Cup final for Newtowne FC despite challenging season

A victory over the Ballymena and Provincial Premier Division champions in the cup final on Friday would cap a remarkable turnaround for the Limavady outfit after an extremely trying beginning to the season.

Manager Michael Burns explained: “We lost 10 players and the manager before the beginning of the season.” He added: ““After an indifferent start, we clicked into gear. You’re talking about 16 and 17 year olds for a lot of the time.”

The faith in youth appears to have paid off for Newtone though because despite beginning pre-season with less than half a dozen players, the local team are now in a cup final after finishing a highly respectable third place in the league standings.

Michael Burns explains: “I was the assistant manager at the time, although I had been a manager for five years before hand with Newtowne and we won nearly 20 trophies during that time.

“When I came back to Newtowne, what we done was we invested in the youth. We just started to rebuild. It was a bit of a change to go from having just won a treble the previous year to trying to sort of start again with the young players.

“After an indifferent start, we clicked into gear. You’re talking about 16 and 17 year olds for a lot of the time. Among them are boys like Stephen Duffy, a great lad we brought down from Derry. The rest of them are all local, Limavady lads - the likes of Evan Donnell, he was 17 when we brought him in as well; you have Mark McClean, who was 17; you have Jamie McElwee. They were the young lads that sort of came in. To be honest, our age group is around the 21, 22, 23 sort of age so we’re a very young team.