SIDELINE CUT:The empty seats and darkened suites at the new stadium on Tuesday sent a clear message to both sporting bodies, writes KEITH DUGGAN

SO BRICKBATS and jeers rain down on the FAI and the IRFU as the new Lansdowne Road era springs into life.

Ireland’s debut against Andorra the other night felt weird. As the song goes, it just wasn’t like the old days anymore. An international football match on a Tuesday night doesn’t feel right and this was an ominous evening of heavy downpours and evening news reports dominated by the latest eye-boggling revelations about Anglo Irish Bank, etc. And yet a pretty loyal crowd of 40,000 showed up.

Still, there was no escaping the thousands of empty seats in the stadium or the fact so many of the corporate suites were shrouded in darkness. It could be a while before those lights are ever switched on. This week, the FAI offered a stiff and somewhat haughty response to queries about the precise breakdown of their long-term ticket sales.

On the day of the Andorra match, Gerry Thornley carried out a damning dissection of the IRFU ticket pricing for the upcoming autumn internationals in this newspaper. It led to the inescapable conclusion that the organisation has misread the public appetite for what are, essentially, meaningless games.

But as with the Andorra game, the camera won’t lie for the Irish rugby internationals either. If there are empty seats, they will be seen. The week of discontent underlines the fact that the IRFU and the FAI could hardly have selected a tougher time to set about turning a buck in their new stadium.

Contrast their fortune with that of the GAA, who took the decision to rebuild Croke Park in the mid-1990s when the Celtic Tiger was founded on something substantial and that was happily completed before everything had gone bananas. Bashing the FAI is something of a national sport and the GAA is often held up as a model of all that the soccer men could be doing right but are not.

It is true that in its timing of the redevelopment of Croke Park, the GAA were uncanny and, after the dramatic debates about Rule 42, they were on hand to accept the IRFU and FAI shillings for the use of the hall while Lansdowne Road was being hauled down and reinvented.

But it should also be remembered that the GAA received several handsome donations from the government as they went about rebuilding the stadium. And as the new Lansdowne Road began to take shape, one couldn’t help but compare Croke Park unfavourably to it. Suddenly, the place on the Jones’ Road began to look sort of grey and monolithic.

On All-Ireland final day, Croke Park will always be able to count itself as the home of one of the most extraordinary and important sporting occasions in the world. That was particularly true at last Sunday’s All-Ireland hurling final for the ages. There was a brimming wildness about the streets and All-Ireland drinking haunts in the hours before the match, a sense that something spectacular was going to happen.

It was one of those rare matches when a victory for either side meant that the crowd would witness something profound and rare. No, on All-Ireland days, Croke Park is a marvel. But is it for other matches, when the place is half full, that its scale seems to dwarf the action of the field? Some sort of vacuum seems to suck the atmosphere out of the place and it feels desolate if it is less than full.

When the IRFU and FAI were tenants in Croke Park, they took plenty of notes on things they might improve upon. The most obvious criticism of the modest scale of the new Lansdowne Road is that it only holds 50,000 people.

Think about how bleak Ireland v Andorra or Ireland v Macedonia or Ireland v Armenia would have been in a stadium the size of Croke Park. IRFU chief executive Philip Browne said not so long ago that the best stadium is always the newest stadium. In time, Lansdowne Road will begin to look dated too. Right now, though, it is a spectacular venue.

Nonetheless, it could be the last of the old model, those stadiums designed around the show and muscle of corporatism. The era of the corporate-entertainment type stadium will surely pass. In fact, it could have already gone out of vogue in the latest global recession.

The idea of corporate suites was vulgar to begin with. If you want to go and see a sporting event, do you really want to suit up, drink mediocre plonk and eat three (mass oven-cooked) courses beside some Joe that you don’t really know just because your first cousin works for Coke or whoever? Maybe you do but the thing is; you aren’t really at the match. You aren’t really in the stadium. Not in any real sense.

I always remember someone telling me about how a television in one of the Croke Park corporate boxes was switched to Formula One during an All-Ireland championship match.

The corporate box started off in the new-fangled indoor arenas in America, shaded windows in the highest part of the building. The idea was about privacy and seclusion and wealth; those shaded windows were designed to reinforce the point to the regular people in the bleachers that the lives of those behind the windows were different to theirs.

The daft corporate boxes that have sprung up in every English football stadium and international venues are just unimaginative repetitions. But in America, the beautiful people realised it was boring being stuck up there – unseen – jawing with the president of Whatever Inc and so they began purchasing their front of house seats so they could be like Spike Lee in Madison Square Garden.

Sooner or later, they will design football stadiums so the privileged people can sit with – although subtly apart from – the grubby masses who actually make the occasion what it is.

It could be that the FAI and the IRFU have been tasked with running a gorgeous stadium which was designed around a model that has already reached its sell-by date.

Corporate boxes and flashy seats have always been a luxury expense for firms. Now, they have no hesitation in saying “No thanks” when they are offered to buy a 10-year hold lease on a 10m x 15m plasterboard room with a mahogany veneer dining table, two sockets and a dimmer switch.

It is hardly a surprise the FAI have not been as successful as the IRFU in selling their premium seats. The IRFU, with the captains of Irish industry in their numbers, have been more successful.

Pillorying the FAI for their failure to meet their own prerequisites won’t change anything. They can hardly force people to buy tickets if they don’t want to. But the FAI should just come out and admit their sales are not anything like they hoped for, that they are struggling. Who isn’t nowadays?

They had no choice but to commit to this stadium and if the Irish team makes it to Euro 2012, these grumbles will soon be forgotten. The IRFU and the FAI are going to have to think boldly now. Build it and they will come is not quite the commandment it once was. Be bright and reasonable with pricing.

Think radically. If the corporate box is going to be empty, offer it to an orphanage for the night. Free of charge. Treat the ordinary people well and forget about courting the suits with gourmet sport. As Basil Fawlty said: “Duck’s off, sorry.”