THERE was huge frustration among Clare hurling fans this week, as people seeking to purchase tickets for Munster championship games faced significant difficulties.
With Covid restrictions now relaxed pre-championship anticipation is at its highest in a few years and with thousands of people all going online simultaneously, Ticketmaster was hit with technical issues meaning fans couldn’t make their purchases for a period of time.
Tickets were also available from Centra and SuperValu stores and some of these outlets also saw huge demand and long queues for tickets.
Clare’s first two games are against Tipperary and Cork, both in Thurles, and with Semple Stadium being as large as it is, there was little concern about any potential sell out there.
Clare’s final game is against Waterford and it had been notified in advance that these tickets would only be available from county boards at a later date.
The really problematic fixture, however, is Clare versus Limerick, which is due to be played in Cusack Park, which will have a capacity of approximately 18,700 for this year’s Munster championship.
Earlier in the year 8,000 tickets were sold for the Co-Op Superstores Munster Hurling Cup clash between the sides, which was a sellout, with capacity reduced as the country was still re-emerging from the pandemic.
With Limerick chasing a third All Ireland in a row, and the May 15 clash potentially being very important regarding progression from Munster, it was always set to see a scarcity of tickets, particularly with the capacity at Ennis being much smaller than at Cork, Thurles or Limerick.
So it proved, and on Wednesday it was the only fixture for which tickets were no longer available to purchase, either online or at the retail outlets.
In recent years the GAA has been moving away from distributing tickets through its clubs, something that has been criticised widely this week, with huge frustration among people who spent long spells waiting for the chance to make purchases.
County Councillor Paul Murphy said the situation on Tuesday had been “a disaster”.
As a season ticket holder he didn’t have to join the queues for the Clare matches, but went to buy some for his wife, a Limerick woman, after the online system went down. “I was in town and Siobhán rang me and said she needed a ticket for Limerick and Waterford.
“I went to Ryan’s Centra and there was a long queue there, the system seemed to be struggling, this was around 1pm.
“I texted the Centra shopkeeper in Clarecastle, he said they didn’t have a queue there, so I belted down, but by the time I got down there was a queue there as well!
“In the shops, while the system wasn’t breaking down, it was slow and struggling to keep the tickets going.”
He queried if making tickets available for so many matches at one time had been responsible for the failures with Ticketmaster, and suggested a more staggered approach may have been better.
As a former chairman of Clarecastle, he said that distribution of tickets does cause a major headache to clubs, but that some system is needed that provides an advantage to club members.
“If people are willing to pay their membership to a club there should be some loyalty to them.”
The Munster Council was contacted with a number of questions this, but answers had not been received at the time of publication.
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked with a number of other publications in Limerick, Cork and Galway. His first book will be published in December 2024.