GAA apologises over trophy incident

GAA President Nickey Brennan has put his hands up and apologised over the blunder that saw Wexford captain Colm Morris lift the wrong trophy after his side's historic NFL Division 3 final win over Fermanagh at Parnell Park yesterday.

Morris accepted the O'Byrne Cup from Brennan after the game instead of the Division 3 cup.

Amazingly, the Division 3 silverware ended up in O'Moore Park, Portlaoise where victorious Offaly captain Ger Rafferty accepted that cup following his county's NFL Division 4 final win over Tipperary.

Brennan blamed the blunder on a packaging error.

"There was a mishap and it was just a packaging error," Brennan said.

"It shouldn't have happened and we apologise to the counties concerned and we will get the matter rectified during the week."

However Brennan was not keen to go into the logistics of the error.

"I don't really know the situation apart from the fact that when I got to Parnell Park, we immediately spotted there was a problem."

Brennan also reaffirmed that despite the Croke Park pitch looking in pristine shape at the moment, it would not have been ready in time for the weekend's league deciders.

UK pitch experts STRI have been drafted in to look after the Croke Park surface and according to Brennan, they are still putting in last-minute preparations to have the pitch ready for a hectic summer of championship action.

"We checked but it just wasn't ready. It looks perfect to all of us here today, but it is very fresh grass and playing on it would have affected it and its growth during the summer," Brennan said.

"We did state all along that there would be periods of outages after the trouble we had a couple of years ago and we opted for a number of small outages rather than big outages, and this was just the window that we used."

The President feels that the decision to hold the weekend's finals in provincial venues - Parnell Park, Pairc Tailteann and O'Moore Park - has proven to be the correct one.

"It was important to understand that this was well flagged so it is a bit surprising to hear people talking about Croke Park. It was well flagged that it would not be available and anyway with the combination of teams, I think we were proven right in relation to holding it (the Division 1 and 3 double header) in a smaller venue.

"Derry were going to bring a certain crowd, Kerry were going to bring a small crowd and we all knew that, to be quiet frank about it.

"We felt that there would be probably as a big walk in crowd from the Kerry people in Dublin as people coming up from the Kingdom," he reasoned.

"While in relation to Wexford and Fermanagh it was a logical half-way house anyway. So from that point of view we got the venue reasonably right."