No rapture, so where the hell were the fans?
Clearly if you have this in your hands then the end of the world — the lakes of fire, vengeful serpents etc., etc. — did not quite materialise.
(We never credited these people with existing until the day my wife and I were at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, standing in front of an exhibition on evolution featuring stuffed monkeys. “Those are NOT your ancestors, Bobby,” said a man behind us to the child by his side. Sometimes we kid each other, even now, that he was talking about the monkeys.)
Still, the apocalypse would have explained the crowd yesterday in Páirc Uí Chaoimh or rather the lack of same. You had the All-Ireland senior football champions playing, Cork, in their first championship outing since winning the big one last September, yet the attendance was only just over 4,000 (4,186 if you want to be pedantic).
That seems a little small to us. After all, there were about 40,000 in Cork city to welcome home the footballers who won the All-Ireland title last year. There were certainly more than 40,000 asking me for tickets in late August to the same game; it got so bad I had to go and hide in Catalonia for a week, though I doubt you sympathise, particularly when I say that I found the most divine Basque tavern just off the beach . . .
Ahem. Sorry.
In essence: you would imagine that given the game yesterday wasn’t being played two hours away, in Ennis, or even one hour away, from the biggest centre of population in the county, that you might have more than 4,000 at the event, but no.
Even allowing for the fact that it wasn’t the sexiest contest one could have envisaged, those were still the players that thousands of Cork supporters simply had to see a scant eight months ago. How have they lost their box-office appeal since WINNING the All-Ireland?
It’s not just Gaelic football. There were empty seats at the Aviva during the week, though clearly the presence of two teams from one of the only other European countries as financially dysfunctional as Ireland was never going to generate a big crowd.
It wasn’t surprising to see the Portuguese teams return tickets: we just didn’t realise that Wednesday evenings in Dublin had become filled with alternative attractions to a European final second only to the Champions League in importance. Clearly it has.
Worse, though, was the attendance at Munster-Ospreys in the Magners League semi-final. That poor attendance was a little more difficult to explain away, largely due to the self-mythologising of the Munster supporters. It was hilarious to hear the plethora of communions in Limerick on the day in question being blamed for the low turn-out, particularly when we had the Good Friday alcohol ban overturned so recently for the same cohort of sports fan.
Looks like God is not mocked, after all.
To be more accurate, the no-show in Thomond would be hilarious if it wasn’t such a slap in the face for the Munster players, who have given a decade’s enjoyment to their followers.
You would have thought that a difficult season would have brought out the best in their followers, a desire to get behind a team that could do with some love, but obviously not.
Clearly it’s dangerous to get on the case of cash-strapped fans in a recession, particularly when the one who’s doing all the preaching is getting paid to go to those games.
But people take a masochistic pleasure in telling you how much they spend on going to the All-Ireland final/away Heineken Cup semis/Old Trafford, inviting you to index-link their fealty to their wallet.
If those people were to take that money and use it in a different way they’d have enough to go to the other games — dare we say the less attractive games — and thus be able to occupy the moral high ground. From that unassailable position they could then rain derision down on the bandwagon-jumpers at the marquee events.
Anyhow. We do but suggest.
Back to yesterday. Talking to Munster GAA chiefs at the recent championship launch in Mallow, they acknowledged that the football championship has always been in the shade of its hurling counterpart when it comes to attracting the big crowds.
They were also hopeful of a big turnout for Cork and Tipperary in hurling this Sunday coming in Thurles, though with the negativity on Leeside maybe that’s not a given either.
What negativity, I hear you say? Well, as they said at the conclusion of episodes of Tales of the Riverbank long ago, that’s another story.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie; Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
