I go to a lot more matches than you anyway mate.
Incredible gymnastics here now.
I get why they donât want minor before the senior. But surely some of the matches could be coupled up as double headers with the under 20s seeing as teams play the same slate of fixtures.
Would make more sense for example to have Waterford v Clare or Limerick as a double header on a Saturday than two mid week games for all involved.
Why dont they want Minor on before Senior when it worked well for over 50 years?
The age changed pal
There was no need to change the age.
It was only provincial final and all Ireland senior championship before senior though.
The powers that be felt otherwise, but that wasnât your question, you asked why it was moved and it was moved because the age changed
It was a shambles last year with the same pairings in the same ground two nights in a row. At least they were jumbled up a bit this year.
I think people enjoy matches mid week though and there would be the occasional issue with u20 / senior crossover if they were played at weekends.
People probably donât have the concentration levels for exceedingly attractive double headers any more I guess.
They were always stand alone fixtures apart from minor finals.
Just over 39k at the Clare v Kilkenny, All Ireland Hurling semi final yesterday at 3pm on the first Saturday in July. Down nearly 10k on the attendance at the corresponding fixture last year, which was played on a Sunday afternoon.
Full house yesterday. Saturday sure everyone know KK dont travel.
Split season blamed for supporter bad behaviour. Ive heard it all now.
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I wonder would it be worth looking to go back to having each of the all Ireland semi finals as an island game for the first 4 weeks of July?
Would certainly help with promotion of all four matches. Would also allow an extra week or two of prep for the sides who make the final.
Hurling final the last week of July, football final August bank holiday weekend.
You could alternate each year which side of the draw would get the extra weeks break ahead of the final.
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Yeah, be good idea.
This year that would have meant an All-Ireland hurling semi-final on June 30th.
July 09, 2024 at 1:00am BST
IF there was ever a thesis done on Kieran McGeeney, the majority of its conclusions would be drawn from the 24-second clip just before Armagh went to war with Kerry twenty-two years ago.
A camera intrudes on their final pre-match huddle. McGeeney is not asking his team-mates to do anything. He is telling them to do it.
âI want yous to listen in here. I want yous to focus. Listen. Yiz go for the first ball like itâs your last. Boys, dig deep for the first 10 minutes. Give it what you have, the rest will come out. It is in your legs. You will not get tired. Do yiz hear me? Now boys Iâm telling ye, the first ten minutes, go for it like your F***ING LIVES depend on it.â
Heâs a paradox. Often borderline mono-syllabic in front of a microphone. Glaring. Thinking. Disagreeing. Challenging. Smiling inwardly. Making you answer your own question first. Glaring some more.
Rarely the animated figure that operated like a set of steel gates at the heart of his countyâs All-Ireland winning defence.
Mellowed. Older. A different perspective.
The skin you shed is forever the one you lived in first.
He will always be that man in that short video. Emotional in a different sense. Raw. Vocal. Two hands on the wheel, driving Armagh football to its destiny.
If it werenât for that nosey cameraman sticking his oar in just at the right time, late enough that nobody was gonna break Geezerâs flow to hunt him, what would we really know about exactly how he was inside the Armagh changing room?
Itâs standard media fare to grumble over a lack of access. Iâve always promised myself that I wouldnât write that column because A) nobody cares and B) see A.
This isnât it.
Itâs more from the point of view of engaging the public.
And on that front, the media sometimes doesnât help itself. Particularly with football, the default position is negativity.
The games are boring, the structureâs no good, sure Dublin or Kerry will only win it anyway, yada yada.
In the last two weeks alone, weâve had Limerickâs drive for five ended and Dublin knocked out of the football. We should be feeding off the momentum of it, building up the last few weeks of the season.
It is difficult to build when the inside doesnât so much hold the public at armâs length as it places itself on the far side of a moat.
But whether they understand it or not, the people involved in inter-county have a serious responsibility to sell the games.
The discourse around football is so boring.
Itâs so analytical with almost no sense of personality.
That feeds into the negative cycle because when thereâs nothing to talk about, youâre drawn analytically to what a team needs to fix rather than what itâs doing well. That leads to the perception of criticism, stuff pinned to a wall, another bit of the lead from media to team being cut away.
Take RTĂâs website this past week. If I missed other parts, I apologise, but the sole study on Limerick-Cork was a fine statistical piece by Eamon Donoghue on the dip in Diarmaid Byrnesâ form.
Why? Because it was there to be talked about and they didnât give anyone anything else.
It all comes from a deeply embedded culture of fear. Not of the media itself, but of being seen to be brash or boastful.
Thereâs a strength of character involved in putting yourself front and centre ahead of a game.
Culturally, the GAAâs tendency is to shy away from displaying that its central figures have that character.
They do have it. We know they have. You canât go out and perform in front of 82,000 people without it.
But nobodyâs prepared to break the cycle.
So what RTĂ ended up focussing on instead was the manna dripping from Rassie Erasmus, both in his press conferences and his social media account.
Ahead of South Africaâs first test with Ireland, the former Munster head coach actually tweeted last week his prediction of what Irelandâs matchday panel would be, complete with their weight, age and number of caps.
Eben Etzebeth accused the Irish media of targeting him for comments heâd made in April claiming that âprobably 12âł of Irelandâs players had said to him they would âsee you guys in the finalâ after their pool stage win at the World Cup last year.
A summer tour went from off-radar to front and centre. It became an event you had to watch.
That fed into the game itself, a ferocious physical battle fuelled by its build-up.
This is a South African team that has allowed the cameras in to document the most intimate moments of its last two World Cup campaigns.
In Chasing The Sun II, Rassie Erasmus breaks down in tears as he tells the story of Makazole Mapimpiâs jersey.
The South African players were asked to submit photos of family members that would be printed individually into the number on the back of their strip.
Mapimpi only had photos of himself.
âHe only had photos of himself⌠because he didnât have anybody else. And I will say âwhy are you doing this?â and he said his brother died, his mother died, his father died, and he doesnât have a photo. So he doesnât play for one thing. He just got [pff] massive heart⌠massive heart,â Erasmus says.
You instantly feel warmth towards them all watching it.
Look now, itâs started to feel like a media thing, but itâs really not.
Imagine for one moment that Padraic Joyce had come out before the Dublin game and said Galway would win it or that Dublin were looking tired or poured any little bit of fuel on the fire.
You can understand why theyâd look at that and think yeah, thatâs alright for you to say, all that does is motivate Dublin.
But thereâs something to be said for having the confidence to back yourself publically.
We have no rivalries, no bad blood, no grudge matches, no anything.
Itâs all pleasant and placid and PR friendly.
If hurling people knew that Adam Hogan and Eoin Cody didnât like each other before Saturday, why didnât they think to tell the rest of us?
It might have put another 10,000 on the gate and another 100,000 on the TV viewing figures.
There has to be some acceptance that a lot of the fair weather fans you might pick up couldnât care less who plays as the sweeper or what Galwayâs retention rate from kickouts is.
They want blood and they want fireworks and they want people to be at each otherâs throats for an hour and a half.
That is what sells a sport.
Even Formula One is looking sexy again. They had the Verstappen / Horner row earlier in the year and now theyâve a very frank exchange of views between Max Verstappen and his good friend Lando Norris.
That is the stuff that attracts the middle-grounders, the fans who are in the market for sport and they donât care what it is as long as thereâs a bit of needle in it.
We are missing the needle so badly. Missing the insight. Missing the realness.
Everyone has to take a share of the blame for that â but itâs so fixable.
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Football semi-final crowd predictions:
Kerry v Armagh 46,049 (8k of that made up by Taylor Swift Cup final junketeers who will leave before the senior game)
Galway v Donegal 54,743 (if England are in the Euros final this could be lower)
Thatâs a great article. How is it easily fixable though? Irish people and rural/gaa people especially are just naturally modest. The turn around in F1s fortunes by doing that doc on Netflix sums the modern sporting landscape up. People want the intrigue and the drama of it. The killer for the gaa is that half the population live in counties that are shite and donât have a hope and have been like this for 100 years. They just give less and less of a shite about it.