6
The number of county captains who won the old Sam Maguire trophy twice and included in that number is the great Galway footballer Enda Colleran. The Moylough native contested four successive All-Ireland finals between 1963 and 1966, winning the latter three, twice against Kerry and also got to savour a victory over Meath.
Colleran also picked up an All-Ireland minor title, a Hogan Cup, two Sigerson Cups and captained his province to a Railway Cup win in 1967. He enjoyed a brief spell playing rugby with Corinthians before taking over as Galway manager and leading them to a Connacht title in 1976. He was named on Team of the Century and Team of the Millennium.
9+1
Galway have won the Sam Maguire eight times, the first in 1925 and the last 23 years ago in 2001, while Armagh succeeded Galway as All-Ireland champions in 2002 when they beat Kerry 1-12 to 0-14 to claim their only title.
1-33
Galway’s Robert Finnerty leads the scoring charts for his county in this season’s Championship. The son of former Mayo footballer Anthony, his father was a huge influence having been involved in coaching club and schools sides on which his son played.
Robert said of the relationship: “We would talk a lot about football, but it’s more things nowadays – we wouldn’t really talk about 1989 or the past too much. To be fair, he doesn’t really like to bring it up or talk about himself too often, we prefer to talk about games that are happening now – local club games or whatever.
“We both have a big interest in football, but a lot of it would be about what’s happening at the minute.”
3-22
Conor Turbitt has been Armagh’s most prolific marksman en route to the final at Croke Park earning the GAA.ie Footballer of the week (over 4,000 votes) in June for the 1-4 he scored in the victory over Derry. He has twice won man-of-the-match awards during the campaign. The digital communications analyst at Danske Bank has shown the virtue of being able to take opportunities, first in being selected having not previously been considered a nailed-on starter and then in converting chances on the pitch.
34
The number of championship matches Sean Hurson will have refereed after he takes charge of tomorrow’s All-Ireland football final at Croke Park. It will be the second All-Ireland senior final for the Galbally Pearses club man who also took charge of the 2022 decider between eventual champions Kerry and Galway.
He also refereed the All-Ireland minor final in 2018, the U20 All-Ireland Final in 2021 and the All-Ireland senior club final in 2022. He also refereed the group game this year between tomorrow’s finalists Armagh and Galway.
His umpires will be Martin Coney and Cathal Forbes both from the Ardboe O’Donovan Rossa club, Mel Taggart from Clonoe O’Rahilly’s and Shane Dorrity from Coalisland Na Fianna. The line umpires are Kildare’s Brendan Cawley, who will be the standby referee, and Roscommon’s Paddy Neilan. The sideline official is Derek O’Mahony from Tipperary.
16,000
A guesstimate at the principal ticket allocation given to tomorrow’s finalists Galway and Armagh from a Croke Park capacity that’s a couple of hundred tickets over 82,000. Corporate and premium tickets come in at 10,528 based on an empirical figure from last year, with season tickets and long-term tickets making up just over 6,000. County allocations, outside of the finalists, are believed to be about 57,500.