A Different View with Dave O’Connell

I should have anticipated the smell of disappointment off it from the very start. Having missed out on the actual sale of tickets for either of the two Oasis gigs in Croke Park, Plan B was always looking like a dodgy one.

A friend of friend of a relative knew someone who had a pal working in a sub-contracted capacity at the gig who would be allocated, for purchase, a few tickets to see the Gallagher Brothers which they’d be happy to move along – and the good news is that there wouldn’t even be dynamic pricing involved.

Once they didn’t put them up on eBay or introduce their own version of Ticketmaster’s incremental, if legal, highway robbery (aka the aforementioned ‘dynamic pricing’) then they can sell them for a few bob over the odds and nobody gets killed in the crossfire.

So a deal was done last November with the proviso that this was always going to go to the wire.

But we had little other option after the bank rejected a mortgage extension to pay for two tickets on the official resale sites where it seemed that Noel Gallagher was seeking just one sucker who would cover his entire divorce bill by bringing one other person to see his gig.

The months went by with just the odd reassurance that the whole deal was still oxo; then the messages were almost weekly as the big weekend came ever closer over the horizon.

The first fly hit in the ointment with considerable force when a colleague of our remote contact saw the Gallaghers and Ticketmaster making a fortune and felt that what was sauce for the goose was good for the gander too.

But they were caught scalping; looking for a price well over the odds – although still half the Ticketmaster ticket – and suddenly, just like used to happen in school, everyone had to be punished because one boy just couldn’t behave himself.

We were assured that this was just a hiccup – until it turned out to be so much more.

And I really should have known.

Once upon a time on a trip to see Liverpool at Anfield, this same sense of foreboding descended when a representative from the club’s ‘official travel partner’ never surfaced at the normally-cheap-as-chips-but-now-dynamically-priced hotel in Central Liverpool as the teams were already driving through the Shankly Gates.