How important is a football stadium anyhow? Roy Keane’s passing observations this week on the importance of creating atmosphere in the Aviva illustrated the fact that when it comes to the modernisation of football stadiums, you can lose as much as you gain.
When Swansea City played their last match at Vetch Field in 2005, the locals waited until the teams made their way to the changing rooms before making their way onto the field of play to sing Roger Evans' Take Me To The Vetch Field. The stadium had been at the heart of mass entertainment in Swansea since 1912: attending matches or concerts there became a rite of passage and in its heyday crowds of 30,000 squeezed into a stadium that officially accommodated less than half of that number.
Like so many other sports stadia, it fell victim to progress and the few years that it was left to fall into disrepair are captured in a fascinating compilation posted on YouTube for which the filmmaker took it upon himself to gather footage of the abandoned football theatres of England’s real football towns, like never-in-fashion Doncaster and McCain stadium in Scarborough. The images are striking: advertising hoardings, rusting floodlights and pitches reclaimed by nature. Feethams was the home of Darlington FC for 120 years and was such an architectural curiosity that it became habit for the home fans to make their way to the opposite goals at half time so they might urge their team forward for the full game. Places like these fell by the wayside through the usual combination of owners blinded by a vision of a bigger, brighter, better home for which more tickets could be sold and by a duty to ‘modernise’ for shame that the old place had come to look old-world.
Pricks the conscience
Whenever you see footage of 1980s football games now, the darkness of the hooded stands and the volume of supporters penned inside them never fail to shock. England’s major football grounds had to change; after the tragedies at Bradford and Hillsborough, that was always the case. A quarter of a century on, what happened at Hillsborough still pricks at the conscience of English society: there is no escaping the fact that those fans, many little more than children, were treated in a way that was appallingly inhumane. So the mass reimagining and rebuilding of the shrines of English football was inevitable and important and the fabulousness of the replacement grounds – the new Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge, and the Emirates just up the road from where dingy, beloved Highbury was closed and razed in 2006 – helped to transform England’s football tradition from a national embarrassment to an international phenomenon.
Highbury was just one of many gems lost in that metamorphosis: Sunderland’s Roker Park and the Victoria Ground in Stoke closed in 1997, Eastville in Bristol closed its doors a year later, The Dell in Southampton was gone by 2001. Vanished too were Maine Road in Manchester and the Baseball Ground in Derby.
The sudden disappearance of these football grounds, which were on one level deeply primitive and unsatisfactory eyesores but were also, on match days, the actual living soul of those towns, had a wrenching effect on their communities. Football fans are both fixated with the future – the next game, the next signing, the next season – and enthralled by the past. Little wonder that fans still wander around the housing estates and shopping centre in the hope of establishing the precise coordinates of where Stanley Matthews or Charlie George once stood.
New stadiums are designed with different criteria in mind, with plans drafted to comply with civic regulations, with the safety of the fans, with sightline stipulations, with easy access to the concession stands and stops, with the requirements of the corporate sector and with the comfort of the star athletes. In Dublin, the funeral march for Lansdowne Road may well have started on the night that the first piece of seating was flung from the upper tier of the West Stand by visiting England fans in that infamous riot of 20 years ago.
Spilling onto the field
Lansdowne Road had an aura about it not only because it was the oldest rugby ground in the world but because it was such an oddity, with the train rattling by and its steep upper tier and the unexpectedness of Wanderers Pavilion and the crowd always looking as if it was about to spill onto the field. It was a raucous and fairly primitive and a brilliant place to watch a match. The reasons for tearing it down and replacing it were commercially sound and on big club and international rugby days, the IRFU has to grapple with the aggravating position of being able to sell thousands of more tickets but not having the seats. In the years since Lansdowne Road was hauled down, the new place has established itself fairly seamlessly as a suitable replacement for Irish rugby.
The move has been less satisfactory for the Irish football team. The new stadium is only five years old. It takes time for any team to truly inhabit a season, all the more so with the stop-start nature of the international qualifying programme. The new stadium is a very impressive and agreeable 50,000-seater home. Once you are inside it, you could be anywhere in Europe. There was no mistaking Lansdowne Road and the very name had the power to send a chill up the spine in a way that a stadium named after a health insurance company simply can’t.
Keane made light of the comparison between the old haunt and the Aviva during the week. But there is a reason why teams value playing at home: it gives them an advantage and gives the players the opportunity to conspire with the tens of thousands of fans to create an atmosphere which makes the opposition players know precisely where they are. A big Polish turn out is expected in Dublin. We will know that Lansdowne is truly gone if we hear their songs and salutes over the Irish repertoire. Irish football has to claim the new home some time and tomorrow, with all seats full and everything riding on the match, it is time to raise the roof and a few ghosts with it.
