The demand of the Mayo football faternity for tickets for tomorrow's All Ireland football semi-final replay with Dublin is gone well beyond what the county has seen ever for a game at this stage of the competition. After last week's sell-out drawn match the sold out signs went up early this week with general sale tickets being snapped up within hours.
The first general sale allocations went on sale on Sunday night online, as many Mayo supporters were still making their way home from Croke Park, and were snapped up within a short period. Two more online general sale batches of tickets were sold out within minutes on Monday morning, with many people across the country expressing their frustrations with the ticketing website which kept crashing under the pressure of demand. There were large queues of people on Monday morning in SuperValu and Centra outlets around the county trying to get their hands on tickets, with people queuing for well over an hour to try to get the prized passes, with this writer witnessing a queue of around 100 people in a Castlebar outlet desperate to get their hands on a ticket.
Tickets appeared on well known classified websites earlier this week with huge mark ups on the original prices, but sites like Done Deal decided to remove all tickets for sale after consultations with the GAA. There was more controversy during the week with some people who bought tickets online receiving duplicate copies of their tickets in the post.
Mayo GAA PRO Aidan McLoughlin told the Mayo Advertiser that he has never seen the demand like this for tickets in his time involved at the county board. "Even from the first game the demand has gone through the roof, we've never seen anything like this for a semi-final. But thankfully we were able to fulfill every order that came in from clubs for this weekend's game, that includes a large number of family tickets that were applied for the game. It was the same last week, we made sure that family tickets were done first so children could get to the game with their families." McLoughlin estimated that around 6,000 ticket orders came in from clubs for tomorrow's big game.
On the football side of things Mayo announced on Wednesday evening an unchanged line-up for the match, with Donal Vaughan, who had to go off injured in the opening exchanges of the drawn game, selected as fit enough to maintain his place. There is no place in the starting 15 for last weekend's equalising hero Andy Moran, who kicked two points after coming off the bench including the leveling score. The big game throws in at 5pm tomorrow, for full coverage see our sports section at the back of the paper.
