Date 25 September 1955 Attendance 87,102 | Venue Croke Park, Dublin | |
Event 1955 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship | ||
The 1955 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship Final was the 68th All-Ireland Final and the deciding match of the 1955 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship, an inter-county Gaelic football tournament for the top teams in Ireland. A then record crowd attended. The game went down in history as "famous" and a "classic".
Contents
Pre-match
British Rail were forced to schedule extra trains to Holyhead such was the clamour to see a Dublin team playing an exciting new brand of football.
Until the Wednesday before the final Kerry's seven-day-a-week training regime, led by Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan, began with a brisk walk before celebration of Mass each morning; there followed light breakfast, a training session out on the pitch, lunch, an afternoon training session. This was considered revolutionary at the time, particularly as the GAA, fearing the advent of professionalism within its ranks, had implemented an unsuccessful ban on collective training of inter-county teams just the year before, only for it to be overturned within a year.
Match summary
Tadghie Lyne scored six points to give Kerry a commanding 0-12 to 0-6 lead. Ollie Freaney's goal five minutes from the brought Dublin within three points, but Kerry weathered the storm and won.
It was the second of three All-Ireland football titles won by Kerry in the 1950s.
Kerry player Jim Brosnan, scorer of two crucial second-half points, was flown home from New York for the final; he was over there studying medicine.
Legacy
Though the team lost this final, Kevin Heffernan was driven onwards to achieve greater things with Dublin in the 1970s.