BY RYAN FERRY
IT’S been a great week of celebrations for Raphoe Town as they toast their first league title in over twenty years.
A 5-0 victory over Lifford Celtic sealed the Donegal Physiotherapy & Performance Centre Division Two title for runaway leaders Raphoe.
They have won 14 and drawn two of their 16 matches and have claimed the silverware with four games to spare.
Raphoe’s senior team have known hardship in recent years but they stuck at it and got their rewards on Sunday.
“It’s been a very good week for the club,” said Raphoe’s manager and chairman, Mike Kelly.
“Even all the we’ans are all delighted and they wouldn’t even know some of the boys.
“We had a meeting on Tuesday night and the coaches were saying they were talking about it at underage training.
“It’s been a great week for the club but it’s been a long time coming.
“Last year we finished third from bottom and the year before that we finished second from bottom.
“We had a very young team at that time with a lot of boys 15 or 16 years of age.
“Players had vacated the place and it was left up to a crowd of young boys so they gained their own experience by getting beat and well beat for a couple of years but this year it all clicked for them.
“A couple of players came back as well.
“Ryan (McCullagh) is our most experienced player at 38 years of age and Craig Kelly is 30 years of age. The rest are under 25 and a lot of them are teenagers.”
Raphoe did win promotion to the second tier a couple of years ago but it has been a challenge to keep all their best players at their fine new club grounds at Drumineney.
They managed to build a stronger squad this season and there was real buy-in from all.
Kelly said: “It’s not greener on the other side.
“It was different years ago when the Ulster Senior League was there.
“I played myself the last two times we won the league and players moved on.
“But the Ulster Senior League isn’t there anymore so there’s no reason to leave your own club.
“Some of the players were away to other clubs and one of them won a cup but he said himself it meant nothing to him because it wasn’t his own hometown.
“So getting the boys back helped and another factor was three years ago we joined up with Killea in the Youth League.
“A man called Seamus Canning was onto me and he had ten players in Killea and I had ten in Raphoe. Neither of us had a team but we went together and that was the best thing that happened us.
“Those young boys are about Raphoe now and Seamus is about Raphoe and he’s a huge asset to our coaching team.
“He takes the training sessions and comes up with the ideas which allows myself and Emmet to watch more.
“We also got Karl McHugh down at the start of the season and got the boys fit.”
The likes of Cranford, Whitestrand, Letterbarrow, Drumoghill and Deele Harps have all had designs on promotion this year.
They are all decent sides but none of them have been able to defeat Raphoe.
“I’ll be honest, after we had played them all once, we knew we were in with a good shout of winning the league.
“We just felt we had clicked in the first half of the season and we thought we could keep the momentum going.
“We took very little of a break over Christmas. Rain, hail, or snow we were out every Tuesday and Thursday night.
“If we had no game then we did something on the Sunday. We had one weekend off in the whole season.”
Raphoe still have games against Dunkineely Celtic, Letterbarrow Celtic, Curragh Athletic and Drumkeen United to go and they want to go through the whole campaign unbeaten.
“We have four games left.
“There’s boys looking at stats and records.
“As it stands at the minute we have the best defensive record ever in the league.
“I think it’s held by Drumkeen who conceded nine goals in 18 games.
“We have seven conceded but we will play twenty games not just 18.
“That will keep the boys motivated. The defence want to do their bit as well.”