Mick McCarthy's boys are in for a change of environment. Mick has always divided the world into those who are inside the tent urinating out and those outside the tent pointing in the opposite direction. Success can make a crowded squatter camp of your home, though, and no sooner had the lads returned from Tehran than the queue formed to get inside the tent and join the lads peeing outwards.

Chief among them were those mind slaves of Emperor Bertie who used the occasion to co-opt the national football team into the cheerleading sector for the BertieBowl.

T'would, we were told, be the cheek-reddening shame of this great little nation, the equivalent of a great hole in the seat of the national britches, were we to go off to the World Cup without a spiffing BertieBowl to call home. The erection of a BertieBowl would be the crowning glory for our sporting achievements.

(Readers of advanced years will of course remember the cruel mockery which pursued the team and the greatest supporters in the world at previous major tournaments back in the last century. Jibes like "Your Roof Isn't Retractable" or "What's It Like to Have no Executive Box?" Insults which withered a nation.)

Of course with a chary independent report coming down the pipeline and the Government preparing to slip the national hairshirt back on the national back, the BertieBowl needs all the ra ra treatment it can get. The idea looked liked a self-aggrandising folly back in the time when the national mood was keyed to such things. In harder times it looks like an election loser.

Times have changed quickly. The Celtic Tiger business is done with and apart from the social necessity of a shiny metal spike for O'Connell Street it's hard to think just what we'll tell the grandchildren we did with all the money. There's a pile of blueprints and those tribunal investigations into memory loss, coincidence and careless filing. And there'll be a neat anthology of arrogant quotes about how we can't take all our oul' dough with us, how we can afford to fix health, education and build a BertieBowl with trimmings. The good times will be remembered mainly for bragging and vulgarity.

So for the lean times, the pinch-cheeked era ahead, what should we do? Well, in the past six weeks or so one venue has reasserted its claims for a facelift and reminded us that when it comes to stadiums location is everything. The soccer games against Holland, Cyprus and Iran, the rugby match with New Zealand were great occasions, not just on the pitch but in the preamble and aftermath.

The stroll, the eating, the drinking, the chat, those things are part of what Irish sport is. Lansdowne Road offers them. So does Croke Park. These are things accountants can't measure and shouldn't try to.

The proposed location of the BertieBowl and its grandiose side palaces has never made sense. Not in terms of traffic, or centrality or social considerations. Do you want to spend three hours in traffic before being shoehorned into the BertieBowl still quivering with road rage, there to have your allotted diversion before rejoining the treacle flow of traffic? Will the rugby fans who come here in such numbers from Britain during the season be queuing up for that experience?

Now the whispers have it that everything is to be shorn form the Emperor's Palace and we are just to have the naked BertieBowl shivering in splendid windswept isolation out in Blanchardstown, What a comical testimony to our stupidity that will be. On match nights we will sit in our recently NCT'd cars in the endless M50 traffic and wonder why there can't be a stadiums tribunal. The entire social aspect of attending a big sporting event in Dublin will have evaporated.

Lansdowne Road is easy to make fun of. After all it wouldn't get done so frequently in this column if it was hard. Still, the old place has a lot going for it. The walk out there, the history, the way the area quickly absorbs a large crowd and disgorges it back into the city.

The time has come surely to blow the dust off the old plans for turning Lansdowne around, (so that the current West Stand lies behind a goal) and turning the place into a modern 45,000-50,000 stadium. The Government should pay for this, compensate the IRFU accordingly, and encourage the GAA to permit the occasional playing of rugby or soccer games that require a bigger crowd at Croke Park. One imagines that a well-reasoned motion to that effect would have few problems at Congress next spring.

After all, how many times is Croker (or a BertieBowl of the originally-proposed capacity) likely to be needed under those circumstances? Once, twice a year? Maybe this year the Holland game in soccer and the England game in rugby would have demanded a bigger venue. Next year soccer has nothing but friendlies until after the World Cup, then we go into the European qualifiers as number one seeds in a five-team group, which is most welcome but it means we won't be having the Hollands and the Portugals coming to play here. In fact, we'll be playing just four competitive home games between now and the summer of 2004.

There are good arguments for the GAA keeping Croke Park to itself, having built the place is a remarkable achievement for an amateur organisation etc, yet realistically speaking the extra usage involved in opening up is small and the rewards are attractive.

It's time surely to get realistic about the paucity of big sporting events we have in this country. GAA is a summer spread. Everything else is an occasional treat, the enjoyment of which would be severely impaired by having to travel to a concrete Siberia.

Time surely to consign the BertieBowl to the same grave as Eircom Park. We can look back at the blueprints in years to come and have a laugh about it all. A velodrome! We need a decent indoor stadium built downtown/dockside and a couple of stadiums the size of Croke Park and Lansdowne, and we need to put millions of punts to better use.

Why take another piece of colour and life out of the city? We need to preserve that aspect of what makes big occasions in Irish sport great.