Croke Park expected to be less than half-full for upcoming qualifiers

THE GAA expects a crowd of 35,000-plus at this weekend's All-Ireland SFC qualifiers, but the Association points out that low ticket take-up in the various counties may be skewing crowd predictions.

"The ticket take-up isn't huge, that's true," said Croke Park spokesman Fergal McGill yesterday.

"We're thinking in terms of 35,000 to 40,000 on Saturday and much the same the following day."

Gloomy predictions of a low turn-out have been fuelled by rumours of exceptionally low ticket purchases in certain counties, but McGill says those rumours may be unfounded.

"I haven't heard from the counties involved this weekend, they wouldn't have made their returns yet, but people should remember that a lot of the estimates about ticket sales come from only one source, the county board.

"Nowadays people are using several different outlets to get their tickets, not just the county board - they're using Ticketmaster, the GAA website, and they're picking tickets up on the day. That means it's getting harder and harder to predict crowds, given that before only the county boards were issuing tickets.

"Certainly, in a given county, the county secretary may be saying that no-one is buying tickets, but there are a lot of other options for people to buy tickets."

McGill also points out that several of the counties involved this weekend have large populations in the capital who may be looking for tickets in Dublin.

"Large numbers of people from Kerry, Cork, Galway and Mayo, for instance, would be living in Dublin and would pick up tickets there, that'll also have an effect on numbers getting tickets in the counties themselves.

"We're happy with the numbers expected, we know it's not going to be a huge sell-out this weekend. Kerry are never huge travellers around this time of the championship, while Mayo fans don't seem behind their team the way they were this year."

McGill adds that the "heavy burden" on fans in certain counties also has to be acknowledged.

"Cork wouldn't be traditional followers of the big ball at this point and both themselves and Galway are following their hurlers to Dublin as well.

"None of that means a return to the old days. You won't see a return to the old days of cash at the gate - the St Patrick's day debacle at the All-Ireland club finals last year proved that. We've always encouraged people to buy their tickets beforehand, it just makes it easy for them and for us. When you have a stadium 82,000, if we sell that out five times in a season we're happy."