Ciaran Hanley

The All Ireland football semi final 2002, Ray Cosgrove has a fairly routine looking free kick in front of Hill 16 filled with Dublin fans expecting him to level the game and send it to a replay. He sets the ball out to the right of the right post, it curls back but not enough, hitting the post and dropping down in front of goal, an Armagh and Dublin player go for it, the Armagh player fists it away and another Armagh player carries it to safety. The referee blows his whistle, Armagh players and fans go ballistic. A first All Ireland final since Joe Kernan, Armagh Manager, lost to Dublin in 1977, lies ahead. The All Ireland Football semi final 2024, Armagh have just extended their lead to two points and we are in the one added minute at the end of extra time. The fans have turned Croker orange but their team are playing in black. Kerry, in the green and gold, bring the ball up into the Armagh half, they move it back and forth across the middle of Croke Park looking for the best angle to...

My brother and I left Croke Park yesterday evening, laughing with joy at the sporting spectacle we'd just witnessed and exhausted from the amount of concentration required to watch an All Ireland Hurling Semi Final between the great Limerick team going for five in a row and Cork who were determined to stop them. I missed 75% of the poc outs because I'm so used to watching football where the keepers generally take an age to restart the game. There is no hanging about in hurling. If you miss the keeper's poc out then it can be difficult to find where the slíotar has ended up on the wide open spaces of Croke Park. The game is so fast, the sequence from keeper at one end to over the bar for a point at the other end might only be a few seconds. This was my first game of hurling and my brothers first Gaelic game at Croke Park full stop. I knew it would be fast but it still takes your breath away. There is no time to talk about what happened in the previous play. More than 80,000 ...