Northern Ireland tour

Last weekend, Jai and Martyn took the U13s to Belfast to play fixtures against two of Northern Ireland’s top clubs.

On Friday evening we played Cliftonville FC U14s at their Solitude Stadium. Perhaps feeling a little weary from the journey, we got off to a slow start and were a bit out-muscled in the first half but from 3:0 down at half time the boys really picked it up in the second half. The game ended with a 4:2 defeat but our confidence was high going into Saturday morning’s game against Glentoran FC.

The Glentoran Academy is recognised as one of Northern Ireland’s strongest, producing good technical players, but up against their own age group the Tigers dominated from start to finish and won comfortably 3:1. There were some especially good performances from Jaeden Nathanial, Yanis N'Douba and Kevin Zambrano. In the afternoon we were the club’s guests at a first team friendly match, meeting the manager (former Man City and Republic of Ireland international Alan Kernaghan) and given a tour of the club’s trophy room before watching the match in the sunshine.

On Sunday the boys relaxed like pros with a game of (crazy) golf, Brandon Trujillo taking the prize money!

The club would like to thank everyone who welcomed us to Belfast, especially Ciaran Gormley and his colleagues at The Ardoyne Youth Club who organised the matches, transported us between venues, fed us and entertained us brilliantly throughout the weekend.