Diarmuid Marsden has been named on the Armagh team to face Dublin in Sunday's National Football League semi-final at Croke Park. He has recovered from the groin injury which he picked up playing for Ulster in the Railway Cup in Killarney a three weeks ago and which kept him out of the league quarter-final against Sligo last Sunday week.
Marsden and forward colleague Cathal O'Rourke will face fitness tests late tomorrow evening but both came through last night's training session - "a fair workout," according to county secretary Patrick Nugent.
A vacancy has been left at full forward in order to give joint managers Brian Canavan and Brian McAlinden flexibility should either O'Rourke or Marsden fail to come through their tests.
Amongst those in contention are Alan O'Neill, Patrick McKeever, Oisin McConville - he Crossmaglen man having recovered from a broken thumb - and David Wilson.
The side shows three changes from the team which narrowly beat Sligo. Marsden, Des Mackin and AN Other come in for O'Neill, Wilson and McKeever. Substitutes will be named tomorrow evening.
The Gaelic Grounds in Limerick has been chosen as the venue for next month's National Hurling League semi-finals. The matches will be played as a double bill, featuring Galway-Kilkenny and Clare-Tipperary on Sunday May 2nd at 2.00 and 3.30 respectively.
Since the pairings became evident last weekend, it became clear that Thurles would not be an agreed venue for the Clare-Tipperary match. Limerick is an obvious venue for the fixture although there might be some inconvenience involved for Kilkenny.
Other decisions taken by the Games Administration Committee include the fixing of the All-Ireland under-21 football semi-finals. Roscommon will face holders Kerry in Ennis at 7.00 on Saturday evening, May 1st and the next day in Breffni Park (Cavan), Monaghan will play Westmeath at 3.30. Fixed for the same day at 3.30 in Tuam is the Railway Cup football final between Connacht and Ulster.
Neither Clare's Fergus Tuohy nor Ruairi O'Connell of Westmeath - whose case is the last piece of business arising from the Westmeath-Wicklow set-to in Mullingar - were dealt with last night as both have requested a personal hearing but are currently out of the country.
The sponsors of the National Leagues, Church and General, have declined to make any statement in respect of the poor publicity attracted by the league quarter-finals of two weeks ago. Of the four defeated teams Sligo preferred to rest their under-21s and didn't field a full 15 and Derry, Kildare and Kerry would all have had difficulty with the stewards had there been an inquiry.
Only 21,000 turned up at Croke Park for the Dublin-Kildare and Cork-Derry double-bill - a third of the numbers present for Dublin's two championship matches with Kildare last June.
"We're happy to plough along rather than dwell on the negative publicity," was the reaction of a company spokesperson.
"When the competitions get to the semi-finals and finals, there's more interest in the games among supporters. Already this week, there has been speculation about the Clare-Tipperary league hurling semi-final as a dress rehearsal for the championship.
"There are no plans to discuss the matter with Croke Park. Maybe at a later stage we might have a chat about it."
At head-office level, the GAA are equally dismissive of the controversy.
"There has been an extraordinary reaction and an amount of hysteria just because of two bad games," said PRO Danny Lynch. "It seems a bit of an over-reaction to two bad games in a competition to decide that it (the league) should be abandoned.
"The crowd was to an extent disappointing but there were a lot of mitigating circumstances with all the sports events on television. In the circumstances, a crowd of 21,000 wasn't all that bad."
Laois hurlers may yet be in with a chance of winning the Walsh Cup. The county was thrown out of the competition after a fracas took place during their semi-final match with Dublin last February, which Laois won. As a result Wexford - who beat Kilkenny in the other semi-final - were awarded the title.
Now Laois are to appeal to the next meeting of the Leinster Council that the final be played. Wexford are believed to agree.
Meanwhile, also in Laois, it has emerged that Martin Delaney, captain of the first Laois team to win the All-Ireland minor title in 1996 who announced earlier this week that he was heading to the US and would not be available for the coming championship, only returned from the States in the first place in order to play under-21 football.
With the defeat of Laois by Westmeath in last Sunday week's Leinster final replay, Delaney decided to head back across the Atlantic just as he did last year after the All-Ireland under-21 final defeat by Kerry. Some observers in the county believe that Delaney, may not return for a considerable amount of time, if at all.
Armagh (SF v Dublin): B Tierney; E McNulty, G Reid, M McNeill; C Hughes, K NcGeeney, A McCann; J Burns, J McNulty; J Rafferty, P McGrane, D Marsden; C O'Rourke, AN Other, D Mackin.
