EARLY birthday celebrations were the order of the day for Clogher Valley skipper Paul Armstrong who turned 29 yesterday (Tuesday).
On Saturday afternoon, Valley beat Richmond 31-17 to ensure that the club will join the ranks of the All Ireland League for the first time next season. A feat that Armstrong says they’ve been striving for;
“We’ve been kind of building to get up the last three or four years, then Covid kind of knocked the whole thing out a wee bit.
“We’re just at the stage where the team is at the right age and there’s good youth coming through and coaches and all that are involved.
“I feel we’ve a right few good players at the 20-21 age and if we didn’t get up we might have lost some of them to bigger clubs.”
That fear diminished when the final whistle sounded at Ashbourne RFC at the weekend but Armstrong admits it took a while to really ring true;
“It was funny to be honest, it didn’t really feel like it had kicked in to be honest. It was kind of a weird feeling because the game wasn’t as tight as we thought it would’ve been. The whistle went and it was like – is that it?
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