25 years on and it's still a special place

IT WAS the 25th anniversary of the first-ever game at the Millennium Stadium a couple of days ago which pulled me up a little short because I remember it like yesterday, not least because it was, I think, possibly the hottest and certainly the most uncomfortable I've ever been reporting in Britain.

It was an absolute scorcher and humid with it and, having driven from Sussex for the occasion that morning on packed motorways, I was hot and bothered to start with and fighting back a nagging migraine which I knew would get me before the day was out.

And that's before we stepped into the furnace of the stadium which was still basically a building site, indeed we were given hard hats to wear as we stepped over power cables and sidestepped bags of cement and transformer and made our way down endless passages packed high with building materials and electrical fittings to the media centre.

In years to come that centre would serve as a friendly refuge for the rugby tragics that make up our media but that day it was an airless dungeon one notch down from the black hole of Calcutta.

As well as the heat there was dust everywhere from the work in progress. In your eyes, throat, nostrils and ears. What we needed was an issue of shemaghs, the scarf-like pieces of headgear they use in Arab countries during sandstorms. And a pair of goggles would have come in handy.

The press area outside in the stand was not finished, in fact I'm not sure it had even been started, so we were seated in splendid isolation at the front of the middle tier although of course the lift broke down en route.