Red Army fans face fight for tickets

FANCY a ticket for Munster’s Heineken Cup quarter-final clash against Gloucester on Saturday? You’ll be lucky.

The sellout game at Gloucester’s ground has produced the usual frenzied scramble for tickets among the province’s Red Army.

However, anyone still looking for a ticket is likely to face disappointment as all tickets from official sources were snapped up immediately after they went on sale earlier this month.

Tickets on sale via the internet are attracting bids of about £132 (€165) per ticket with a face value of £42 (€55).

Another opportunistic, if somewhat greedy, seller who is seeking a minimum bid of £500 (€630) for a pair of stand tickets has so far failed to attract any bids.

Munster’s allocation of around 4,000 tickets was fully taken up through its usual distributions channels of clubs and schools.

But resourceful Munster fans are believed to have got their hands on some of the 1,500 tickets set aside for the general public in Gloucester. Fans of both teams queued overnight outside Gloucester’s ground at Kingsholm on March 3 when the last remaining tickets were sold out by 8am.

A Gloucester spokesperson admitted yesterday that some Munster fans had managed to obtain tickets sold from their ground, although the Cherry and Whites had tried to reserve the majority for their own season ticket holders.

“I think a few slipped through the net,” laughed the spokesperson. “We could probably have sold over 30,000 tickets for this match but we never considered moving the game to another stadium. There has probably never been anoccasion like it in terms of popularity for us.”

Although Kingsholm has not been a happy hunting ground for Munster in recent years, having suffered consecutive defeats to Gloucester in the pool stages in 2002 and 2003, Declan Kidney’s men will be hoping it is a case of third-time-lucky on Saturday.

Although Gloucester are currently top of the Guinness Premiership, they have recently hit a bad patch, although Kingsholm remains something of a fortress for the English club where they have lost only once this season in all tournaments. The ground’s normal capacity of 16,500 has been reduced by almost 400 for Saturday’s game for health and safety reasons due to refurbishment works at Kingsholm.

In a bid to provide some of the big game atmosphere to ticketless fans of both clubs, Gloucester have organised a screening of the match in the town’s GL1 leisure centre which can accommodate 2,000. Tickets for the event cost £10 each and the price includes a complimentary pint.