FESTIVAL OF FOOTBALL

Croke Park is the centre of the universe this weekend as all human life is here at four big ball quarter-finals

- BY KARL O'KANE

ORANGE flags, hooters and lovely two-point shooters.

Roll up, roll up folks for what is undoubtedly the greatest weekend ever, for unquestionably the greatest show on earth.

Mini bus loads of lads will go on the lash and bodies will crash - some will burn. Men will 'hop off' each other and kick a roundy piece of leather over a white-coloured bar or into a net.

In a strange coincidence people dressed very similarly will jump out of their seats and roar their approval at the same time.

Those similarly-dressed people will sit back down again.

In the stands, they'll murmur in hushed reverential tones, 'Jim Gavin was right' and that he did indeed create and choreograph the greatest show on earth.

Meanwhile, in the corporate boxes they'll be glued to their phones as the Lions - mostly Irish, some British - face down the Taiwanese Tornados in a key challenge match in Botswana.

And somewhere in a central location in the Hogan Stand, Gavin will nod knowingly as he looks out onto the field watching Dublin miss a load of two-pointers.

For it was he who peered out from behind those big glasses, as his masterplan to save the game began to take shape.

Out on Clonliffe Road, hoards will flock from every corner of Ireland to the big grey behemoth on Jones' Road for a festival of football the likes of which we've never seen before.

A tired and weary Donegal will arrive first, turning up in a series of four-man ice baths wheeled all the way from the Abbey Hotel by a fanatical fan base.

In a lovely moment of karma, it emerges later that the Donegal ice baths took a wrong turn and headed off down the N7 after being caught in 'road works.

A Prime Time Special later uncovers the truth, with eyewitness accounts of Ger Brennan in a Chadwicks builder's yard buying a set of traffic cones.