Cue: mayhem in the capital.
It’s hard for Dublin fans, it really is – once you get past all the success and the advantages that come with being the county with the biggest population in Ireland.
They get the most investment from the GAA – which, to be honest, correlates with their numbers and the sport needs a strong capital – they get to play most of their games in what is a dream venue for others, a mere aspiration, and they have, by far, the best team football has seen for a long time.
But every time they win another championship, their fans are poked with calls from everyone else to split the county in two. They’re told that the success is down to the money that comes from the top. Their Croke Park familiarity is held up as another big factor in their historic run.
So, rather than just marvelling at what is happening on the pitch, Dublin fans find themselves dragged into forums, baited by articles or enticed into arguing in the stands for the right to be able to hold their heads up high and say that they’ve created a winning team that would’ve won outside of any of the above. After a while, that can wear a good person down and, after a while, even the sweetest of victories can be soured a little by the narrative being read out by the rest of the country.
But it takes balls from a current player to come out and cite one of these things and, for that, Declan Kyne deserves some credit.
The Galway defender spoke to the media for the Allianz Football League launch on Wednesday and didn’t exactly roll out any old cliched line or shut down questions to remind the press that he wasn’t allowed to talk about county football. No, he came out and said what he was thinking.
And what he was thinking was that Dublin shouldn’t be allowed to play their All-Ireland semi-finals in Croke Park.
“Dublin are so used to playing in Croke Park, maybe it’s a slight advantage of them, whereas teams like us wouldn’t be playing every weekend in it,” Kyne told the press.
“It definitely makes a difference. Maybe semi-finals at least should be played at a neutral venue. There are plenty of grounds around the country that could host a semi-final if the GAA wanted to go that way.”
In the same week that Donegal forwarded a motion to have Dublin’s advantage of playing two Croke Park games in the quarter-finals revised, Kyne has gone one further and pointed to the games in the last four.
Galway lost to Dublin in the semis last year and, whilst the capital would generally have packed out headquarters for a game like that in the past, just 54,000 people were in attendance.
“Even for the Super 8s in Croke Park it’s a big advantage for Dublin,” Kyne looked at the bigger picture beyond what happened to Galway.
“They had two home games there last year.”
As it stands, Dublin will have two games in Croke Park for the Super 8s again in 2019 but the GAA were well aware of that issue even before the motion of the championship restructure was passed.
“That does give them an advantage” – GAA response to Super 8s question one year ago
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