Noel was a very skilful corner forward, everyone was in a band except them!

NEW Order, Happy Mondays, United and City, Strangeways and ship canals, the worker bee and... Oisins GFC.

- 

Manchester, so much to answer for.

Not least the world's most famous ex-GAA player, Noel Gallagher, who was at Croke Park and marched out to the sound of Amhrán na bhFiann as an U16 corner-forward with Manchester's Oisins GFC in 1983.

This summer Gallagher will be back in Croker with his brother Liam as part of the Oasis reunion tour.

The occasion of his first visit was a hastily arranged match, done on sort of a nod and a wink basis it seems, between Kilmacud Crokes and Oisins and who regularly featured both Noel and Liam Gallagher.

"Both of my parents are Irish so we basically grew up here (in Ireland) in the 60s and 70s," Noel told Ryan Tubridy on the Late Late show in 2012, name checking dad Tom from Duleek and mom Peggy (Sweeney) from Swinford/Charlestown.

"I had an Irish upbringing and I used to play Gaelic football, not professionally of course, with a team from Manchester. We were U14, 16 and 18 champions consecutively.

"We came to Dublin to play exhibition games against some Dublin teams in Dublin (one was in) in Croke Park. We were hammered though but there is a photograph. I scored a point"

But then 1983 was a noticeably different time as far as this tale unfurled.

Noel wouldn't get his first guitar, as a present, until the following May; indeed, he showed little interest in being in a band until joining Liam's band, Oasis, eight years later.

On the other side of the ball, Kilmacud Crokes were nothing like the dual-code powerhouse they would become in the 90s although the connection that day to the later breakthrough was strong.

1995 will forever be the year of Blur v Oasis. It was also the year the Dubs won the All-Ireland, and so did Kilmacud Crokes.