Croke Park looking to gridiron future

GAELIC GAMES STADIUM PLANS:CROKE PARK is hoping to stage American football action in the stadium in the next couple of years, as it gets ready for the post-rugby and soccer era. This weekend sees the most intensive hosting of other sports since the GAA's headquarters was opened for them in February 2007 with the soccer World Cup qualifier against France and the rugby international against Australia on successive days.

Twelve years ago Croke Park, then partly redeveloped, staged one of the blue-riband American colleges matches, between Notre Dame and the Navy, and the latter have again been looking at venues for a possible return.

“There’s an interest from the American colleges in taking a game over to Dublin,” according to Croke Park stadium director Peter McKenna. “This would be a competitive game and we have shown representatives from the Navy around the stadium with a view to it being considered for such a fixture. They’ve also had a look at Lansdowne.”

The professional game is different but has staged a regular season match in Wembley for the past three years, the most recent being last month’s meeting of the New England Patriots and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. McKenna says there is now the possibility of such matches being extended.

“There is talk about the NFL widening the scope of these matches to look at other stadia. They’re talking about the Millennium in Cardiff and also at Frankfurt, where there’s a big military base.

“But that’s at an early stage and Croke Park haven’t yet been involved in any discussions.”

It is understood, however, that the stadium would hope to apply whenever NFL fixtures were put out to tender.

Logistically, American football makes considerable demands on a stadium. There is the question of “sideline kill” whereby the vast playing squads, who line up along the side of the pitch, have to have the room to stand up without obscuring the view of the crowd, something that necessitates removing seats from the lower tiers.

Next year will be the last year of rugby and soccer fixtures in Croke Park, as the re-building of Lansdowne Road is completed. Over the four years the lease of the stadium to the FAI and IRFU yielded nearly €40 million for the GAA. McKenna has been planning for the need to source new business in the coming months.

“We’re never going to replace that level of revenue, which was particularly lucrative,” he says. “We want to go some distance towards making it up but there just wouldn’t be that level of activity to replace it fully.”

Preparations for the busy weekend ahead are under way. The stadium will have just four hours of daylight to complete the transformation from soccer to rugby on Sunday morning. As well as pitch markings and the larger, more cumbersome goal posts for rugby and different pitch-side advertising mechanisms there will be a turnover in camera crews and other media.