Dublin hoping for 25,000 spectators for Kerry match

SPRING SERIES:DUBLIN ARE hopeful the next leg of the "Spring Series" will bring 25,000 to Croke Park on Saturday. After the weekend's matches against the All-Ireland champions in hurling and football drew 35,000 to see Dublin defeat Tipperary and Cork in Division One matches, the Kerry footballers are up next.

County chair Andy Kettle says that although there had initially been higher projections, the attendance turned out to be more or less as he had estimated.

“Maybe hopes had got a little high early on,” he said, “but as time went by we came back to reality and getting 35,000 into Croke Park on a February evening is still very satisfactory. If you looked at all the attendances for the Allianz League outside of Dublin, they’d hardly add up to that.

“The Dublin football supporter is used to following the team with the sun on their back. They’re not like Leinster rugby fans who know all about cold weather. If we’d had those games in Parnell Park you’d have been looking at crowds of about 6,000 or 7,000.

“Instead, those figures were multiplied five-fold and that has to count as a success.

“Thirteen euro for two great games and the music. You wouldn’t get three pints of Guinness for that. It was a fairytale start to the series. I walked off the pitch with the hurlers under the Cusack and the reception they received from the crowd was a super boost for them because they haven’t been used to big crowds, and hopefully people who were there will come back and watch more hurling matches.

“It’s great for the team now that the relegation pressure has eased and they can go and express themselves.”

Given all of the promotion for last weekend’s double bill and the presence of Eurovision hopefuls Jedward, there are apprehensions that without the hurlers and bearing in mind the distance from Kerry, Saturday’s crowd might fall a lot short of last week’s.

“We wouldn’t have budgeted for a high turn-out from Kerry,” says Kettle. “In this economic situation long-distance travel for night matches isn’t very easy, but we’ve sold 15,000 of our ticket packages for the Spring Series, and when you add the corporate-level tickets, which are around 7,000, you’ve over 20,000 straight away.”

It wasn’t known at the time the fixture was made, but Saturday night’s general election count coverage will be a powerful incentive for the armchair follower (the match is on Setanta) to stay put.

“You plan as far as you can, but Dublin and Kerry are traditional rivals and we beat them down there for the first time in a long time last year. I think there’ll be big interest. We’d be looking at 25,000,” says Kettle.