The All-Ireland senior hurling quarter-final between Limerick and Wexford looks set to take place at Semple Stadium, Thurles despite efforts to have the fixture moved to a bigger venue.
Wexford county board had requested that the game be moved to Croke Park to accommodate the large demand from within the county after it emerged that just 2,000 stand tickets would be made available to Wexford fans.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1 earlier tonight however, Wexford county board chairman Diarmuid Devereux appeared to accept that the match would go ahead as planned in Thurles on Sunday.
Chairman of Wexford GAA speaking now on RTE Radio 1. 'Each club will receive 25 stand ticket from our 2000 allocation' 1/2
— Wexford GAA (@OfficialWexGAA) July 22, 2014
“We’re not complaining or making a big issue out of this, it’s just we’ve massive hurling support in this county and we’ve an awful lot of very disappointed hurling supporters and really what we’re trying to do at this stage is to do our best to payback our loyal supporters as best we can.
“We have about 2,000 stand tickets available so we’re going to allocate 5 stand tickets to each club and so we’re going to allocate 25 stand tickets to each of our clubs and that’s as much as we can do, there’ll be no family tickets in the stand and then we would hope to have an unlimited number of terrace tickets available at €20 per ticket,” said Mr Devereux.
The chairman also said that while the county board had made its decision and accepted the reality of the situation, he was disappointed with the low number of tickets made available to the county secretary.
Hope to put an unlimited number if terrace tickets on sale from tomorrow in Wexford Park. Seems it's Thurles on Sunday.
— Wexford GAA (@OfficialWexGAA) July 22, 2014
“We’re not on a blame game here… it’s just we are very, very disappointed that within 48 hours out of Nowlan Park that we discover that only about 2,200 tickets would be available to the 50 odd clubs that we have,” he said.
Mr Devereux also accepted that thousands of Wexford supporters had likely secured their ticket through online sales already and estimated that about 3,000 may have done so to date.
[social=twitter]https://twitter.com/OfficialWexGAA/status/491656113415540736[social]
Wexford reached their first All-Ireland quarter-final in six years by overcoming Waterford in Nowlan Park on Saturday while their opponents Limerick were beaten in the Munster final by Cork.
The match is part of a double-header with Tipperary taking on Dublin at 4pm on the same day.