Remembering when ‘Martians’ invaded Croke Park

By Cian Murphy

The return of American Football to Croke Park this Sunday writes a new chapter in the fascinating history of the Grid Iron game at GAA headquarters, and the passionate and knowledgeable Irish fans in the capacity crowd will be a far cry from the bemused onlookers who encountered the sport when it took its initial steps on Jones’s Road in the 1940s and 1950s.

GAA archivist Adam Staunton and his colleagues at the GAA Museum have showcased the long and colourful history of US sports at Croke Park in a new exhibition display which details everything from Cowboy Rodeos to Baseball, American Football and of course the staging of the Muhammad Ali v Al Lewis boxing match of 1972.

The first recorded American Football game at Croke Park was an exhibition match played among US servicemen in 1946 on a stopover and held in aid of the Irish Red Cross.

The large numbers of US military stationed across Europe after the end of the Second World War facilitated the staging of official competitions. After that first visit to Croke Park the next game was a much bigger affair when a US Air Force league match between the Burtonwood Bullets and the Wetherfield Raiders was held on the GAA pitch on Saturday, November 21, 1953.

A promotional campaign in advance swelled spectator numbers to 40,000 with the Irish Red Cross again the beneficiaries, and a look at the newspaper reports of the day offer an insight into a curious but uncertain Irish public in an era when Cork hurler Christy Ring was the biggest sporting icon in the land.

The reporter for the Irish Independent bemoaned the fact that the 1953 contest was a one-sided affair with Burtonwood cruising to a 27-0 victory but was more taken by the physicality of the exchanges and the equipment garb of the players in a time when there wouldn’t be RTÉ television for another decade and there was no such thing as helmets in hurling.

The Irish Independent wrote: “To the uninitiated – and they were many – these tough Americans looked like a child’s conception of visitors from Mars as, heavily padded and helmeted, they tore into one another with rare abandon and it seemed as if the ball was of secondary importance, and the main idea was to ground the other fellow.”

Surprisingly it would take more than 40 years for American Football to make its return. After a European promotional campaign in the 1980s, the next instalment happened in 1996 with the College Football Shamrock Classic, where Notre Dame defeated United States Naval Academy team 54–27 in front of another 40,000 strong crowd.

The Pittsburgh Steelers made their first visit to Croke Park in 1997 when they defeated the Chicago Bears 30-17. In 2014 the University of Central Florida (UCF) hosted Penn State in their 2014 Season Opener in what was called the Croke Park Classic. Penn State defeated UCF 26 - 24 in front of 54,000 fans.

This Sunday’s match against the Minnesota Vikings is the culmination of a long-term project by the Pittsburgh Steelers to grow an Irish base. After adding Ireland to their Global Markets Programme in 2023 they have held two sold out watch parties at Croke Park for games in the 2023 and 2024 seasons which have built up to this – the first ever regular season NFL game being played in Ireland. It is something of a homecoming too, as the Rooney’s the noted philanthropists and owners of the Steelers can trace their ancestors back to James and Mary Rooney who emigrated from Newry to America during An Gorta Mór in the 1840s.

We understand more about Mars now than we did in 1953 and know more about American Football too, but there will still be plenty of curious GAA fans on Sunday as Croke Park enhances its status as one of the finest venues in world sport, and just a couple of kilometres from the site of their landmark defeat in Clontarf, some Vikings look to go marauding in Dublin again.