“I had an awareness of what happened there, but I never knew the depth of what went on or what people experienced,” Barry-Murphy said following the 1-0 victory.<\/p>\n
“It was very important for the players to watch the footage to understand what the people there have been through.<\/p>\n
“We organised to go there and it was very, very important.<\/p>\n
“While you’re there, it’s naturally emotionally very difficult because you start to see the gravestones of the people who passed there.<\/p>\n
“But also the stories of the different people there that day. It’s very difficult to comprehend what they went through.<\/p>\n
“Football is football and we couldn’t guarantee that we were going to win today, but we had to produce a performance that looked as if we understood what we were playing for.<\/p>\n
“On such a poignant day, it’s very important that we played the way we did.”<\/p>\n
Barry-Murphy had written in the matchday programme – including a front cover displaying the clock found in the rubble that stopped at the time of the disaster – that the people of the community had shown what coming together means “in the most unimaginable of circumstances” and wanted his side to display the same qualities.<\/p>\n
The game also saw a minute’s silence held before kick-off, respected impeccably by Cardiff and Birmingham fans.<\/p>\n
Barry-Murphy revealed that academy coach, Dennis Moss, also made the visit to Aberfan 24 hours before the 60th anniversary commemorations having been among the rescuers.<\/p>\n
“He was one of the first responders as an 18-year-old from Cardiff who shot up there to start pulling bodies from the rubble,” he said. <\/p>\n
“He was there with us and you see the effect it had on him to be back there.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I had an awareness of what happened there, but I never knew the depth of what went on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-664667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}