After all the wondering it came down to one number: 35,517, worse than all but the most pessimistic of predictions. A number so meagre that it was left unannounced on the day. It is probably time, however, to be clear about one thing: the attendance problem at last Saturday’s rugby international between Ireland and the World Champion South Africans was not down to charging around €100 for a ticket, nor was it down to “the current economic environment”. The problem was grouping all four games in the first place; nothing that the IRFU did after that mattered a whit.

Tickets have been €80 before and people have snapped them up, and one might find that the pubs and clubs of Dublin are doing a fine trade with people dropping money into the tills at a grand rate. When one omits the corporate boxes and premium level tickets, the difference in the number of publicly available seats between Croke Park and the new Lansdowne is vast, somewhere in the region of 25,000. Simply put, even accounting for the financial ills of the country, the IRFU should have been able to fill the place twice over.

Hark back to when Philip Browne came on the airwaves and pled for mercy, saying that people were willing to pay €140 for Michael Bublé so it wasn’t the price of the tickets that was keeping people away.

Not the price of one ticket, no.

Previously, the match ticket had been part of a larger day out. Perhaps €80 for the ticket itself plus about €100 for pints, a bit of food and the necessary transport over the day. Money well spent, and sure wouldn’t you spend €100 on a night out anyway. And the same would be done a couple of weekends later, with mind and wallet perfectly willing to suspend disbelief and never add it all up.

After the IRFU’s ticketing masterplan, suddenly their target customer was looking at a sum of nigh-on-€400, adding at least another €250 (allowing for a less hectic pace at the Samoa match and a Sunday Argentina game) to that already large sum.

That’s a lot of money. To one person, it’s the bones of a ski holiday; to another it’s their car insurance; to a third it’s half of their kid’s school fees for the year. And that’s for a person going alone, never mind one who would intend to bring friends or family.

As the match tickets paled in comparison, Joe Punter for the first time contemplated the simple notion of not watching the match from a stadium seat, considering instead the sofa or the high stool. Once that notion was explored, even for a moment, simply dropping the price closer to the old levels wasn’t going to do the trick.

Complementary goods, * Economics 101.  The IRFU took a mostly inelastic product called “going to the match” – previously compared to a decent meal out or a music concert – and moved it into another bracket entirely, filled with very expensive things against which tickets couldn’t possibly compete.

Once they’d done that, breaking the tickets into two batches made no difference. The spell was broken; tickets were now luxury items, not the essentials which they were once deemed to be. That, more than anything else, destroyed their demand and resulted in the alienation, even for a brief time, of their fanbase.

A national mindset has been changed. The Irish rugby chiefs could have a long way to go to turn this around.

* An unfortunate error on my part, considering the title of the post.  Thanks to the reader who took the time to point it out.