Brisk sales reported for season tickets

THE GAA are reporting brisk sales of the 2012 season ticket and encouraged any potential buyers to come in sooner rather than later to maximise their value for money.

Although there has been a slight decrease in the number of games in this year’s league due to the restructuring of the hurling league, the season ticket actually takes in more games as it now includes the league finals, plus the All-Ireland club finals.

Over 10,000 season tickets have already been sold, with particularly keen uptake from Dublin. Priced at €85, the season ticket includes all Allianz League matches in the selected code (including semi-finals, finals, play-offs, etc), the selected county’s opening championship fixture, plus the AIB club finals in Croke Park on St Patrick’s Day.

On that basis the season ticket offers even better value than 2011, when the league finals weren’t actually included. The juvenile season tickets, priced at only €10, have already all sold out.

Meanwhile the scoring issue is certain to provide plenty more talking points for 2012 and NUI Galway will assess the mood for the GAA’s possible embrace of score detection technology by staging a public talk on the issue next Tuesday.

Entitled “A score or not a score – that is the question!” the talk is being organised as part of NUI Galway’s degree programme in Sports and Exercise Engineering, and will be delivered by Liam Kilmartin, Lecturer with the School of Engineering and Informatics at NUI Galway.

“From Geoff Hurst in 1966 to Frank Lampard in 2010, the inability to determine whether valid goals have been scored in soccer has generated much press and debate,” says Kilmartin.

“Similar discourse has erupted at times in GAA circles particularly relating to hurling where determination of valid point scores is often even more challenging due to the speed and height of the sliotar.”

The talk will focus on the challenge of score detection in a number of sports, and will examine technologies which have been proposed for use in both soccer and Gaelic sports.

It will also address how modern communication and sensor technology is being used in team sports such as soccer, GAA, Australian football and rugby to aid in monitoring player performance both in training and during actual games, and examine possible future technologies which could help with player’s mental focus, possibly determining when they are in the zone and hence ready mentally to perform at an optimal level.

The talk begins at 6pm and further information can be found at www.ExerciseEngineering.com

The GAA’s Central Council last August approved the Hawk Eye technology for use on a two-year pilot basis for all championship football and hurling games played in Croke Park, starting this summer.

A full review will be conducted at the end of the two-year pilot period and before any subsequent proposals for more widespread implementation are sent to Congress approval.

However, it has been estimated that it could cost up to €500,000 to introduce Hawk Eye at every championship venue, and that such widespread use would prove cost-prohibitive.