Home sweet home: The best of the county grounds
It may not enjoy top billing on The Sunday Game that evening but the sports nerd we all hide inside is making me a little bit giddy at the thought.
Gaelic Park will be this onlooker’s 30th county ground visited in as many years travelling to GAA matches as a supporter and a journalist — though never both at the same time, of course! — leaving just Páirc Sean Mac Diarmada in Carrick-on-Shannon and Walsh Park in Waterford to be crossed off the list.
It’s been three decades of games in grounds that varied from the good to the bad and to the downright ugly but it’s been a magical means of crisscrossing this peculiar little island and here’s hoping for 30 more.
Croke Park when full and throbbing with energy makes for an electrifying experience, and Munster hurling final day in Thurles is as addictive as it is legendary, but the sight of the hordes walking up and then down the hill from the jam-packed town and into St Tiernach’s Park is unique. Just don’t mention the traffic out of the place after.
The old O’Connor Park was an absolute dump and the press box a rickety flea pit but the new stadium, well, what a joy. Not only is the press box heated but it has its own toilet and tea and sandwiches too. And all of it accessed by a lift. A lift, no less. More of this please.
With the forested acres of Killarney National Park and St Finan’s Hospital serving as backdrops, Fitzgerald Stadium is hard to beat but the wide expanse of Ben Bulben with its trademark perpendicular cliff-face seen from Markievicz Park in Sligo almost manages it. Both are magical on a sunny day.
Hard to look beyond HQ with its Premium Level gourmet fodder. But a tip of the hat to Breffni Park in Cavan for their revolutionary stance in mixing chicken with tikka. One area the entire association could improve on, in fairness.
Ignore the panicky punters ditching motors two miles or more out from town, tell the garda manning the first barricaded roundabout you’re a journalist/steward/priest/player then make for the stadium itself and park right around the back just metres from the ground. !
Slap bang in the middle of the country (sort-of), on the main motorway between Dublin and Cork and fairly close to the slip roads leading onto said M7 which negates the urban traffic. There’s a food court nearby too. Of course, if your county is playing there it probably means you’re in an All-Ireland qualifier so best avoided, really.
Nestled, like so many GAA grounds, in the midst of a heavily residential area, Pearse Stadium has all the mod cons thanks to substantial redevelopment in recent years. Someone really should tell the people of Galway about it, or airlift the place to a spot where the wind doesn’t hold so many games to ransom.
Páirc Esler in Newry and Nowlan Park in Kilkenny both have stands behind one set of goals that are reminiscent of English soccer grounds but the structure in Pearse Park that wraps around the town end goal and all the way up one sideline wouldn’t look out of place in French rugby’s Top 14. Magnifique.
It may be a nightmare trying to get in or out of the place by car but there is something special about being funnelled inexorably towards this place on a wave of buzzing humanity on a big match day. That said, the walk out is always more welcome after an afternoon wedged in those tight seats.
If Páirc Tailteann had been built in the USA it would have been razed to the ground decades ago, possibly the day after its construction. It’s impossible to envisage an era when its shack of a main stand would have ever looked new and yet this wreck and the grass banks behind both goals speak wistfully of an era lost forever. Then again, Gaelic Park in Drogheda may well give Navan a run for its money there.
Email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie
Twitter: @rackob
