CROKE PARK:NEIL RYAN (6) made a beeline for the blue and yellow jersey in the corner of the players' dressing room. "I'm sitting in front of it," he said with a proud gap-toothed grin. "This is the lucky dressing room" guide Elaine Powell explained.
"Obviously Tipp weren't in here last week," Neil's dad Mark remarked. "Do you know which dressing room Dublin normally use?" Powell asked the group. "Yeah, the unlucky one," another voice suggested.
This was the Croke Park tour during the GAA Museum's family day yesterday as part of Heritage Week. Hundreds of visitors were given a free glimpse behind the scenes at (and here comes a tour nugget) western Europe's fourth largest stadium.
There was the hallowed turf (not to be walked on under any circumstances); the specially-commissioned chandelier in the player's bar; and the hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck sensation of walking out of the players' tunnel to recorded sounds of cheering from the stands.
For some it was a first sporting visit to the stadium. Irene Murphy had seen Celine Dion (sunny) and Neil Diamond (raincoats) this year but was now helping to shepherd 14 young Dublin-jersey wearers around the tour.
"They shouldn't have given them the balloon swords until after the tour," she said clutching three to her to avoid impromptu swashbuckling.
The sea of Dublin jerseys were topped with faces painted in superhero patterns and team colours. There were even balloon hurleys and sliotars, producing not so much clash of the ash as a flump of the rubber.
It was no mean feat to puck a balloon sliotar with a balloon hurley. Two young Dublin fans were attempting to do it in the middle of the museum, some of the game's forefathers watching from their life-sized black and white frames.
The tour kept everyone interested. "How many doors are there in Croke Park?" Powell asked at one stage. "One hundred and twelve," one child shot back instantly. The real answer was almost 2,000. "And some of the them lock automatically," she warned - and no one was to attempt to hide out for this weekend's matches.
In the changing rooms, the group stood along the jersey-lined walls and heard about the 28 power showers, two plasma screens, the safe and the hairdryers that the players can use.
Outside on the pitch there was the rumble of mowers as two groundskeepers combed the blades of rye grass into perfect stripes.
Donal Lavin played on the pitch in the 1950s as a football player with St Vincent's. "Fourteen of the team were on the Dublin team," he said.
Back trouble put Lavin out of it and the next time a member of his family was on the pitch was half a century later when his granddaughter became one of the first girl members of the Artane Band.
Primary school teacher John Egan brought his son Seán (6) and daughter Méabh (3) to the open day glad of an indoor event at the end of Ireland's monsoon summer.
Over at the Cúchulainn display guide Simon O'Donovan was explaining how his ideal audience is group of nine-year-olds. A junior hurler for Crumlin, O'Donovan is regularly asked funny questions on the tour.
"'Was the Hogan stand named after Hulk Hogan?' was one of the most memorable," he said. "And I've been asked that one a few times."
www.gaa.ie/museum
