Sean O'Connell goal v Dublin (1975)

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across one of those homemade, local sports highlights programmes from yesteryear on BBC NI. 'Glory Days' apparently. Charting local sporting "success" from the 1970s. You know the drill: Jackie Fullerton, lots of motorsport and Billy Bingham as a talking head. Missable stuff. 

But a diamond in the rough was the appearance of Sean O'Connell bursting into the Dublin square in Croke Park to volley to the net during Derry's All-Ireland semi-final defeat in 1975. A great Derry move and a fantastic goal. (This was recorded on my phone camera, so please excuse the ropey sound and picture quality!)

Showing my age here, but it was a score I hadn't seen before and it highlighted what appeared to be a decent showing from the Oak Leafers, eventually going down to a 3-13 to 3-8 defeat. 

Indeed, I don't recall having ever seeing any footage from that Dublin game, (although the 1976 semi-final against Kerry - in which the Derry players wear a jersey that somehow sports a horizontal red stripe - gets aired from time to time; see YouTube clip below) and it got me thinking about how performances from the likes of O'Connell, Jim McKeever, Eamon Coleman, the Gribbens and McGurks and a host of other legends from Derry and all around the country have probably been lost to the archives. And in many cases probably never seen tape at all.

The late Sean O'Connell also scored a goal in the 1958 All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry. It is one of the greatest scores in Derry's football history, both in terms of aesthetics and significance. A brilliant individual effort by all accounts, that helped the Oak Leafers beat the Kingdom by a single point and reach their first ever All-Ireland Final. Yet I, like most Derry fans have never even seen it. 

As that BBC programme proves, there are still bits and pieces of tape lying about, but it's a shame that most of us haven't seen any footage from great Derry performances of the past.

Maybe the GAA, along with the likes of RTÉ, will someday task a group or body to carry out the painstaking job of trawling the archives and remastering them. If such a thing could even be done. Although some YouTube members are doing a pretty good job of it already. Nowadays we are used to total saturation of Gaelic Games coverage, and we take these things for granted, but it would be nice if we could produce a digital archive of the great matches, great scores and great performances of the past, before they are lost forever.