Dublin entering the final countdown

EVENT organisers said yesterday that there were only a few hundred tickets left for sale for tomorrow night’s Europa League Final in the Aviva Stadium — yet there is still no guarantee that the game will be a sellout.

The anomaly arises from the fact that some 7,000 tickets were purchased when the initial international allocation for the game went on sale — but that was at a time when some of European football’s bigger guns, including Liverpool and Man City, still had designs on reaching Dublin.

Now, with the final being contested by two Portuguese sides — Porto and Braga — it simply won’t be known until before kick-off at 7.45pm just how many of those 7,000 football fans are actually going to turn up for the first European club football final ever hosted by this country.