Croke Park resounds to the cheers of a record rugby crowd
Inside Track | Joe Carroll
As these words trickle on to the screen, Alexa is doing what she’s good at – providing background music of my choosing. I’m with Simon & Garfunkel, the best of; but right now “The Sound Of Silence” is not appropriate. Read on.
Windsor Park had a crowd of around 16,000 for the recent Irish Cup Final. One hundred miles the road, Croke Park housed five times that, the 83,000 turn-out a record for a Champions’ Cup match.
Leinster were out against Northampton Saints in a semi-final, and having enjoyed a decisive lead at one point, Leo Cullen’s side were hard-pressed to hold out for a 20-17 win, qualifying them for a meeting with Toulouse.
Leinster supporters were in the majority, as you’d expect, and with their team scoring three tries and then having to grimly retain their lead late on, those in the stands and on Hill 16 had good reason to raise their voices. And they did, to the maximum.
To me the volume couldn’t have been turned up much louder. It matched anything you’d hear if Dublin and Kerry were going neck and neck down the home straight on All-Ireland day. It was a surprise, therefore, to read what a visiting writer had to say in his report the following day.
“The stadium itself is no architectural triumph, although brutal functionality is needed to pack all the seats in.” He followed with, “Somehow, the noise escapes from the structure – I have seen scores of stadiums where the noise levels were higher – but, frankly, it took an awful long time to hear noise at all from Northernampton, either on or off the field.”
I’ve never been to Twickenham, or Murrayfield, or Ellis Park, so therefore wouldn’t be able to make comparisons with what I’ve heard when Croker was full to the gills. Maybe it was The Stoop, with its 15,000 capacity, that the writer had in mind, or maybe he was just rankled by the result.
Later on he wrote: Clearly, Northampton had to beware of the two excellent Kiwis in the Leinster backs – James Lowe on the wing and Jamison Gibson-Park at scrum-half.....”
To me, this was another one below the belt, aimed with a fair dollop of begrudgery. It didn’t find the target.
The two “excellent Kiwis” are there becuse the rules permit them to be. Maybe England club teams should get their scouts out in the hope of identifying players as good as the two New Zealanders.
The final is coming up at the end of this month, and London’s 62,000-capacity Tottenham Hotspurs has been chosen as the venue. Leinster fans will be travelling in their thousands, and when they get to the grounds they’re sure to make quite a racket. And it won’t all go up in the air.