Criticism
The Football Association of Ireland has been criticised by the media, supporters and other football associations for high ticket prices. The 51,700-capacity Aviva Stadium was less than half-full for all of the games. The game between Wales and Northern Ireland was attended by only 529 fans, many of whom were Scots who happened to be in Dublin for their country's game two days later.
Northern Ireland fans were criticised for singing sectarian chants at games, while during the game between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, Republic fans booed "God Save the Queen", the national anthem of Northern Ireland, and Northern Ireland fans booed the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, as she greeted players before the game. Scotland fans also booed "God Save the Queen", when playing Northern Ireland.
Wales manager Gary Speed criticised the tournament organisers for scheduling Wales' games to be within three days of each other, the only team to suffer such timing. He also criticised the officiating in the game against Scotland, in which in his opinion several fouls on Welsh players went unpunished.
Read more about this topic: 2011 Nations Cup
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)