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Viable or not, the vendors and season tickets holders have contracts and commitments. I find it amusing lads can’t get their heads around this. The income from these will come down fair quick if we don’t actually over games in the fucking thing
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The GAA has a problem here. Contracts and deals only work in the long run if you have a decent product you can offer.
An integral part of the product is the expectation there will be sufficient games with sufficient attendances and atmospheres to make the signing of contracts worthwhile - be it for catering or for premium tickets or corporate boxes or whatever.
With every passing year, less and less games are capable of attracting attendances to Croke Park that make it worthwhile to open it.
Currently there are only about seven or eight occasions in a year when Croke Park is worth opening up in a general sporting sense - the two All-Ireland finals, four semi-finals, maybe one of the quarter-final double headers, maybe one Leinster match. If you’re lucky. And even some of these occasions have entered the dead zone where they attract only somewhere in the region of 20 to 35k, where the place feels like a morgue.
The more games that are shoehorned into Croke Park, the more you detract from the overall product. Contracts end up having a significant negative effect on the overall product, which has already been damaged by lack of competitiveness and lack of expectation of competitiveness.
Meanwhile the Stade de Frank lies idle and Belfast is about to commence construction of its own even grander white elephant.
Catch 2022.
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I don’t know if it’s really workable for logistical or financial reasons post Covid, but one thing that did work well was spreading out the crowd for the reduced capacity semi finals & finals last year. Think there was only 25k there for the Limerick - Waterford game but the atmosphere seemed decent enough.
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There was a weird psychological thing at play with crowds during Covid. Everybody was there in the knowledge that crowd sizes were capped way below normal. Say for Dublin-Mayo, it felt like a taste of normality was being handed out to the 24k in attendance, almost that it was a privilege to be there. Everybody there understood that were this match taking place in normal times there would be 82k in attendance. Everybody attending other matches which wouldn’t have attracted a full house in normal times, say Kerry v Tyrone, still understood that demand on that particular day still considerably outstripped supply and that they were being privileged to get a taste of normality - that other people who wanted to be there could not be.
The psychological dynamic was different to say, Dublin v Kildare this year where if 82k wanted to turn up they could have, but didn’t - only 33k bothered to turn up because there was little public enthusiasm for this match.
I agree that the spacing for Covid matches helped. It meant there were no dead zones in the stadium. The cavernous empty upper tiers and when the Canal End lower tier is deserted are what destroy atmospheres. That was not present for the Covid matches in 2021.
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The crowd need something to feed off from the players and likewise the players need to feed off the crowd.
Is a ‘symbiotic relationship’ the right turn of phrase?
There may have been 80k at the 2019 hurling final but the place was like a zombie apocalypse.
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It loses a lot of money when it opens for the Christy ring/lory meagher and the like. I think it costs thirty odd grand to open for a match.
It’s not the point though. The point is whether trial by TSG is acceptable and accepted.
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If you’re in a crowd of 33k in an 82k capacity stadium where there was simply no demand for the other 49,000 places in the stadium, it demonstrates to those who do turn up that public interest is lacking. Therefore it is harder to feel passionate about such a match.
If in recent memory the same match regularly attracted 82,000 people, which Dublin v Kildare or Dublin v anybody Leinster football finals did, those in attendance get the feeling they are in attendance at something which is now in terminal decline or dead.
People tend to feel more passionate about something when lots of other people feel passionate about it, and when there is less physical space around them. If there is two yards of space between you and the nearest other spectator, you are less to likely to shout. Inhibitions are raised.
So if 45,000 other people are in a sold out Thurles, roaring as the Limerick and Clare teams walk around the pitch, and flares are being let off, you as an individual feel emboldened to roar yourself. You are at something which the public has declared they are passionate about and you are part of it. Inhibitions drop.
Whereas at Dublin v Kildare with just 33k present in an 82k capacity stadium, you feel a bit of an oddball attending something pointless and worthless, especially when Dublin run in five goals in the first half. The pervading feeling at such matches, even for television spectators, is one of loneliness.
But as you say, even with 82k present, if a match is one sided, it will feel lonely. Competition and tension are prerequisites to hold an atmosphere. Occasionally an atmosphere befitting an 82,000 crowd can generate with a smaller crowd if the match is important enough, close enough and tense enough.
Donegal v Kildare 2011 is a good example of this.
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Like lads queueing for two hours for a McDonald’s.
They want what they can’t* have.
What on earth are you on about? You’d be whinging even more if the Sunday game turned a blind eye.
No, I’m bothered by the fact that these incidences are the only ones being prosecuted because they are the ones selected by TSG. You either go through the entire film looking for incidences of foul play, or none of it. It’s a simple concept I’m trying to convey. Im surprised you struggle with it.
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or have a citing commissioner and if county boards want to suggest incidents to be looked at then the commish will do that and award bans on foot of that if foul play is detected
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That’d be excellent. That could get rightly spiteful. There’d be fallout for generations.
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the first citing done by the limerick lads would be for liam dunne in the 96 final 
Not sure about that at all. I regularly feel very passionate about Waterford games in half full stadia.
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It’s an anti-Clare conspiracy, plain and simple.
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You might. But you’re a hard core supporter of a county which is one of a select few which hasn’t won an All-Ireland for a looong time but which has realistic hopes of winning one. The sniff of success which would end a famine is always there and the circumstances make it easier to feel passionate.
Same dynamic with Mayo. Derry and Armagh are now in this sort of scenario too. A long fallow period builds a thirst.
Whereas a period of All-Ireland winning success is a passion killer. You’d wring more passion out of a dried up passionfruit than you would out of the supporters of Kilkenny hurling, Kerry football and Dublin football at provincial matches. The dynamic was not much different with supporters of Galway, Down, Derry and Donegal for long stretches after their All-Ireland winning teams faded away, and Clare and Wexford in hurling. It’ll come to Limerick as well. Offaly got so sated they completely faded away as a GAA county.
But even with Mayo, organisers can take the piss one time too many, as the paltry crowd at the weekend showed. The majority of Mayo supporters were not passionate enough to the level of travelling to a morgue like atmosphere in Croke Park on a Saturday evening. And you couldn’t blame them.
What trial by TV?
They were high profile incidents in a high profile game. People were always going to discuss them.
There have been other incidents featured/high lighted on The Sunday Game in years gone by and no action has been taken subsequently.
Maybe the players involved might do themselves a favour and accept they were in the wrong rather than moaning about being sanctioned for stamping on/striking an opponent.
The incidents involving the three players from last weekend were blatant red cards. That’s the bottom line for me. The whinging since has been most unbecoming.
Maybe don’t go around stamping on a prone player or striking a player from behind who has his back turned to you and there’ll be no issue.
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With respect, they were by far the worst incidents… The two Clare incidents were strikes… One a punch and the other with the Hurley on the back of a player walking away. The stamp can’t be defended… There’s a difference between over zealous challenges and the above.