Today should have been a good PR day for the GAA in Munster.
After fears that the capacity for Pairc Ui Chaoimh next Sunday could be as low as 32,000 the Munster Council was able to confirm this morning that 36,646 people would be able to attend.
However, many fans encountered problems earlier today buying tickets for the Munster hurling final online and through Centra and Supervalu outlets occurred due to a technical issue with the GAA’s ticket partner, tickets.ie.
Tickets.ie have made a statement saying: “Tickets.ie regrets and apologises for any inconvenience caused to Munster GAA customers who were delayed in purchasing tickets for the Munster GAA Hurling Final either online or from designated retail outlets this morning.
"We encountered a technical problem that took some time to resolve. Once the work was completed all tickets available to us to sell were placed on sale. The tickets available to Tickets.ie for the Munster GAA Hurling Final have since sold out.
"Tickets remain available for all other GAA fixtures this weekend from tickets.ie and retail outlets.”
Munster GAA also said that it "regrets very much the inconvenience to patrons" as a result of these problems and "would like to apologise to all who experienced difficulties purchasing tickets".
This followed last night’s announcement that a limited number of terrace tickets would be available for public sale through various retail outlets and on gaa.tickets.ie.
However even before the announcement on capacity today, reports were coming out of frustrated queues and a website that was not working.
One of the many many queues at present for terrace tickets for Munster hurling final #GAA #Limerick pic.twitter.com/Khz2yr9djA
— Jerome O'Connell (@JeromeSport) July 10, 2014
Cork GAA had to issue a tweet at 9.46am to advise they had no role in the public sale of tickets.
Cork GAA has no role in today's sale of tickets. All we are hearing is that demand is so high that the system is struggling to cope #GAA
— Cork GAA (@OfficialCorkGAA) July 10, 2014
The Munster GAA made a statement on their website at 10.15am acknowledging that the gaa.tickets.ie website was down and saying that this outage also affected sales through Supervalu and Centra outlets.
At 10.25am they added an update to say that they had been informed by the tickets website that it was back up-and-running and tickets were available for sale.
People who had queued for hours at outlets across the the two counties were left empty handed as most outlets had very limited numbers of tickets and some none at all.
There were reports of shops with queues of 100 or more who ended up only having five or six tickets to sell.
All tickets were sold out by 2.05pm with huge frustration expressed online when this was announced.
@OfficialCorkGAA 5 and a half hours trying and nothing, what a joke. Were these online tickets imaginary or what?
— Nóirín O Connell (@Noirin_O) July 10, 2014
@MunsterGAA Yea how did they sell out when the website was down for the last three hours and no shops could print them all day long?
— Paul Desmond (@GunDesmPaul) July 10, 2014
@OfficialCorkGAA no way those tickets were ever available at any time online. Went to 4 shops who said they didn't get any tickets.Jokeshop
— JC-Corcaigh #Think32 (@Corcaigh35) July 10, 2014