Another ticket headache for Leinster Branch

MURRAYFIELD IS set to have a huge Irish contingent if the ticket sales remain in the same hands that originally bought them come Heineken Cup final at the end of this month in Scotland. While the two club sides involved in the European final, Leinster and English giants Leicester, have allocations of just 7,500 tickets each, the ERC have said that of the 45,000 tickets that were bought in the public sale last year and in the beginning of his year, 35 per cent of them went to people with Irish addresses.

Tickets for the 2009 final were first put up for public sale in May 2008 with the 45,000 allocation sold out by January of this year making this season’s event the fastest-selling Heineken Cup final since the inception of the competition.

The European Rugby Cup (ERC) retains 15,000 tickets for the two finalists and those tickets are split according to demand. It is certain that both clubs will look for their entire allocation of 7,500 each, which is expected to cause allocation problems for both teams. The Leicester Tigers message boards are lit up with fans eager to buy tickets for the match. Leinster, however, may have their own unique problem born out of this year’s popularity of the team.

The Irish province has just over 9,000 season ticket holders, who would have first claim on the increasingly rare tickets. But with their relatively small slice of the Murrayfield pie, the province will not have enough tickets to cater for the demand of all of their season ticket holders. Clearly 9,000 into 7,500 does not go the way Leinster would like it.

In tandem with the season ticket holders, Leinster officials also have to find a way of looking after the needs of the clubs, their sponsors and the players’ requirements.

When the committee sit down and try to work out what is looking like a loaves and fishes type of headache, the simple fact is that Leinster may have to contrive some sort of lottery system in order to disburse the tickets in an equitable way.

“We have not yet decided how we are going to do this given our allocation of tickets. But we will have worked out some details tomorrow (Wednesday),” said a Leinster spokesman. “Meetings are taking place just to try and decide what is the fairest way, in terms of the fans, for the tickets to be distributed. Maybe there is also some way that Munster fans, who may have bought tickets and don’t want to travel, can offload them to Leinster. But we’ve got to assume too that Munster fans who got final tickets may want to support an Irish team in the European final.”

The Edinburgh ground has a capacity of 62,400. Of that the public sale accounted for 45,000 seats, the two clubs a further 15,000 with the rest of the 2,400 going to hospitality, European rugby stake holders, unions, clubs as well as the ERC’s broadcasting and media partners.

“We’ve had fans travel to the Stoop and also to Croke Park-and don’t forget that all of those fans don’t live in Dublin but are from all over the province – so maybe there are some who have done enough away games. But we do anticipate that that there will be a big demand and we should have more detailed news on that tomorrow,” added the spokesman.

Yesterday evening four tickets for the half way line of Murrayfield’s East Stand, lower tier had an offer on eBay of €1,200, or, €300 per ticket.