County boards must realise they are now in the events and entertainment business
After he made his way through the turnstiles, Tony Browne took up a spot on the terraced bank alongside an 80-year-old man from Fourmilewater. The small stand on the opposite side of the field was already full, and so the octogenarian had to be content with standing room only, enduring the intermittent rain.
“I was fine watching the game from my vantage point,” Browne wrote in his column for this paper yesterday, “but surely we could be laying on something better for a man of that age?”
Although the Waterford County Board stated last month that it would be redeveloping the venue after the second of Waterford’s two home games in this summer’s Munster championship before opening it again for the summer of 2019, Browne argued that he’d have no issue with them taking even longer if needs be, once they brought the place up to scratch, once and for all.
John Mullane, who won four Munster titles for the county soldiering alongside Browne, feels an even more urgent and drastic measure needed to be taken. Although, like Browne, he grew up less than a mile from the old venue, he has called for Waterford to play their two home championship games this summer somewhere else.
“I hate to say it as a Waterford City man but that venue [Walsh Park] is not up to holding a Munster championship game, particularly Cork and Tipperary,” Mullane said in The Throw-In podcast. “Shut the place down and do a total revamp on it.”
It’s not the only place that could do with a bit of a makeover. Though there isn’t a question that Clare’s two home games this summer in the Munster championship will be anywhere but Cusack Park, the last time the venue hosted a major championship game graphically illustrated for me some of its inadequacies.
Last July what seemed like the whole of Mayo, as well as a few thousand of us living in Clare, descended on the Ennis ground for the third-round football qualifier between the counties. I was there with my wife and in-laws from Mayo, and my two kids from Clare, over on the terraced stand.
Half an hour before the game I had to bring my five-year-old son to the toilet, the one down by the Aldi, scoreboard end. The place was dank and dark and when we closed the cubicle door, it was pitch black. I had to use the light of my iPhone to help clean him up. Literally dark ages stuff, except for that intervention with something straight out of 2017.
t’ll be two years ago next month that the refurbished stand in Cusack Park was unveiled but as Antony Daly wrote in these pages at the time, it was — and is — distinctly underwhelming for a project that reportedly cost €2.3m: “The architect’s drawings online made it appear like a smaller version of Croke Park but it looks on the outside that it just got a new paint job.”
Everything seems ad hoc, patched up, painted over, when, like Walsh Park, it needs a total revamp.
The irony of it all is that the prospect of venues like Cusack Park and Walsh Park and Parnell Park hosting championship games is what makes the new-look hurling format so appealing.
A standout championship memory for this writer was when Mullane and Browne and that cracking Waterford team of Justin McCarthy’s came down to Ennis for a qualifier match in 2005, back when Daly was managing Clare.
Although both teams were already through to the All-Ireland quarter-finals, this was no dead rubber.
The sun was splitting the stones, the place was packed, jointed, jumping, all the more so with Mullane unable to stop scoring points at one end and the Waterford defence, as was their way at the time, unable to stop leaking goals at the other.
Other games have generated a similar atmosphere through the years. Local derbies against Limerick, like Joe McKenna’s last stand as manager in 2006, or the Game That Now Never Was, the null and void league final of 2011. Do-or-die qualifiers against Galway in 2003 and 2009.
The Mayo exodus last summer. The bars and restaurants and streets of the town hopping in a way only the Fleadh or a big match can. Now with its new format, the Munster championship guarantees an Ennis at least two days like that every summer, the glorious realisation of Liam Griffin’s call to bring the game to the people.
It’s just that it would be nice if the people could bring their kids to the jacks while they’re at it.
County boards like Clare and especially Waterford need to seriously reflect on their current plight and premises; the dilapidated state of the Aldi-end scoreboard is symptomatic of the Clare board’s ‘It’ll Do’ mindset — but it’s a wider GAA issue.
They’re mistaken if they’re thinking they are just in the business of hosting fixtures.
They’re in the business of staging events. Entertainment. Just as people expect to take up a decent spot and avail of decent toilets whenever they attend the cinema or a gig, they now expect and deserve the same when they got a match.
The days of white-elephant projects are over. Munster does not need any more 40,000 stadiums. But in places like Ennis and Waterford it needs tidy, compact 20,000 stadiums, along the lines proposed for Navan’s Páirc Tailteann.
Ireland’s failed Rugby World Cup bid served as a reminder how stadia here, especially of the GAA variety, have been simply inadequate.
For generations GAA spectators were treated and viewed more as stock than patrons and customers. Sure, ‘it’d do’. Now it won’t.
True, any changes and revamps will cost money but then these games and the much-talked-about TV deals can provide that. And with it, maybe a seat for our octogenarian friend from Fourmilewater.
