With a 68-0 scoreline the match didn’t set pulses racing, but rugby fans could marvel at a stunning arena
FIVE REASONS to be cheerful about Saturday’s curtain-raiser at the Aviva Stadium:
1 Stunning arena;
2 €10 tickets;
3 Brilliant acoustics;
4 Swift ejection of a vuvuzela blower;
5 Mexican-waving crowd.
And there was rugby, was there not? Well, the announcer did greet the crowd of 30,000 with an exultant: “Ladies and gentlemen: Irish rugby comes home!” And it did, strictly speaking. There was rugby. And it was in Lansdowne Road . It could hardly be described as a match, though. Any game that ends 68-0 is obviously a mismatch and this one will long invade the dreams of the hapless Connacht-Munster under-20s, caught on the sharp end of a soaraway Leinster-Ulster onslaught.
Among a little cluster of red Munster jerseys, Deirdre Leonard from Limerick, her 11-year-old son Matthew and nine-year-old daughter Sorcha were trying to keep their heads up. John Fitzgerald, Deirdre’s brother and former Young Munster player, suggested with a laugh that it was Connacht that was doing the damage. John, now of
Manchester and Altrincham Kersal RFC, blamed it on Munster-Connacht’s passing: “It’s horrendous and they’re not getting all the tackles.”
Sadly, they hadn’t managed to get enough tickets to include Deirdre’s husband and her eldest daughter – quite unconnected to the fact that they’re Leinster fans, of course. But they were not eagerly anticipating the welcome home. It won’t be an outstanding memory either for the spectator who had to be carried away in a St John’s ambulance. Still, as the IRFU is fond of saying, the very best place to have a heart attack is at a rugby match, since a slew of doctors is routinely invited and placed strategically around the ground.
And as rugby crowds also tend to be littered with lawyers and the odd judge, some of them might have considered a legal conundrum: if there’s a stadium ban on vuvuzelas, what’s the worst they can do to someone who insists?
A toneless buzz had IRFU men sniffing out the source like a dog scenting a rabbit and to be fair, this rabbit wasn’t hard to track. If he hadn’t been a walking beacon in yellow day-glo, the hostile crowd would have turned him in anyway. After a minor stand-off, a big guard with a long arm pointed unrelentingly towards the exit.
For connections of the winning side, by contrast, it was a day of high emotion and Mexican waves. A 19-year-old Ulster winger, Craig Gilroy, from Dungannon RFC, will go down in modern rugby history as the first to land a try in the rebirthed stadium. Leinster lad Andrew Boyle of UCD, a former student of non-rugby school Clonkeen College in Blackrock, who developed his skills from the age of six at St Brigid’s, scored the second. Danny, his modest father, said it had always been his son’s dream to play at Lansdowne Road: “But the fact that he scored here – well, he’ll go home on a cloud. We came out on the Dart and walked in here for the first time today and it’s fabulous – much nicer, much more intimate than Croke Park. ”
Andrew’s proud aunt Sinead and her husband Nigel Motyer, both employees at AIB Bankcentre in Ballsbridge, had watched the stadium take shape over the past four years. “My boss’s office overlooks it and during meetings I used to watch the cranes loading in all those bars,” said Nigel, pointing at the 5,000 tonnes of structural steel. “We get so blase, going to Croke Park , which is one of the finest stadiums in Europe. But this is a fantastic place.”
So they think rugby has come home then? “Eh. Yeah,” said Sinead rather hesitantly. Fresh back from America, perhaps they had anticipated a little more razzmatazz? “I thought they should have built it up a bit more”, said Nigel. “They showed a short clip in black and white of the knocking of the old stadium and laying the foundations of the new one. It could have been very good. They could have played on the history of the place a bit more . . . But the match kinda started a bit suddenly.”
Most of the crowd seemed to have missed the pre-match performance by Ireland Unlimited, a women’s barbershop chorus. A brief rain storm forced new IRFU president Caleb Powell to deliver his pitch-side address under an umbrella, in which he valiantly linked the choice of youth teams for the opening match to “this stadium . . . a reflection of the future”.
But, frankly, as one admirably honest senior rugby man put it, it was “a bit of a shag match”, fuelling the notion that the IRFU had cobbled the day together to thwart any chance that Lansdowne Road’s historic first official game would involve a round ball.
Meanwhile, close to where rugby was coming home, the FAI had parked a smart, black Ticketmaster van – at a licence cost of €400 – staffed with the association’s project director, Adrian Mooney, and other charmers offering tickets for round-ball matches. Anyone up for a glam Manchester United outing on Wednesday?
