Dodge83 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 14, 2022 1:22 pm
Any indication if the county final will become a regular thing in Birr or not ? You’d imagine
if there is a good crowd and cracking atmosphere the county board will have to give it serious consideration
You can't measure atmosphere, so that's moot, but you can measure the crowd, and I've no doubt that will be a huge part of the calculations for 2024 and onwards. Back when this whole debate cropped up first back in the 2000s, Birr wanted the games but they also wanted the standard ground rent fee. That's not a factor any more, so it's a pretty clear calculation - is the crowd more, less, or broadly the same as what you'd expect for the same game in Tullamore? If it's less, debate over. If it's the same, then it'll be hard to justify not using the better facilities and the greater comfort for supporters that exists in Tullamore. If bringing the game to Birr results in a significant bump in attendance however, then of course - and rightly - that will by itself represent a strong argument for leaving the fixture in SBP for a few more years after, to extend the experiment.
Generally speaking, in Tullamore and prior to the Covid years, the attendance at the Offaly senior hurling final tended to range from 5,000 to 7,000, and my understanding is that this number did include senior citizens and concessions, but not children who went in for free, though I am open to correction on that. There were years it went higher (K-K's emergence, the Tullamore years), there were years when it dipped lower (last year, when fears of covid meant crowds were lower across the board), but broadly speaking, that was the norm.
Now almost all of those finals - every one of them since 2010 - featured two out of Rynagh's, Birr, Kilcormac-Killoughey and Coolderry. Generally speaking, Rynagh's vs K-K were the best attended. K-K bring a decent crowd as a rule, while Coolderry is simply a very small area in terms of population and Birr, like a lot of town teams, doesn't have a huge following either, and they wouldn't have gone into many of those finals with high expectations.
This year, I would expect that the crowd might nudge towards the higher end of that scale. It will feature either K-K (who always bring a good crowd) or Birr (who will be favourites if they get that far, so that will be different from recent finals involving them) playing either Shinrone or Belmont, both of whom would be chasing their first championship, while Belmont would be in their first ever final. Naturally, that should lead to a "last one out, turn out the lights" scenario in those areas.
That number will set the bar, so to speak, and then that can be contrasted with the crowd that rocks up to St. Brendan's Park in 13 months time. No two games are identical of course - even if it's the same pairing, Rhode vs Tullamore last year made a lot more appeal than Rhode vs Tullamore this year - but I generally find it's better to set the parameters in advance for what constitutes a decent crowd, rather than have the debate after the fact when everyone will look at the matter from their own pre-existing viewpoint.
There are other issues of course, such as the lack of a warm up area, but Birr have plenty of time to sort that out and come up with a solution, which I'm sure they will. I think we can all agree that there is a world of difference between the mindset and ability of the Birr club executive now, relative to what was there when this debate first reared its head.
