Our Under 16 football team travelled to Cookstown to play their first Divison A league game having won promotion from last year. On paper we were certainly underdogs coming up against a school nearly three times the size of our own but that was just ''on paper''!

Right from the first whistle our centre defence partnership of Dean Martin and Justin McCloy kept the Cookstown strike threat in their back pockets while young Kyle Colgan and captain Nicky Hudson ran the show in midfiled controlling wave after wave of Magherafelt attack. After 15 minutes a piercing run by Kyle Colgan was stopped dead, illegally, in the box and the resulting penalty was tucked away into the corner of the goal by Dean Martin.

Not to be denied Kyle Colgan did net himself a goal 5 minutes later leaving the score 2 - 0 at half time in fact it could easily have been 3 - 0 as a thirty yard Nicky Hudson free kick nearly split the cross bar in two before ricoching away from the goals.

The second half saw our boys continue to press a shell shocked Cookstown with Luke Porter and Neil Smyth running at and around the Cookstown wing backs at every opportunity. Samuel Murray found the back of the net mid way through the second half and the rout of Cookstown ended with a sublime chip from our big centre forward Kyle Moore.

The Cookstown team stuck at it until the final whistle but on this occassion were simply outclasssed in every area of the park. The quality of the Magherafelt squad is testament to the large numbers we have had out at training and we look forward to our remaining four league games confident of what we can do.

Men of the match were Dean and Nicky

Mr Irvine

20th October 2011