Dick Clerkin is lamenting the poor turnout for Championship football matches but, challenges the idea that cost is the main reason why people are not attending inter-county games. The former Monaghan footballer wrote an analysis piece for the Irish Independent newspaper in which he said All-Ireland football ranked "fourth or possibly fifth in sporting relevance at the weekend".
He was commenting following a notably poor attendance in Croke Park for a championship match against Roscommon and Dublin at the weekend. But, Dick Clerkin said he would challenge the argument that cost is keeping people and their families away from games since the cost of a child's GAA ticket is a fiver.
Instead, the Scotshouse man said no one is thinking of championship games in bad weather in April and this weekend, Gaelic football competed with Man. Utd. V Man. City, Celtic V Rangers and Leinster V Toulosue: "At the end of the day to buy a child's ticket to one of these games is a fiver. I can't get out of Applegreen without spending a fiver on a child some days. It's the best value you'll get," Dick Clerkin told the Joe Finnegan Show, "I'll give you an example: the Monaghan / Cavan game a few weeks ago. In this region, that game, traditionally, would've been such a high profile game, with people looking forward to it and hype building up to it but I had multiple conversations with people in the week building up to it and they didn't know it was on. Can you imagine that in Monaghan and Cavan? These are GAA people."
