The Cork County Board are going for the safety in numbers approach when it comes to choosing its next hurling boss, and there’s All-Ireland-type ticket fever before this weekend’s third round qualifier in Navan.
When it comes to making decisions, there are few bodies more thorough than Cork County Board. The GAA does committees – make sure you pronounce it correctly, now, by putting the emphasis on the last syllable – better than anyone in the world does committees. And people in Cork do them better than anyone else in the GAA.
So when it comes to choosing their next senior hurling manager, after they got wind of the fact that the desperately unsuccessful Denis Walsh was interested in replacing himself, they decided to abandon the methodology that got them in this pickle in the first place.
A three-man (you guessed it) commit-tee plumped for Walsh two years ago, but the privilege of choosing the top boss for 2012 and beyond will be back in the County Board’s hands.
And when we say County Board, of course we mean Frank Murphy.
Ticket fever
When is a capacity of 28,000 not a capacity of 28,000?
When it’s at Pairc Tailteann, Navan. Meath’s county ground will host Saturday’s All-Ireland third round qualifier between the Royals and their overlords Kildare, and the announcement that there will be a reduced capacity is sure to prompt a ticket frenzy in parts of The Pale over the next couple of days.
It turns out that the banks behind each goal have been ruled out of bounds by the GAA’s health and safety commit-tee, meaning just 20,000 will be permitted through the turnstiles this weekend.
Strangely, given human nature in general, and the human nature of GAA folk in particular, if no announcement had been made the attendance on Saturday night probably wouldn’t have exceeded 20,000, but now that there’s a limit in place the game will sell out by Friday lunchtime.
It’s a marketing masterstroke, but as this is the GAA, it’s probably an accidental marketing masterstroke.
