PRESENT TENSE:SO, I PICK UP my tickets for today's Ireland-France rugby game and the first thing I notice is the price: €90. I do some exaggerated eye-rubbing and have another look. The ticket is still €90. The only miracle is that it hasn't gone up by a fiver in those five seconds.
This seat is not the best in Croke Park, you understand. It is not beside President McAleese. It does not come with a cushion and an electric blanket. It is not even along the sideline, but behind the goal in the Davin Stand. I am, in effect, paying €90 for a decent view of the giant screen when the play is up at the opposite end of the pitch. If I wanted to pay daft money to watch sport on a big screen, then I wouldn’t have cancelled my Sky subscription.
There are some reasons to be thankful, because there are people who have paid an equally exorbitant sum and will arrive at the stadium to be greeted by a sherpa in a hi-vis jacket, who will guide them to a dizzying altitude, through the clouds and to a seat from where they can squint at the game while the Goodyear blimp hovers below them.
Ironically, just as has happened to international soccer, ticket prices have risen as the sporting entertainment has fallen. Croke Park has not been a particularly happy stadium for the rugby team. I desperately hope it changes today, but there has been only one genuinely enjoyable day so far, and that win over the English was a one-off in so many senses that it can’t be used as any comparison to what went before or what will follow. Apart from it, there have been occasionally thrilling moments surrounded by long, flat acres of disappointment. Worse, the atmosphere has been flat. Too often there has been the background murmur of 80,000 people chatting.
There were days when the crumbling intimacy of Lansdowne Road helped it become an intimidating place for opponents, but more often than not the atmosphere would drift off into the gale, especially after the opening 20 minutes, as the crowd, the team and the seagulls realised that this was not going to be a happy afternoon.
The nation has since convinced itself that Croke Park is one of the world’s great stadiums. And it is excellent in many ways. Anyone who has trekked to and from Saint-Denis in Paris or the industrial parks of English midland cities will not take the stadium’s city-centre spot for granted. But once inside it, Croke Park is not truly great and won’t be until they complete the four sides and get rid of that sliver of Nally and the unsightly TV studio. As long as that is there, it’s like showing off your most beautiful daughter but asking people to ignore the fact that one of her legs is horribly wizened.
There is an irony in how the atmosphere at matches would probably be better if the IRFU didn’t spend so much time trying to stoke it up. Each time Carmina Burana is blasted over the loudspeakers in anticipation of the Irish team’s emergence from the tunnel, it is a siren call for the inevitable anti-climax. There is now music before the match, as the teams run out, after scores, at half-time, and at full-time. It is meant to aid the atmosphere, but it drowns it out. It is supposed to encourage fans to join in, when actually it discourages them from competing with the relentless din. Meanwhile, in recent years they’ve played adverts on the big screen at brain-burbling volume, so that whatever enthusiasm fans have worked up is battered into submission by the relentless, head-ringing corporatism.
It is this that is most irritating about the €90 ticket price. Few supporters should ever expect anything other than disappointment – and the heightening of expectations has brought its problems – but it epitomises an international sport that, despite the growth of its popularity in Ireland, has only moved further away from the supporters. The IRFU talks about generating revenue to fund the game, but these nearly prohibitive ticket prices are taking advantage of, and squeezing the goodwill from, supporters who went to games during years when results could be categorised as either a crushing defeat, an embarrassing slip-up or a pointless moral victory.
And while the Munster team continues to thrive on the relationship between supporters and players, the Irish team rarely acknowledges those supporters who pay through the nose to be disappointed either at home or away. The soul of English football has received many wounds in the last decade, but even its millionaires know the value of applauding their supporters after every match.
A win today could make that €90 feel like a bargain, of course. That is the nature of fandom. But the longer-term problem will remain in a sport that is fleecing and deafening its supporters, before walking away without noticing they were there in the first place.
As I write this, the Everton-Liverpool match is on the television. I can hear the stadium announcer firmly asking the Liverpool supporters to sit down. They’ve ignored her and continued bouncing away in the stands even though the seats are probably playing havoc with their shins. I hope they bounce even higher. They look like they’re enjoying themselves.
shegarty@irishtimes.com
