Time For Kildare Fans To Be Counted

Season ticket holders not guaranteed a ticket at small venues. It is in terms and conditions and is a lie being peddled by GAA so they can get away with this, as with Aughrim.

Cian O'Neill has been excellent in all of this

GAA: a home game should be a home game, whether it's in qualifiers or Super 8s.

Also: stop financially doping Dublin to the eyeballs – moving our games to Croker to facilitate same – and start taking radical action to make championship more competitive.

All quite straightforward.

The latest on this from Marty... https://twitter.com/i/status/1011587166747557888

Drivel from Maughan... Next!

Borderline wrote:

The latest on this from Marty... https://twitter.com/i/status/1011587166747557888

Comes across as a CP mouthpiece. Nothing unusual there I suppose.

That interview with Ned Quinn is something else, he comes across as a character from Farher Ted. What a bungling idiot. As for Sean Kelly, he basically wanted the GAA to bribe the county board into submission.

Throwing money at their problems is no longer an option, players and supporters only want fairness and a level playing field for all.

Roll on 5 o’clock..

Very disappointing from Marty, totally one sided view of the argument. Let him know if you see him in Conleths in future.
As for Maughan would he even bother giving his opinion if it wasn't his beloved Mayo involved.

Just listened to Marty on News at One quoting "health and safety."
Yet he has not asked the GAA what that means - because it means nothing.
8000 people at an all ticket game does not break health and safety regulations

What station was Ned Quinn on, wet myself reading transcript. Dying to listen. By his logic there'll likely be mass graves out sold-out Semple on Sunday for Munster final. As for All Irelands, genocide.

Brilliant from Christy Moore :

GAA dream quarter finals

Garth Brooks v Bruce Springsteen
Ed Sheeran v U2
The Dubs v The Pope
Rihanna v Conor McGregor #NEWBRIDGEORNOWHERE

Cian O'Neill press conference off due to work commitments. No county board to step in and even read a statement.

Borderline wrote:

John Maughan: Kildare backing themselves into a corner

https://www.rte.ie/sport/gaa/2018/0626/973298-john-maughan-kildare-backed-themselves-into-a-corner/

"Kildare have backed themselves into a corner, this should have been dealt with behind closed doors. There should have been some sort of an arrangement, but coming out publicly as Cian O'Neill did yesterday and Kildare management did saying it is St Conleth's Park or nowhere, I don't think that is helpful and what we have now is a very, very entrenched situation," he added.

I don't think there's anything the county board or O'Neill could have said that would have been more helpful in all of this.

They aren't there to pander to Croke Park or a team with a big support.

They are there to represent Kildare GAA and at the moment they are doing it absolutely brilliantly

TommyKeegan wrote:

Cian O'Neill press conference off due to work commitments. No county board to step in and even read a statement.

Negotiations must be ongoing as they say!

Tommy - search Off The Ball AM from this morning on YouTube for NQ. Brace yourself - it's quite something even by the standards of GAA officialdom.

if_in_doubt wrote:

Borderline wrote:

John Maughan: Kildare backing themselves into a corner

https://www.rte.ie/sport/gaa/2018/0626/973298-john-maughan-kildare-backed-themselves-into-a-corner/

"Kildare have backed themselves into a corner, this should have been dealt with behind closed doors. There should have been some sort of an arrangement, but coming out publicly as Cian O'Neill did yesterday and Kildare management did saying it is St Conleth's Park or nowhere, I don't think that is helpful and what we have now is a very, very entrenched situation," he added.

I don't think there's anything the county board or O'Neill could have said that would have been more helpful in all of this.



They aren't there to pander to Croke Park or a team with a big support.

They are there to represent Kildare GAA and at the moment they are doing it absolutely brilliantly

Behind Closed Doors - for far too long!

TommyKeegan wrote:

Cian O'Neill press conference off due to work commitments. No county board to step in and even read a statement.

I'd imagine a solution is close at hand and I believe there can only be 1 solution that the Kildare county board can agree to and thats Newbridge with all season ticket fans getting a ticket.

Rest will be split evenly among the 2 counties meaning it will be 3 to 1 Mayo in Newbridge on Saturday.

TommyKeegan wrote:

Cian O'Neill press conference off due to work commitments. No county board to step in and even read a statement.

Just a tad worrying.


https://youtu.be/MD3DdskaPhs

topcat wrote:

Kildare and Croke Park have both backed themselves into a corner where they can't/won't back down.

Giving that Croke Park seems to be expecting scenes from Millwall v West Ham games of the 80s, if the game is to be played in Newbridge!! Who is heading up our firm!!!

Got to be TK, the level of fury he would reign down would be epic. Now where is my old lacoste top.

I'd have to buy a bomber jacket. Can we fundraise for it on Saturday too?

We surely are not backing down on this??

Dont fool yourselves that Mayo are backing our stance. The following text is from the Mayo Gaa Blog.



Kildare are in a right corner now
June 26, 2018 Willie Joe


Bloody hell, this was a storm nobody saw coming 24 hours ago. But, following the Round 3 draw this morning which saw us pitted against Kildare next Saturday, events have unfolded at dizzying speed. So much so that at this stage it’s impossible to tell for sure if the tie will be played at all.
Let’s aim for some clarity in terms of what happened. The draw this morning handed home advantage in the tie to Kildare, as they were first out of the hat, but venues and times for all ties have to be okayed by the GAA’s CCCC.
Immediately the CCCC recognised there’d be a problem with capacity at St Conleth’s Park. With the fixture forced to be an all-ticket one then, as this piece in the Irish Times confirms (which is worth a careful read, by the way, in particular by those who’ve been quick to pronounce judgment on the rights and wrongs of the decision to move the tie to Croke Park), the capacity at the Newbridge venue would be just over 8,000.
Any eejit can recognise that a ground that could only take 8,000 punters, at least 7,000 of whom would be standing on the terraces, isn’t big enough to cater for a match like this. There were over 8,000 at our Round 1 match against Limerick and more than 11,000 at the Tipp match last weekend. In both cases the vast bulk of those supporters were ours.
Clearly, we’ll be assembling an even bigger crowd for next weekend. And you’d imagine it’s a game for which Kildare would attract a fair bit of support too. That piece linked above confirms that the GAA expects that at least 18,000 would attend the game.
All of which makes the Kildare GAA statement – which is here – so difficult to understand. They claim that they’d have “no difficulty” hosting the game at St Conleth’s Park but are only able to support this claim by referring repeatedly to how they’re “entitled” to do this. Nowhere in the statement is the 18,000 into 8,000 mathematical issue addressed .
Then a besuited Cian O’Neill went on prime time TV, on RTÉ’s Six-One News, to double down on Kildare’s position. He stated he could see no logic in the decision – despite citing the interest of fans as one of his reasons for playing the game at St Conleth’s Park – and insisted that they’d be togged in Newbridge on Saturday evening.
The GAA clearly weren’t buying any of this guff when they came to the conclusion that St Conleth’s Park wasn’t a runner. They could see the venue could cater for less than half the potential attendance and so, like they’ve done so often in the past for other qualifier ties, including to facilitate Kildare, they moved to Plan B.
Kildare, though, wouldn’t nominate an alternative, despite the fact that O’Moore Park in Portlaoise would fit the bill pretty much perfectly (for us as well as for them). This led inexorably to the logic of playing the Cavan/Tyrone game (which couldn’t be fixed for Breffni Park, as it’s closed for redevelopment) and our match with Kildare as a double-header in Croke Park.
Yes, it’s an arrangement that suits Sky Sports down to the ground and, absolutely, there’s no justification for the ticket price-hike that always goes hand-in-glove with matches being fixed for HQ. But, as that piece above makes clear, it was Kildare’s intransigence that, first and foremost, resulted in this outcome.
Which inevitably leads to the question – why? More particularly, why now?
It would be one thing if Kildare GAA had a consistent line to defend here. But they don’t. They sold their soul for grubby cash years ago and, like the rest of Leinster, have for years happily trotted off to play at Croke Park at every available opportunity. For Heaven’s sake, they even played Dublin at Croke Park as a home game in the League a few years back.
And how come this is being held up as some kind of exemplar about the GAA selling its soul more generally? That particular train left the station a long, long time ago, with far less attendant wailing at its departure too. Probably because Twitter hadn’t been invented then, I guess.
So this poor-old-us routine from Kildare GAA doesn’t cut it, I’m afraid. What have they done to develop Newbridge as a venue suitable for matches like this? That’s right – absolutely nothing. The place is an embarrassment and the only surprise is that the GAA still allows them to continue playing League matches there in this day and age, never mind championship ones.
So, as things currently stand, Kildare will be warming up at St Conleth’s Park on Saturday evening while our lads will be doing likewise up at HQ. It’s a ludicrous state of affairs.
But it’s not one that can, despite what the usual suspects might claim, be laid at the door of our County Board. This is a spat that involves the GAA and Kildare, we’re just collateral damage.
It goes without saying that we’ll play wherever we’re sent next weekend. Newbridge would never have been ideal for us but we’d have gone there had we been ordered to do so. Some of us – a fairly small minority but, hey, who’s counting? – might even have managed to get in to see the game.
It’s hard to see the GAA back-tracking now. Indeed, if the CCCC caves on this then they may as well dissolve themselves altogether and let fixtures venues be decided instead on the basis of the popularity of Twitter hashtags or some kind of similar metric.
Hopefully, sense will break out and that this occurs sooner rather than later. It doesn’t help, of course, that Kildare have painted themselves so badly – and in such a public way – into a corner on the issue.
There’s no easy way out for them now, just like there’s no easy way to jam 18,000 fans into a venue that holds 8,000. But try telling that to Cian O’Neill and his fulminating fellow-travellers. What a mess.

PS I think GAA as part of climbdown if there is one should be asked to apologise to both Mayo and Kildare fans. McGill suggested they are idiots who would show in 1,000s for all-ticket game with no ticket to point of hurting each other. Ned Quinn went one better and said they'd try to hurt each other as if animals. Is there any low these spoofers won't sink to so as not to admit they are wrong. Genuinely, a massive insult to Kildare and Mayo supporters.