The biggest attendance of the GAA Championship season looks set for Croke Park on Saturday week, May 28th with the Dublin men and women confirmed for the Leinster Finals in their respective football tournaments at the weekend.
A shade over 38,000 were at Croke Park on Sunday for the doubleheader of Men’s semi-finals with Kildare beating Westmeath and Dublin beating Meath to set up their Final.
The Dublin Ladies will face Meath for the third time so far this season after their rivals saw off Westmeath to set up a rematch of the Big two in the Senior Leinster Championship.
There is a sense of real competition in both games which should add to the drama.
Both of the Dublin Meath clashes this season have ended in single-point victories, for Dublin in Navan in the Lidl National League, and for Meath at Parnell Park in the Leinster Round Robin.
The next clash will be their first return to Croke Park since Meath won last year’s TG4 All Ireland Final.
In the Men’s decider, Dublin will bid for a 12th Provincial title in a row, and a seventeenth in eighteen years. Last year’s eight-point win in the final was only the second time in this run that Dublin and Kildare had met but the Lillywhite’s League Victory earlier in the spring does give them a sense that maybe this is the time for a first Leinster title since 2000.
The last time the Leinster decider was played in front of a potential full crowd was in 2019 when 47,027 went through the turnstiles.
Four times in a row, between 2005 and 2008 before Dublin’s dominance of the All Ireland Championship began the crowd for the Leinster Final exceeded 80,000.
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The doubleheader promises to bring out the biggest crowd of the summer. The women’s game is the latest clash between Dublin and Meath that is fast becoming an epic rivalry that deserves a significant proportion of those who would go for the Men’s game to turn up early and support both the boys and the girls in blue.
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