Quote from: armaghniac on September 02, 2021, 01:12:11 PMQuote from: Lone Shark on September 02, 2021, 11:23:45 AM
Lads, anyone who thinks sending two tickets to a club in Wicklow or Carlow is the wrong thing to do badly needs to spend a year actively involved in their club's administration, so they can get a feel for quite how much is involved in being a club secretary, treasurer or chairperson. All-Ireland final tickets is the GAA's way of recognising that effort, which goes way above and beyond what any supporter does for any county. Even at that, nine times out of ten those people won't even use the ticket - it'll get given to the U-12 coach who has a first cousin playing in the game, or the Mayo lad who moved into the parish and now sells 20 lotto tickets a week in his workplace, or it'll be put up for raffle as part of a fundraiser. Even if they do go, then yeah, they probably weren't at a game all year - because every other day, the county game clashes with the club U-13 fixture, or a county board meeting, or some other official duty.
The happy-go-lucky, doesn't-go-to-a-game-all-year attendee is almost certainly there through sponsorship in one way or another, either at a county or a national level, and is probably high up in marketing in Centra, or Allianz, or Kelloggs, or some company like that. And again - if you don't understand the importance of keeping sponsors happy, you don't understand the GAA either.
Ability to attend games in person is one of the strengths of the GAA and the sense of the whole community being involved in an All Ireland is also one of its strengths. While the TV experience has been very welcome during the pandemic it is something that the Premiership offers every week. It needs to be accepted that using tickets as a form of reward for diligent workers and sponsors has a price to be paid in the reputation of the GAA as a place run for the benefit of insiders rather than the community. It would be better if alternative forms of recognition could be identified and some more tickets go to the counties. In 1977, I sent a cheque to the County Secretary and got 3 tickets back in return, I could never do that now if Armagh reached the final again despite the stadium holding almost 20,000 more. Some rebalancing is needed.
There's a fundamental truth at the root of this, but I'm not entirely sure what "alternative form of recognition" would work that wouldn't at the same time be extremely costly to the association. Firstly the nature of the current system is that the tickets tend to find their way back to the most ardent supporters. What happens in a lot of cases is that if a chairperson or secretary has access to a ticket, they might want to go themselves but it's far more likely that they'll have a Mayo or Tyrone person in their club or in their lives that they'll accommodate, and because that official is dyed-in-the-wool GAA themselves, they'll understand the difference between someone who'll really appreciate it and the day out.
I also wouldn't go so far as to say that it is an "association run for insiders", or even that a perception like that is held by anyone with the slightest of understanding how the GAA works. Yes, I've no doubt that view is held by your average supporter that's passionate about Man United in the winter and then transfers that "support" to their county for June, July and August, but frankly, that type of supporter can think anything they like, it doesn't bother me.
Moreover, the most recent numbers suggest there is circa 540,000 GAA members on the island of Ireland. The population of the island of Ireland is roughly 6.5 million, so what that tells me is that one in eleven Irish people is a member of a GAA Club. Let's assume that expands out to one in eight, or even one in six in communities like Claremorris or Carrickmore, where the GA is the primary sporting and social organisation by a distance.
Even at that level, by current population numbers, allocation 11,000 tickets to a county comes pretty close to catering for every GAA member in that county, or at least every club member that wants one. It certainly caters for two thirds of them at least, and probably more when you factor in that an U-6 is not going to go to any game and sit still for two hours, while there will be plenty more lads that are working, have other things on, or have other reasons why they can't go. GAA club members that don't get sorted directly aren't as common as all that. And again, if you're not a member, my sympathy for you is very limited, or maybe non-existent!
Because of my role as a GAA reporter and club minor secretary, I get oodles of requests from acquaintances for tickets every year (and no, I don't get one of my club ones) and sometimes, through Roscommon GAA or Offaly GAA and the work I do for them, I get allocated one. But most of those requests are people I would never be in the least bit concerned about accommodating; because I know for a fact they aren't a club member, and have no affiliation with their local club whatsoever beyond at a push, dropping the kids off for training and then scarpering out the door for coffee with other Mammies and/or Daddies, just in case anyone might see them lingering and ask them to help out.
There is one guy from East Mayo that I will try and sort out, because he's a hardcore supporter, club member, has sorted out sponsorship for teams from his previous employers, supports my local club fundraiser that I run, and yet somehow still tends to miss out. But guys like that who don't get sorted are extremely rare.
And I'm not being facetious when I say 1977 was a different world. People simply didn't go to games back then, you had All-Ireland semi-finals and provincial finals with 10,000 people at them. We're never going back to that, or at least I hope not.