Do Super 8 games really need to be played in Croke Park?
IT’S as if the weather gods knew what was coming before the rest of us did. After what seemed to be forty rainless days and forty dry, balmy nights the heavens opened on Sunday morning, the second day of the opening weekend of the All-Ireland SFC Quarter-final Group Phase, or the ‘Super 8s’ to use the now unshakeable label given to it by some media genius.
After the one-sided opener between Tyrone and Roscommon followed by a fairly uninspiring arm-wrestle between Dublin and Donegal maybe the weather gods were trying to send out a message. If you’re from Kildare or Kerry don’t bother travelling, and unless you absolutely love your county then don’t waste your time coming in from Monaghan or Galway either. In the end 30,740 decided not to listen or weren’t able to decode the signs in the black clouds overhead, which in hindsight were the clearest portent possible for the muckfest of football on offer in Croke Park on Sunday afternoon.
Of course, there was never anything close to 31,000 in Croke Park at any one time. A quick estimation from the deserted upper Hogan Stand would suggest about 20,000 in for the Monaghan versus Kildare game and barely 10,000 for the Kerry match. By the time David Clifford did his best Antoine Griezmann impression with his 77th minute goal we’d venture there was about 7,000 in the stadium, the rest of them already halfway down Jones’s Road in search of a dry public house showing the World Cup Final or looking for the fastest way onto the M7 in the case of most of those loyal but let-down Kerry supporters.
We assume there will be a root and branch review of the Super 8s by the GAA authorities as soon as Stephen Cluxton takes the Sam Maguire home again in early September, and we humbly suggest that those charged with the review consider carefully and critically last weekend. Leaving aside the unfortunate clash of Sunday’s games with events in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, the GAA will have to carefully reconsider the value - to the Association at large and the constituent teams - of staging these Super 8 games in Croke Park, or at the very least the pairings and order in which they are played.
Leaving aside the particular results last weekend and how they have impacted teams heading into Round 2, one has to wonder how the fixture makers reached their decisions in who plays who and in what rounds and where.
On any level it seems wrong that the three provincial champions (we’ll leave aside Dublin for the moment as a special case because of their arrangement with playing in Croke Park) this year - Kerry, Galway and Donegal - all have to wait until the final round to play at home in their own county. That all three had to play their first game in Croke Park in one thing, and acceptable seeing as the four Qualifier winners also had to play at HQ on the opening weekend, but there seems something very wrong with all three having to then go on the road seven days later to an ‘away’ venue. At least Galway travel to Newbridge on the back of a win and can take that momentum in against Kildare, but Kerry’s and Donegal’s ‘reward’ for being provincial champions is having to travel to Clones and Roscommon town respectively a week after losing their opening game.
Of course, the GAA’s fixture makers can’t be held responsible for how the results of the first round play out, but given that the first round pits the provincial winners against each other it’s inevitable (barring the unlikely event of two draws) that two provincial winners would be heading to an away venue on the back of a defeat, and likewise the likelihood they at least one or two would be then going up against a Qualifier with a win under their belt, which is the scenario that Kerry find themselves in going up against Monaghan.
If the Super 8s are meant to eradicate the advantage that the provincial champions had, in theory at least, under the old system that’s one thing, but it shouldn’t goes so far as to disadvantage the provincial winners, which is what is happening now. Someone asked earlier in the week that perhaps the advantage for the provincial champion is having their last Group Phase game at home, to which the obvious response is that’s it will be of no advantage if that champion is already out of the running for a semi-final place. Lose above in Clones, or if Donegal lose away in Hyde Park, and Killarney or Ballybofey will be of precious little value to Kerry and Donegal on the August Bank Holiday weekend.
It’s been well worn in the build up to the Super 8s the advantage that Dublin have in getting to play two games in Croke Park and just one on the road. It’s a tricky one to solve at the moment given the vast support the Dubs enjoy and the complete inadequacy of Parnell Park to accommodate anywhere close to sufficient numbers were they to use that as their ‘home’ venue. But what of the apparent necessity for the rest of them to play one game in Croke Park. Does it really - really - have to be so? It’s long be perpetuated that every county - players and supporters - want to play in Croke Park, that everyone wants their shot at playing in the Big House. But is this really the case anymore? Certainly the counties that have made the Super 8s this year - effectively all the Division One teams bar Mayo, with Roscommon who were Division One two years ago and will be again next year - are more than familiar with Croke Park and are hardly enthralled at playing there at this stage. And certainly not, one must believe, when the place is less than a quarter full and devoid of any semblance of atmosphere or electricity at all.
For sure, if a Leitrim or an Antrim or a Limerick were to somehow make their way into the Super 8s those players and supporters might covet the chance to play in Croke Park but is the chance of a blue moon event like that a good enough reason to enshrine into law that a Super 8 game must be played in Croke Park?
Micheal Quirke wrote in his Examiner column on Tuesday of clearly hearing the sound of a pitch-side gate bolt being opened clearly clanging around the stadium just before the start of the Kerry game. Even worse, this observer clearly heard the crack of Paul Conroy’s leg breaking 20 minutes into the game. Had the hot seasonal weather of the last month continued into Sunday we would have expected a couple of coils of tumble-weed to blow in from the stands.
Imagine the atmosphere had Kerry played Galway in the Gaelic Grounds, or better again Cusack Park in Ennis, with the 10,000 or so supporters pressed up to the wire. Or Kildare and Monaghan going at each other in Pairc Tailteann in Navan, a compact venue that hosted a couple of great Qualifiers this year.
Tyrone and Roscommon in Brewster Park or Mullingar or Portlaoise?
Why the obsession with Croke Park for quarter-finals? Under the old pre-Qualifier system only the All-Ireland semi-finals and finals were played in Dublin, and even now the All-Ireland hurling quarter-finals aren’t played in Croke Park.
Most of the provincial grounds aren’t as shiny or perfect as Croke Park but most have more than adequate playing surfaces and can and do comfortably accommodate the sort of attendances that the old All-Ireland quarter-finals and now the Super 8s will attract.
Through no one’s fault and everyone’s fault the start of the new Super 8 era was a fairly damp squib, with the rain coming down in sympathy. Better rounds and years ahead hopefully, but right now we’ll take Satisfactory over Super as we head to Clones - a proper provincial out-post - where Kerry’s Championship will live or die.