Croker shouldn’t be the be all and end all

OVER a bridge we ambled, the river Shannon flowing peacefully, but powerfully beneath us. To our right King’s Island with King John’s Castle just about visible out of the corner of our eye.

Green and gold mingled with green and red along the tree lined streets down towards the Ennis Road, down towards a sun-baked Gaelic Grounds. It was a day like no other. It was something special, something different.

For a week the doom-sayers wailed against the injustice of it all. The GAA had made a show of themselves, let themselves down, let down the supporters of Mayo and Kerry, not to mention the players, for failing to have Croke Park available for the replay of the All Ireland semi-final.

One commentator even branded the Gaelic Grounds “a dump”. Granted it’s not quite as salubrious as headquarters. The press facilities are massively inferior to those on Jones’ Road – your heart bleeds we’re sure – the main stand is one of the worst designed in any stadium anywhere... and did we care?

Did the people sitting in that stand care? Did the players out on the pitch play with any less conviction than they would have were the game to be played in Croke Park? Are you kidding? They just got on with it. The whingers and their whinges were quickly forgotten.

We all, however many thousand of us there were, got swept up in it all. That the game was one of the all time classic contests, featuring some of the finest individual performances you’re ever likely to see, probably colours our memory of the day, but that’s sort of the point isn’t it?

It didn’t have to be played in Croke Park for it to be hailed an instant classic. The game evolved and the occasion did right along with it. The atmosphere built and built and reached a crescendo.

The Kerry players weren’t any less elated when the final whistle blew, the Mayo players weren’t any less disappointed. It was more intimate, more personal than Croke Park. Ogie Moran was able to embrace his son, man of the match David, on the pitch in front of the stand in a way he’d never be permitted to in Croke Park.

We say all this not to knock Croke Park in any way, simply to make the point that it’s not the be all and the end all. For the next two months the epicentre of the GAA universe switches to Dublin 3. Nowhere else gets a look in. The 2014 semi-final replay was an aberration. The Gaelic Grounds has hardly been filled again since then. Croke Park hasn’t even hinted at fixing a game in the latter stages of the All Ireland championship any where other than Croke Park. That seems to us not only a mistake, but short-sighted and somewhat against the very spirit of the Association. It’s a drive towards centralisation in an organisation that’s supposed to be as much about the country’s regions as its centre. There’s surely a case to be made for moving at least some of the All Ireland football quarter-finals out of Croke Park and into provincial grounds. This weekend’s All Ireland quarter-finals in Croke Park will make hardly any impact on life in the capital. Were they to instead be played in Limerick – with Kerry and Clare, Galway and Tipperary playing it would be an obvious venue to choose – it would provide a boost, both tangible and intangible, to the city of Limerick and Gaelic games in that county. There are arguments against it. The principal one amongst them being that the players of Tipperary and Clare deserve their day in Croke Park. Neither county has a huge amount of Croke Park experience, so why shouldn’t they get their day in the sun? It’s certainly a persuasive argument – Clare haven’t played there in championship since 1992 and Tipperary since 1935 – and, yet, we’re not completely sold on it. For the longest time the only sure fire way for most counties to make it to Croker was to reach an All Ireland semi-final. Quarter-finals in Croke Park – and quarter-finals full stop – are historically atypical, even if they’ve been with us now since 2001 (in 2001 by the way Kerry and Dublin played out another couple of classics in Semple Stadium). This Sunday’s games could bring the argument for change to the fore. As of now we can’t imagine there will be many more than 30,000 spectators in attendance. A crowd of in and around 30,000 makes Croke Park a fairly soulless arena. There isn’t a critical mass to generate an atmosphere – there’s usually seagulls on the pitch when that happens, look out for that at the weekend– and when there isn’t an atmosphere the action on the pitch can often times suffer. Players, some of them at any rate, feed off the crowd. Calls for to change the venue for this week were always going to fall on deaf ears, but it is an idea whose time has come. It’s time to include all of Ireland – and not just Dublin – in the All Ireland championship.