The day Croke Park only narrowly avoided a second Bloody Sunday

THE LATE Bill Shankly famously said that “some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

Growing up in Kerry, All-Ireland football final Sunday was usually important. As a nine-year-old I was lifted over the turnstiles at Croke Park to see Kerry beat Armagh in 1953. One of my abiding memories of the game was watching the crowd spill on to the field at the Canal End as the fencing collapsed at the start of the game.

The stadium gates had been closed, locking out thousands, and a crowd at that end broke through the gates. In the ensuing crush the fencing collapsed, which was a mercy because if it had held the real haunting memory of Croke Park would have been the carnage of that day, not the mortally wounded 15 people on Bloody Sunday, 1920.