THE GAA is satisfied the use of Croke Park for Sunday’s NFL finals was justifiable and that the stadium is the best venue for the competition. Association operations manager Feargal McGill said they were “delighted” with the turnout and that the stadium should ideally be used for future Division One finals.
“We would probably be inclined to continue playing the Division One final in Croke Park. There is an argument that as the national final of our second most important competition, it should always be played here and I would subscribe to that view strongly.”
Despite misgivings about the venue a crowd of 20,545 turned out and McGill believes that was more than satisfactory in the circumstances. “Twenty thousand is around the figure that justifies the use of Croke Park. We were delighted with the turn-out – of course it could have been better, but we would regard playing this year’s finals in Croke Park as a gamble that paid off.”
He also pointed out despite the pessimism about the likely attendance, it was still more than twice the number that had attended the 2008 final, also between Kerry and Derry. “When you play a fixture in Croke Park you double the attendance, which we did on Sunday. The same counties got a crowd of 9,800 in Parnell Park last year. This year it was more than 20,000. The other question is whether you should have a league final at all or just leave it with the top team winning the league.”
Former Donegal All-Ireland winner Martin McHugh has made the argument that the competition would be more attractive were the format to revert to the one of four Division One, two Division Two and the winners of Three and Four going into the quarter-finals but in with All-Ireland qualifiers, finding sufficient dates would be difficult.
The GAA have been unlucky in that for two years running Kerry and Derry, about as geographically distant as possible, have reached the final. Kerry have plenty of opportunity to visit Croke Park during the summer and Derry have a relatively small demographic (the counties for instance drew the smallest crowd to an All-Ireland football semi-final since the redevelopment of the stadium – just 35,457 in 2004).
“Maybe the small crowd can contribute to a lack of atmosphere,” McGill says of the weekend, “which can have an effect on the game. It was also strange for the teams plying under rules that had become obsolete. But put it this way: we weren’t sitting down two years ago the morning after Donegal and Mayo (which drew a respectable 29,433), wondering about where to play the final . . . the past two years have been unusual with the same pairing twice.”
If the argument is that finals should be played in Croke Park is there a case for staging the Division Three and Four finals there on a Saturday and making a finals weekend? McGill believes the crowds would be too small, not much more than 5,000 or 6,000 (Saturday’s attendance in Longford was just over 1,000) on grounds of atmosphere and television presentation but rejects the suggestion they would be economically unviable.
“There’s just not the same history or tradition to the lower-division titles. I take issue with the argument based on the cost of opening Croke Park. That has grown out of a specific answer given by Peter McKenna (stadium director) at a media conference a couple of years ago, which has been used to suggest unless you have 32,000 at a match it shouldn’t be at Croke Park. We would never worry about that. Cost is not a factor and holding a match in the stadium automatically increases the attendance.
“If you take the attendances at club finals, the year they were played in Thurles we had the smallest crowd in ages (16,227). The best roads in the country go to Dublin, all trains go to Dublin and over a third of the population is within an hour of the stadium.”
