Kyle heads for the Valley

CLOGHER Valley’s preparations for the 2025-26 Energia All-Ireland League 2B season have already begun with the signing of exciting centre, Josh Kyle, from Omagh Accies.

The youngster will fill the gap left by New Zealander, Luke Russell, who decided to head home after enjoying a successful year at The Cran, and Valley head coach, Stephen Bothwell is delighted to have the former Omagh Academy pupil onboard.

“We’re delighted he’s over. He’s a good quality player, a good talker, young and he suits us in a position we needed with Luke going away,” he explained.

“He’s probably better, he’ll make us tick better because he’s got better ball skills than Luke.”

As well as having to replace Russell, Bothwell also had to fill the hole left by winger, Ewan Haire, who has also moved to New Zealand to play rugby down under for a year.

But he feels it won’t be necessary to look away from The Cran to achieve that feat: “We’ve a couple of good young lads coming through and we have young Thomas Barnett coming out of ERGS [Enniskillen Royal Grammar School], who fills a lot of positions for us, maybe from six on up, bar nine.

“He’s a cracking player too. He played 10 for the twos last season and did well and then we have another young centre of our own, Daniel Loane, and Josh Mee, who got his chance against Ballymena last season.”

While Bothwell is happy with his lot squad wise, he knows he faces a tough task when the campaign opens at the end of August.

Clogher face three difficult fixtures in the revamped Ulster Senior Cup where they will host a much strengthened 2A side, Ballymena, who have recruited at least one ex-Ulster player in Andrew Warwick, while they will also be on the road to 1A side City of Armagh and 1B outfit Instonians.

And the Clogher head coach knows his side will need to be on their mettle ahead of those clashes in order to be ready to hit the ground running when the AIL gets underway at the end of September/start of October.

“Those are big teams we have to play [in the Ulster Senior Cup], so the boys need to be fairly good shape otherwise you could pick up injuries,” he observed.

“And we want to avoid that, so we’ll definitely have no need to go looking for pre-season friendlies!”