Ciarán Murphy: The lure of ‘the day out’ still strong for GAA supporters

It is Tuesday morning and my schoolteacher friend has once again taken in hand the task of securing our tickets for a Galway football game. His texts are rather panicked at first – ‘why are all these tickets so poor?’ − but it soon becomes clear that the Mayos and the Armaghs have gone on a buying spree.

He eventually alights on four tickets upstairs in the Hogan Stand, pretty central, and the stage is set for what is just an exceptionally appetising quarter-final double-bill of Galway/Armagh and Kerry/Mayo on Sunday week.

He’s particularly happy because he missed out on attending Galway’s last game, the Connacht final, due to chronic work-related fatigue. He had a Covid outbreak in his school in Meath, and ended up having to split his class into groups, and go to four Communion masses in one day on the day before. That’s eight hours of mass. After that, he reckoned that taking the Lord’s advice about a day of rest, rather than a cross-country trek was the wisest course of action, and who could blame him quite frankly.

(That wasn’t even his most devout run of form - in the first year of Covid, he did 19 masses in three days across Communions and Confirmations. He wasn’t saying the masses, I should confirm, but I feel sure he would have been able to give it a fairly good rattle by the end of that weekend.)

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Alan Milton, the director of communications with the GAA, told the Irish Examiner on Wednesday that the GAA website had never experienced traffic like it. “We never had the volume of public sales that we had today between 12pm and 2pm, when we sold 50,000 tickets. A week and a half out, 35,000 tickets have been sold for the Sunday fixtures and 24,000 for the Saturday fixtures, so close to 60,000 in four hours.”

As for the hurling quarter-finals this weekend in Thurles, they are already sold out – the four counties involved might send a few tickets back from their clubs today or tomorrow but the 17,000 tickets that went on general sale were snapped up in no time.

Milton also said that “it’s interesting because it sort of debunks fears that people wouldn’t attend in large numbers because of Covid. If the games are attractive enough and people feel their teams have a good chance to win, they will support them.”

But there is also, I think, an interesting corollary that exists in the GAA supporter’s mindset. The idea of being there for a sell-out is also a major attraction, in and of itself. There comes a moment when a critical mass is reached, and what might be a 35,000 crowd in Thurles suddenly becomes a near sell-out. And that moment comes when people realise that they might miss out on a really memorable day.

And for all that Milton talks about the attraction of feeling optimistic about your team’s chances of victory, it’s not always all about that either. The lure of ‘the day out’ is still hugely potent. Galway and Kilkenny in the Leinster final was always going to be a tight game, but from early on in the build-up, all you heard about was how late the throw-in time was, the price of fuel, the price of hotels in Dublin … all the reasons not to go, in short.

It had a domino effect, where suddenly paramount among all the reasons not to go was the fact that the crowd would be small. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hurling would probably be good (it wasn’t, in the end), but the occasion will certainly be a let-down (which it was).

The opposite might well happen with the Sunday football double-bill next week – as the ticket sales tick past 50,000, suddenly the more casual sports fans around Dublin, who are of course perennially locked out of most All-Ireland finals, will start to get interested, and that could well propel the attendance up closer to 65 or 70,000.

We shouldn’t even really be surprised, because €40 for Thurles this Saturday, and €40 for Croker on both days next weekend, constitutes the best value ticket of the GAA season (maybe the best value sports ticket in the business if you didn’t get into Trent Bridge for free this Monday.)

I tend to avoid the press box on occasions like the next couple of weekends, though not out of any deficit of love for my colleagues in the fourth estate. It is rather just an admission that being one of the paying customers on occasions like these is at least as much fun as the game itself – that the mere act of walking up to the stadium, getting a pint or just sampling the atmosphere beforehand, feeling oneself a part of this great swell of people, is as compelling a reason to attend as any other.

And my friends and I can rest assured as we take our seats next Sunday week that we will surely have religion on our side, if hours at the coalface mean anything to the man upstairs.