Dergview insist player safety is priority after Irish Cup exit

DERGVIEW Football Club is standing by its decision not to travel to Saturday’s fourth round Irish Cup tie at Larne despite being thrown out of the premier knockout competition by the Irish Football Association (IFA) and potentially missing out on a lucrative fifth round tie against Linfield.

Dergview had planned to leave their base at Darragh Park at 9am on Saturday morning to begin the long journey to Ballymena and Provincial League opponents Wellington Rec for a 1.30pm kick-off.

But an hour and a half before that club officials began receiving messages via Whatsapp from concerned players regarding travelling conditions following numerous reports of roads being blocked by snow, flooding and fallen trees.

News was also filtering through that two Castlederg men, one a  former player, had died following a road traffic accident in Donegal.

Dergview informed the IFA of the situation and delayed their departure time by half an hour.  But with players from Derry, Donegal, Strabane and more locally struggling to complete their journey to base, in the interests of health and safety of their players at 9.51am the club informed the IFA that they would not be travelling to Larne.

Yesterday (Monday) the club wrote to the IFA  explaining that they did not fulfil the tie because of “exceptional circumstances” which they claimed falls under the remit of Rule 20 (b) of the Irish Cup competitions rules. It states, “The Association reserves the right to implement a protocol in the event of exceptional circumstances.”

The email also included numerous Facebook posts of reports and photographs of roads affected by snow and flooding.

But that submission has fallen on deaf ears and last evening, after consideration by the Challenge Cup Committee, Dergview were informed they had been dismissed from the competition and fined £250 ahead of the lucrative fifth round draw.

Dergview have the right to appeal and are currently considering their options.

Their stance however remains unchanged from the email submitted to the IFA on Monday which signed off by stating, “We made the difficult decision not to travel based on local knowledge and info that we were receiving via many different social media posts from people, local authorities, elected reps and news pages.

“When making the decision we did so with only one thought in our minds – the health and safety of our players.”

In this morning’s fifth round draw Wellington Rec were paired with Premiership leaders Linfield.