a building that was torn down in 1995.

After Ireland's home friendly against Russia last month, visiting Japanese journalists anxiously looked about them and quickly grew alarmed at the vague rumbling of the passing train, which to the untutored ear sounds exactly like a decrepit stadium in the initial throes of collapse. They stood in polite, bespectacled terror while the rest of the 200-strong press corps wrestled for any one of the five packets of sandwiches that are made available on international match days.

Later, the same visitors were to be seen battling in utter astonishment through the seas of out-going crowds in order to make their way to the press pavilion. Having arrived at the enclosure half an hour later they were, doubtless, more than a little surprised when the lights inexplicably went out, greeted with a wry cheer of "wey-hey" from regular inhabitants used to spooks in the wiring.

I think these little quirks of inconvenience just enhance Lansdowne Road. It is brilliant, for example, that after games, people who wait long enough around the back of the stand get to see (and maybe even brush against) superstars like Roy Keane and Ruud van Nistlerooy or whoever the visiting country's most sexy commodity happens to be. This exercise is also good for the superstars, particularly those of the soccer world, who are too well shielded from the common folk who make them what they are.

Also, the announcer often sounds that he is operating not so much through a state-of-the-art surround-sound system as a borrowed megaphone. And ever wonder why soccer players are so small? It's so that after their playing days end, they can squeeze into the tiny commentary booths that appear on Lansdowne Road's upper stand.

The venue is definitely no Twickenham. And thank God for that. Impressive as the English fortress looks from a distance, it is a vacuous monolith in which to watch a game, all scale and polish and no subtlety. And, like so many of these super stadiums located on the edge of endless suburbia, it is often eerily hushed, the crowd noise filtered and dispersed before it ever really catches voice.

Of course, scale is the only criteria when it comes to modern stadiums. Proud as the GAA ought to be of Croke Park, what that ground has gained in capacity, it has lost in atmosphere. For all the trumpeting and talk about new facilities, it is hard to see the practical difference; you still queue for chocolate and minerals and half-time visits to the bathroom facilities remains a true test of both courage and sanity.

In the current shambolic crossing point in the tedious future-homes-for-Irish-sports debate, Lansdowne Road might ultimately lose out because of its relative lack of scale. So those of you going along to the last home Six Nations game of the season on Saturday should really look around and enjoy what the old place has to offer.

To be able to walk to your place in the terrace or the stands from the heart of the city centre is in itself a bonus. The hawkers and chancers-turned-street-entertainers that mill around the ground just sort of put you in a good mood. People seem to arrive relatively hassle free with no sense of addled commuters having fought traffic for hours. And once you are inside, the fun takes care of itself.

Lucrative corporate facilities and the not inconsiderable fact that the IRFU and FAI could sell tens of thousands more tickets on big days will probably ensure that finance demolishes sentimentality when it comes to Lansdowne Road, with its humble 40,000 capacity.

Only if the place goes and the property sold so that some slumbering executive can sit browsing the Internet at the exact spot where Ciarán Fitzgerald addressed the troops in the mid 1980s will its unique value fully be recognised. In Boston, for instance, they still moan about the flashy new Fleet Centre that replaced the iconic "Gah-den", a no-frills dive that was simultaneously disgusting and intoxicating.

So, whatever happens over the next 12 months in the stadium debates, here's hoping Lansdowne Road survives the shakedown unscathed. The world is full of anonymous sports theatres with carpeted corridors for the well-connected and overpriced tickets to mile-high plastic seats for the rest of us. Lansdowne Road is one of the last of the beautiful kips and is worth saving.