Youthful Clogher to clash with Cooke

CLOGHER Valley’s already young first XV is set to be even younger on Saturday when they travel to Cooke in the semi-final of the Junior Cup.

With Michael Treanor’s wedding scheduled for the same day, head coach, Stephen Bothwell is without the front rower as well as Kyle Cobane, Eugene McKenna and Philip Hopper, but that’s opening the door for the younger members of the squad to take their chance.

“As young as we are, we’re going younger!,” exclaimed Bothwell, who confirmed that Neil Henderson, 18-year-old Jamie Allen and 21-year-old Aaron Crawford will most likely be his starting front row against a strong Cooke scrum.

While not overly concerned about the impact those particular absences will have, Bothwell is more concerned about the lack of game time the majority of his squad have had over the last four weeks.

Five members of Clogher’s side – Paul Armstrong, Reece and Callum Smyton, Neil Henderson and David Maxwell – played in the Ulster Junior side’s opening 21-10 win over Leinster in this season’s Interprovincial tournament and they should be lining out for their province again in Munster on Saturday.

However, due to Ulster Branch scheduling the Junior Cup semi-finals both for this coming weekend, the Ulster Junior side will now be without all of the Clogher contingent, the Instonians and Cooke players too. And even though that contingent will be replaced by their Limavady counterparts, who missed the opener due to a promotion play-off win over Coleraine, the Ulster juniors will be significantly weaker than they needed to be.

That organisational blunder apart, the remainder of Clogher’s squad members haven’t played in a month, which is a more pressing concern for Bothwell.

“The only concern I had was none of my players picked up a knock, but that’s been so badly organised,” he said.

“Having not played for four weeks is an issue too because, while it’s the same for Cooke, we play a game that is more risk with the ball in hand, so I suppose, the boys have been good, training and the Ulster boys have been playing.

“But it’s hard to get any energy into a training session so we’ve taken the under-18s with the senior lads so both have someone to run against.”

Having already beaten Cooke twice in the league this season and relatively comfortably too, Bothwell is hopeful his team can reach another final – having already won the All-Irleland Junior Cup at Kingspan in January. He feels that achievement can help soften the blow of missing out on the league title in the final game of the season to Instonians.

“It would be lovely to end the season with another trophy and some of the boys went to the Towns Cup final and are desperate to get back to Kingspan,” he said.

“It would have been nice to have gone up but as long as we can keep the boys together we’ll have another go next year.”