The meeting of Derry and Donegal should provide some relief in a GAA season struggling for crowds and attention
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There was a crowd of 4,000 in Newry on Saturday for a Down team on the up against an Antrim team from just down the road. Enniskillen on Sunday was better with 7,000 but I would qualify that a bit because Armagh’s huge following has been an exception to the rule. Look at Fermanagh’s last performance against Cavan and see how that held up on Sunday, getting hammered by Armagh whose own disappointing display against Donegal was transformed for the weekend. Westmeath beat Down in the league final and lost to Wicklow a week later. How Cavan turned things around in Clones?
These are the sacrifices of the condensed season. Nobody wants to go back to the 1990s but we lose out by not attracting a bit more publicity and interest for the fixtures. There’s a big difference between kicking a ball in Brewster Park and in Croke Park where the bounce will be true and you’ll be able to turn on the surface with confidence. Other venues lack that consistency.
How will Derry deal with All-Ireland scrutiny? For the past five years, the story has been, Derry are building, Derry are building. Now, the narrative has settled on them being finally built and regularly mentioned in the same breath as Dublin and Kerry. Compare it to our development in Donegal. We arrived with a bang in 2011 and our big awakening came in that Dublin semi-final. We obviously ruffled feathers – in Dublin, certainly but even around the country, judging by the outpourings of cribbing and crying that came with it.
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