Capital crowds
The announcement in Croke Park on Sunday that the attendance was 58,680 drew an acerbic response from one of the more ‘seasoned’ members of the press box.
“The worse the football gets,” he said during the interval of Dublin’s quarter-final against Fermanagh, “the more turn up to watch it.”
Although the attendance was a healthy figure for a largely pre-determined double bill on a bank holiday weekend, it only just about makes it into the top 20 crowds for All-Ireland football quarter-finals - at number 19.
Co-incidentally the biggest crowd of the lot was on this day six years ago when 81,892 turned out in Croke Park for the Dublin-Kerry quarter-final, the day of Pat Gilroy’s ‘startled earwigs’ and the last time Kerry beat their old rivals in championship.
The top 20 is dominated by Dublin quarter-finals and 12 of the county’s 14 matches at this stage of the championship are included. Five of the biggest crowds have to be seen in the context that they took place on the same double bill as an All-Ireland hurling semi-final, which pushed up the numbers.
Although Dublin haven’t played a stand-alone quarter-final since that 2009 match with Kerry, six of the top seven attendances feature the county in such fixtures.
Only Kerry-Monaghan at number two with 80,546 breaks up Dublin’s sequence of best-attended quarter-finals but that fixture was staged on the same afternoon as Limerick shocked Waterford in the 2007 All-Ireland hurling semi-final.
Looked at more negatively, Sunday’s attendance was the third-lowest to watch Dublin in the last eight at Croke Park, beating only the matches against Laois three years ago (on a double bill with Mayo-Down) and against Tyrone in 2011, which in fairness was a stand-alone fixture.
The smallest crowd to watch an All-Ireland football quarter-final was 13 years ago when an estimated 22,000 watched eventual champions Armagh beat Sligo in a replay in Navan’s Páirc Tailteann.
Croke Park's lowest attendance for a similar match came four years ago when just 22,732 were present for the Mayo-Cork and Kerry-Limerick double bill. SM
Nobody to be left alone with Murphy or O’Shea
Galway’s naive attempt to curtail the most powerful specimen ever seen on a GAA field, Michael Murphy, with a solitary man marker, the usually unbreakable Finian Hanley, will not be lost on the Mayo think-tank ahead of this weekend’s renewal of their 2013 meeting in Croke Park.
Nor will Donegal allow a McGee brother to be left alone with Aidan O’Shea.
Another fascinating subplot would be the sight of Keith Higgins tracking the younger McHugh brother, Ryan, on his long distance race to cover every inch of the massive green field.
What's certain is this: the ridiculously drawn out phoney war that has been the 2015 football championship ends Saturday night. GC
