Catholic Utd v Kelvedon Hatch

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Welcome to Kelvedon Hatch supporters to our little part of Southend City.

We’re in Essex Olympian League action for the first time in two months. Our cup campaigns have gone extremely well which has impacted our league matches, but this is to be expected.

We find ourselves 7th in the league having played 2 or 3 games less than those above. Although in the case of Old Southendian (6th place) and Canning Town (4th place) we have played a staggering 5 and 6 games less respectively. If we were to win our games in hand, we would go second in the table, but still 8 points behind runaway leaders Hutton FC.

Before the festive break we played Larkspur Rovers in the second round of the Anagrams Trophy. The Anagrams Trophy competition provides us with the means to compete against clubs outside Essex. Larkspur Rovers play in the Middlesex County Premier Division and despite the 3-0 scoreline, it was a good match for both Catholic United supporters and neutrals alike.

The match started with both sides trying to retain posession, but it was clear that Rovers were looking to play direct football, with long balls from the back which Jack Leech and Loius Robinson were comfortably clearing. Yet the first goal came with just two minutes on the clock, as the returning Liam Oliver played the ball into the box from the left, for Ben Burrows to side foot home.

Rovers continued with their direct play but when they got the ball of the floor and played through their midfield four, they were actually getting into better positions in the final third.

FROM THE EDITOR

When Aaron Baldwin unleashed a rocket from a full 30-yards out to double our lead before the break, it was enough to dent the confidence of Rovers.

A well worked corner just after half time allowed Mike Sammut to get on the scoresheet and put the game out of sight of the visitors. A quiet afternoon for Louis Godwin-Green, who only had a couple of saves to make and the Essex Bhoys are in the 3rd round, with a trip to Chipperfield Corinthians in the quarter final on the 11th March. A date for your diary!!

As we turn our attention to today’s game, we find Kelvedon Hatch in 10th place in the league, just four points behind us. They have had a mixed bag of results but the highlight being a superb 3-1 home win against promotion hopefuls Rayleigh Town who currently lay in second place. The arrive having not played a game since 26th November, a 4-0 loss to Shenfield AFC, both games after this being postponed due to the cold snap.

Historically we’ve not faired too badly against Kelvedon Hatch.

Since 2015 we have played them 13 times, winning 7 of those games, drawing twice and losing 4 times. We’ve scored 34 times and conceded just 18 goals.

The first time our clubs met was on the 8th April 2015, an Essex Premier Cup semifinal, where Hatch won 2-0. Our squad today contains just two of the players from that match, brothers Patrick and Thomas Kearney.

Our biggest win came on the 12th October 2019, a 6-0 victory in the Olympian League Cup, Ellis Sands firing a brace on the day.

Our biggest defeat sees two games where Hatch won 3-1, both in the EOFL Premier Division. From an importance perspective, many would consider the Premier Cup semi-final to be our biggest defeat to Kelvedon Hatch though, so I’ll leave this to your opinion!

Let’s take cup competitions out of the equation though and concentrate on the league. We’ve played 10 matches and won 6, drawn 2 and lost 2. We’ve scored 29 goals and conceded 15. At home, we remain unbeaten, playing 4 games winning 2 and drawing 2, scoring 11, conceding 6.

Most of us will be watching for a result to keep Catholic United moving up the table but those games in hand will be key and I can only assume the league will get us playing a few games midweek should the cup runs continue.

I don’t envy the players having to play Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday-Tuesday, but I’ve long since retired from my sport and as an avid Essex Bhoys supporter, having some midweek fixtures will get a big thumbs up from me, even if the players tell me to ‘do one’ :)

Enjoy the game today and please have a safe journey home.

Rob

Hello and welcome to the management team and players from Kelvedon Hatch for today’s match.

I hope everyone had a good festive period and enjoyed time with family and friends. However, no sooner are we celebrating Christmas, New Year is round the corner and gone in a flash. We’re now in 2023 and our attentions return to football.

Looking back at December, we had two tough cup games in which we did very well coming through as victors, but what was pleasing was us converting our chances and scoring goals. We’ve progressed in both competitions so our quest to win.

Larkspur Rovers gave us a great test in our last game before Christmas, and it’s great to see we can battle physically as well as mentally.

We return to league action today though, a first for a couple of months and I’m really looking forward to it. It will be a tough game as Kelvedon Hatch will be working just as hard as us to get their New Year off in the best way possible.

I’d like to say it would be good to get a scoreline similar to the last time we met but I am sure Kelvedon will be a different side than earlier this season.

Of course, doing well in cup competitions mean our league fixtures can get stockpiled. We’ll take each game as it comes but it is of great importance that we take the confidence from our cup games into our league matches and continue to enjoy playing football our way.

Enjoy the game today and have a safe journey home.

Simon Thomas

Official Media Partner

In 1920 Kelvedon Hatch Football Club was formed to enable the local boys, of what was then a very small Essex village, to play organised football. The Club continued up to the wars years when, like so many other clubs it was temporarily disbanded until it was re-formed in 1946.

Kelvedon Hatch Football Club played for many years in local football leagues until the mid 1970’s when in an endeavour to improve the standard of football it applied to join the Greene King South Essex League. The Club was admitted to the League where it continued to play for many years.

In order to progress, the Club applied for membership to the Essex Olympian League which at that time required any club participating in the league to also have a reserve team. A reserve team was formed and the Club was admitted to the Essex Olympian League as a member in 1985.

The first few years in the league were spent in adjusting to the higher grade of football with the club setting about the task of recruiting better players to assist with the progression of the Club.

This proved a successful strategy in that in the late 1980’s and the 1990’s the Club achieved outstanding success on the field of play winning, on more than a number of occasions, the Essex County Cup, the Essex Olympian League, the Essex Olympian League Cup and the Ongar Charity Cup.

During this time some of the Management and many players achieved honours in being selected for the Essex County Representative Team and the Essex Olympian Football League Representative Team.

The Club continues to strive to provide the village of Kelvedon Hatch with a football team of which it can be proud.

COME AND JOIN BELFAIRS GOLF CLUB

Football Ambassador To The World

Pelé, one of soccer’s greatest players and a transformative figure in 20th-century sports who achieved a level of global celebrity few athletes have known, died on Thursday 29th December 2022, in São Paulo. He was 82.

His death was confirmed by his manager, Joe Fraga. The Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in São Paulo said the cause was multiple organ failure, the result of the progression of colon cancer.

Pelé had been receiving treatment for cancer in recent years, and he entered the hospital several weeks ago for treatment of a variety of health issues, including a respiratory infection.

A national hero in his native Brazil, Pelé was beloved around the world — by the very poor, among whom he was raised; the very rich, in whose circles he traveled; and just about everyone who ever saw him play.

“Pelé is one of the few who contradicted my theory,” Andy Warhol once said. “Instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries.”

Celebrated for his peerless talent and originality on the field, Pelé (pronounced peh-LAY) also endeared himself to fans with his sunny personality and his belief in the power of soccer — football to most of the world — to connect people across dividing lines of race, class and nationality.

He won three World Cup tournaments with Brazil and 10 league titles with Santos, his club team, as well as the 1977 North American Soccer League championship with the New York Cosmos. Having come out of retirement at 34, he spent three seasons with the Cosmos on a crusade to popularize soccer in the United States.

Before his final game, in October 1977 at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Pelé took the microphone on a podium at the center of the field, his father and Muhammad Ali beside him, and exhorted a crowd of more than 75,000. “Say with me three times now,” he declared, “for the kids: Love! Love! Love!”

1968 - Pele attempts a bicycle kick. It was said offbalance or not, he could lash the ball accurately with either foot

In his 21-year career, Pelé — born Edson Arantes do Nascimento — scored 1,283 goals in 1,367 professional matches, including 77 goals for the Brazilian national team.

Many of those goals became legendary, but Pelé’s influence on the sport went well beyond scoring. He helped create and promote what he later called “o jogo bonito” — the beautiful game — a style that valued clever ball control, inventive pinpoint passing and a voracious appetite for attacking. Pelé not only played it better than anyone; he also championed it around the world.

Among his athletic assets was a remarkable center of gravity; as he ran, swerved, sprinted or backpedaled, his midriff seemed never to move, while his hips and his upper body swiveled around it.

He could accelerate, decelerate or pivot in a flash. Off-balance or not, he could lash the ball accurately with either foot. Relatively small, at 5 feet 8 inches, he could nevertheless leap exceptionally high, often seeming to hang in the air to put power behind a header.

Like other sports, soccer has evolved. Today, many of its stars can execute acrobatic shots or rapid-fire passing sequences. But in his day, Pelé’s playmaking and scoring skills were stunning.

Early Success

Pelé sprang into the international limelight at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, a slight 17-year-old who as a boy had played soccer barefoot on the streets of his impoverished village using rolled-up rags for a ball. A star for Brazil, he scored six goals in the tournament, including three in a semifinal against France and two in the final, a 5-2 victory over Sweden. It was Brazil’s first of a record five World Cup trophies.

Pelé also played on the Brazilian teams that won in 1962 and 1970. In the 1966 tournament, in England, he was brutally kicked in the early games and was finally sidelined by a Portuguese player’s tackle that would have earned an expulsion nowadays but drew nothing then.

With Pelé essentially absent, Brazil was eliminated in the opening round. He was so disheartened that he announced he would retire from national team play.

But he reconsidered and played on Brazil’s World Cup team in Mexico in 1970. That team is widely hailed as the best ever; its captain, Carlos Alberto, later joined Pelé on the Cosmos.

“I wish he had gone on playing forever,” Clive Toye, a former president and general manager of the Cosmos, wrote in a 2006 memoir. “But then, so does everyone else who saw him play, and those football people who never saw him play are the unluckiest people in the world.”

Edson Arantes do Nascimento was born on Oct. 23, 1940, in Três Corações, a tiny rural town in the state of Minas Gerais. His parents named him Edson in tribute to Thomas Edison. (Electricity had come to the town shortly before Pelé was born.) When he was about 7, he began shining shoes at the local railway station to supplement the family’s income.

His father, a professional player whose career was cut short by injury, was nicknamed Dondinho.

Brazilian soccer players often use a single name professionally, but even Pelé himself was unsure how he got his. He offered several possible derivations in “Pelé: The Autobiography” (2006, with Orlando Duarte and Alex Bellos).

Most probably, he wrote, the nickname was a reference to a player on his father’s team whom he had admired and wanted to emulate as a boy. The player was known as Bilé (bee-LAY). Other boys teased Edson, calling him Bilé until it stuck.

One of Pelé’s earliest memories was of seeing his father, while listening to the radio, cry when Brazil lost to Uruguay, 2-1, in the deciding match of the 1950 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro. The game is still remembered as a national calamity. Pelé recalled telling his father that he would one day grow up to win the World Cup for Brazil.

He signed his first contract, with a junior team, when he was 14 and transferred to Santos at 15. He scored four goals in his first professional game, which Santos won, 7-1. He was only 16 when he made his debut for the national team in July 1957.

A New Way to Play

When Brazil’s team went to the World Cup in Sweden the next summer, Pelé later said, he was so skinny that “quite a few people thought I was the mascot.”

Once they saw him play, it was a different story. Reports of this precocious Brazilian teenager’s prowess raced around the world. One account told of how, against Wales in the quarterfinals, with his back to the goal, he received the ball on his chest, let it drop to an ankle and instantly scooped it around behind him. As it bounced, he turned — so quickly that the ball was barely a foot off the ground — and struck it into the net. It was his first World Cup goal and the game’s only one, and it put Brazil into the semifinals.

“It boosted my confidence completely,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The world now knew about Pelé.”

The world now knew about Brazilian soccer, too. Pelé undoubtedly benefited from playing alongside other remarkably gifted ball-control artists — Garrincha, Didi and Vavá among them — as well as from Europe’s lack of familiarity with the Brazilian style.

Most European teams used static alignments; players seldom strayed from their designated areas.

Brazil, though, encouraged two of the four midfielders to behave like wingers when attacking. This forced opponents to cope quickly with four forwards, rather than two. Making things more difficult, the forwards often switched sides, right and left, and the outside fullbacks sometimes joined the attack. The effect dazzled onlookers, not to mention opponents.

After the semifinal against France, in which Pelé scored a hat trick in a 5-2 Brazil win, the French goalkeeper reportedly said, “I would rather play against 10 Germans than one Brazilian.”

1975 - Pele in his debut game with the New York Cosmos at Randalls Island Stadium

The team went home to national acclaim, and Pelé resumed playing for Santos as well as for two Army teams as part of his mandatory military service. In 1959 alone, he endured a relentless schedule of 103 competitive matches; nine times, he played two games within 24 hours.

Santos began to capitalize on his fame with lucrative postseason tours. In 1960, en route to Egypt, the team’s plane stopped in Beirut, where a crowd gathered threatening to kidnap Pelé unless Santos agreed to play a Lebanese team.

“Fortunately, the police dealt with it firmly, and we flew on to Egypt,” Pelé wrote in his autobiography.

He had become such a hero that, in 1961, to ward off European teams eager to buy his contract rights, the Brazilian government passed a resolution declaring him a nonexportable national treasure.

Soccer Diplomacy

When Pelé was about to retire from Santos in the early 1970s, Henry A. Kissinger, the United States secretary of state at the time, wrote to the Brazilian government asking it to release Pelé to play in the United States as a way to help promote soccer, and Brazil, in America.

By then, two more World Cups, numerous international club competitions and tireless touring by Santos had made Pelé a global celebrity. So it was beyond quixotic when Toye, the Cosmos’ general manager, decided to try to persuade the player universally acclaimed as the world’s best, and highest paid, to join his team.

The Cosmos had been born only a month earlier, in one afternoon, when all the players had gathered in a hotel at Kennedy International Airport to sign an agreement to play for $75 a game in a country where soccer was a minor sport at best.

Toye first met with Pelé and Julio Mazzei, Pelé’s longtime friend and mentor, in February 1971 during a Santos tour in Jamaica. It took dozens more conversations over the next four years, as well as millions of dollars from Warner Communications, the team’s owner, for Pelé to join the Cosmos.

During that period, he became the top scorer in Brazil for the 11th time, Santos won the 10th league championship of his tenure, and Pelé took heavy criticism for retiring from the national team and refusing to play in the 1974 World Cup, in West Germany.

Toye made his last pitch in March 1975 in Brussels. Pelé had retired from Santos the previous October, and two major clubs, Real Madrid of Spain and Juventus of Italy, were each offering a deal worth $15 million, Pelé later recalled.

“Sign for them, and all you can win is a championship,” Toye said he told Pelé. “Sign for me, and you can win a country.”

To further entice him, Warner added a music deal, a marketing deal guaranteeing him 50 percent of any licensing revenue involving his name, and a guarantee to hire his friend Mazzei as an assistant coach. Pelé signed a three-year contract worth, according to various estimates, $2.8 million to $7 million (the latter equivalent to about $40 million today).

Pelé relaxing during the World Cup in Mexico in 1970. Pursuing a musical avocation, he was never far from a guitar.

He was presented to the news media on June 11, 1975, at the “21” Club in New York. Pandemonium ensued: Fistfights broke out among photographers, and tables collapsed when people stood on them.

The hubbub continued when Pelé played his first North American Soccer League game, on June 15 at Downing Stadium on Randalls Island in the East River. It was a decrepit home; workers hastily painted its dirt patches green because CBS had come to televise the big debut. More than 18,000 fans, triple the previous largest crowd, shouldered their way in to watch.

At every road game during Pelé’s three North American seasons, the Cosmos attracted enormous crowds and a press contingent larger than that of any other New York team, with many journalists representing foreign networks, newspapers and news agencies. Movie and music stars — including Mick Jagger, Robert Redford and Rod Stewart — showed up for home games, lured by Warner executives’ enthusiasm for their hot new talent.

The Cosmos moved to Giants Stadium in Pelé’s final season, 1977, and there, in the Meadowlands, reached the pinnacle of their — and the league’s — popularity. For a home playoff game on Aug. 14, a crowd of 77,691 exceeded not only expectations but also capacity, squeezing into a stadium of 76,000 seats.

That season, the Cosmos had added two more global superstars, Franz Beckenbauer of West Germany and Carlos Alberto of Brazil. (Later, in 1979, the Los Angeles Aztecs lured a third, Johan Cruyff of the Netherlands, to the league.) Soccer seemed poised to enter the American mainstream.

But as it turned out, professional soccer was not yet ready to blossom in America, not even after the Cosmos won the 1977 league championship, in Portland, Ore., or after Pelé’s festive farewell game in October, when he led the “Love!” chant and played one half for the Cosmos and the other half for the visiting team, his beloved Santos.

The league had expanded to 24 teams, from 18, and lacked the financial underpinnings to sustain that many games and that much travel. Nor could other teams match the Cosmos’ spending on top-quality players. The league went out of business after the 1984 season.

But at the grass-roots level, and in schools and colleges, soccer did take off. In 1991, the United States women’s national team won the first women’s World Cup. (The United States has won it three times since.) In 2002, the men’s national team made it to the quarterfinals of the World Cup. And Major League Soccer has established itself as a sturdy successor to the N.A.S.L. (In 2011, the inaugural season of a new minor league with the N.A.S.L. name included a New York Cosmos team, of which Pelé was named honorary president.)

In June 2014, the city of Santos opened a Pelé Museum just before the start of the World Cup, the first held in Brazil since 1950. In a video recorded for the occasion, Pelé said, “It’s a great joy to pass through this world and be able to leave, for future generations, some memories, and to leave a legacy for my country.”

Advocate for

Education Pelé met Rosemeri Cholbi when she was 14 and wooed her for almost eight years before they married early in 1966. They had three children — Kely Cristina, Edson Cholbi and Jennifer — before divorcing in 1982.

After his divorce, Pelé often appeared in the gossip pages, partying with film stars, musicians and models. He acted in several movies, including John Huston’s “Victory” (1981), with Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone.

It also emerged that he had fathered two daughters out of wedlock. One, Sandra, whom he had refused to acknowledge, later sued for the right to use his surname. She wrote a book, “The Daughter the King Didn’t Want,” which he said greatly embarrassed him. She died of cancer in 2006.

His son, nicknamed Edinho, was a professional goalkeeper for five years before an injury ended his career. He later went to prison on a drugtrafficking conviction.

In 1994, Pelé married Assiria Seixas Lemos, a psychologist and Brazilian gospel singer; their twins, Joshua and Celeste, were born in 1996. They divorced in 2008. In his later years he dated a Brazilian businesswoman, Marcia Aoki, and he married her in 2016.

Children always responded warmly to Pelé, and he to them. Neither big nor intimidating, he had a wide, easy smile and a deep, reassuring voice.

“I have never seen another human being who was so willing to take the extra second to embrace or encourage a child,” said Jim Trecker, a longtime soccer executive who was the Cosmos’ public relations director in the Pelé years.

Pelé was sensitive about having dropped out of school and often lamented that so many young Brazilians remained poor and illiterate even as the country had begun to prosper.

Indeed, the day he scored his 1,000th goal, in November 1969 at Maracanã stadium in Rio before more than 200,000 fans, Pelé was mobbed by reporters on the field and used their microphones to dedicate the goal to “the children.” Crying, he made an impromptu speech about the difficulties of Brazil’s children and the need to give them better educational opportunities.

Many journalists interpreted the gesture as grandstanding, but for decades, as if to correct the record, he cited that speech and repeated the sentiment. In July 2007, at a promotional event in New York for a family literacy campaign, he said, “Today, the violence we see in Brazil, the corruption in Brazil, is causing big, big problems. Because, you see, for two generations, the children did not get enough education.”

(On the subject of correcting the record, research for his 2006 biography turned up additional games played, and the authors concluded that the famous 1,000th goal was actually his 1,002nd.)

In London during the 2012 Olympics, Pelé joined a so-called hunger summit meeting convened by the British prime minister at the time, David Cameron, whose stated goal was to reduce by 25 million the number of children stunted by malnutrition before the Rio Olympics in 2016.

Business and Music

Pelé’s own venture into government began in 1995, when he was appointed Brazil’s minister for sport by then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Pelé began a crusade to bring accountability to the business operations of Brazil’s professional teams, which were still run largely as gentlemen’s clubs, and to reform rules governing players’ contracts.

In 1998, Pelé’s Law, as it was known, passed. It required clubs to incorporate as taxable forprofit corporations and to publish balance sheets. It required that players be 20 before signing a professional contract and gave them the right of free agency after two years (instead of after age 32).

Many of the provisions were later weakened, and corruption continued, but Pelé said he took pride that the free agency clause had survived.

Business deals gone awry plagued him throughout his life.

Pelé reveling after he scored his 1,000th goal in 1969

He himself said he was often gullible, trusting friends who were less competent than they appeared. In 2001, a company he had helped found a decade earlier, Pelé Sports and Marketing, was accused of taking enormous loans to stage a charity game for Unicef and then not repaying the money when the game failed to happen. Pelé shut down the company; Unicef said there had been no wrongdoing on his part.

While continuing to promote educational programs throughout his life, Pelé also pursued his musical avocation. He was never far from a guitar, and he carried a miniature tape recorder to capture tunes or lyrics as the mood struck him.

He composed dozens of songs that were recorded by Brazilian pop stars, usually without his taking credit.

“I didn’t want the public to make the comparison between Pelé the composer and Pelé the football player,” he told the British newspaper The Guardian in 2006. “That would have been a huge injustice. In football, my talent was a gift from God. Music was just for fun.”

As he grew older, he often spoke of the difficulty of distinguishing between two personas: his real self, and the soccer superstar Pelé. He often referred to Pelé in the third person.

“One of the ways I try to keep perspective on things,” he wrote in his autobiography, “is to remind myself that what people are responding to isn’t me, necessarily; it’s this mythical figure that Pelé has become.”

His face remained familiar around the world long after his retirement from soccer. In 1994, when the World Cup was about to be played in the United States, Pelé sat in Central Park in New York waiting to be interviewed for ABC News. A teenager passed, did a double-take and then ran off; within minutes, people were streaming across the park to see him.

“There were hundreds of them,” Toye wrote in his own memoir. “Seventeen years after he last kicked a ball, this dark-skinned man is sitting in deep, dark shade under the trees — but he is still recognized, and once recognized, never alone in any country on earth.”

Pele is inundated by children at the 1966 World Cup. He was injured in the group stage as Brazil failed to advance to the quat er finals

RIP

Pelé

Edson Arantes do Nascimento

LURGAN CELTIC FOOTBALL

CLUB

Official Allegiance Club

Sharing club values of being open and inclusive to all, to encompass and represent all members in the community and society in which we operate

Team photo by Chris Totten

LURGAN CELTIC

As our ties with Celtic Football Club grow stronger following Calvin Carter-Vickers permanent transfer a few weeks ago, we decided it would be good to seek out other like-minded clubs that have the same values that we do.

During pre-season we reached out to Lurgan Celtic to cement an official allegiance, and a club we are happy to introduce to everyone.

So, who are Lurgan Celtic FC?

A club by the name of Lurgan Celtic was originally formed in 1903, with the obvious slant of aiming towards the Roman Catholic community of the town, adopting the name and colours of Glasgow Celtic, a popular club among the Irish Catholics population of Glasgow and the west of Scotland. At the time it was a bold move to try and break into the world of football. The Gaelic Athletic Association was in its early stages and was keen to promote Gaelic sports and football in particular, perceived as “foreign”, was discouraged. A change in attitudes gradually took hold in the early 1970s and Lurgan Celtic was reborn to try its luck again in the local football scene, quickly rising to become one of the strongest clubs in the Craigavon area.

Irish Football League membership remained elusive during these years, partly due to the presence of Glenavon down the road at a time when the IFA was trying to reach out to new footballing towns. There was also a suggestion that it was the club’s clearly Nationalist stance as they pushed for membership of what was considered a predominantly Unionist league that stood in their way at that time. So strongly was this felt that the club joined forces with Belfast club Donegal Celtic, another club that took its name and kit from the Glasgow club, and threatened the League with legal action to gain membership. The restructuring of the league in the early part of the 21st century eventually resulted in both Celtic clubs gaining admission to the Irish Football League Second Division for the 2002–03 season.

In 2003 the club closed their town centre ground and relocated to share Oxford United’s ground on the edge of Lurgan at Knockramer Park, which offered better facilities.

Promotion to the Intermediate League First Division was achieved in 2006–07, but in 2008 the club failed to meet the criteria for a place in the new IFA Championship, and found itself in the IFA Interim League for the 2008–09 season. They successfully made the necessary improvements to gain admission to the newly formed third tier, IFA Championship 2, for the 2009–10 season. After seven seasons of consolidation in Championship 2 with occasional flirts with relegation, Celtic surged to the 2014–15 NIFL Championship 2 title, achieving promotion to the national second tier, Championship 1.

On the back of their title success the previous season, Celtic pulled off one of the local game’s biggest giant-killing acts of the 21st century. After reaching the quarter-finals for the first time ever in the 2015–16 Irish Cup, Celtic were drawn to face senior NIFL Premiership side and beaten Irish Cup finalists the previous year, Portadown away at Shamrock Park. Celtic stunned the Ports by taking a 2–0 lead after 54 minutes. However, Portadown came back into the match after 70 minutes with two goals of their own to level the score at 2–2. However, Lurgan Celtic had the last say, and scored a last-minute penalty to win 3–2 and cause a major upset by eliminating Portadown and reaching the semi-finals of the cup for the first time in the club’s history. The match was also notable as Portadown’s final match under the management of Ronnie McFall. After the match, the Portadown manager resigned, ending his reign at the club after 29 years.[2] In the Irish Cup semifinal they were defeated 3–0 by Linfield with Aaron Burns scoring a hat-trick.

Despite the achievement of reaching the IrishCup semi-finals, manager Colin Malone resigned at the end of the 2016-17 season and the club endured a period of instability. The appointment of Brendan Shannon as Celtic player-manager could not prevent a serious downturn in results, and Shannon left halfway through the 2017-18 season, to be succeeded by Frankie Wilson. By this point, relegation to the third tier had become an inevitability; Celtic finished the season 20 points adrift of 11th-placed Dergview.

A 17-year spell in the Northern Ireland Football League ended on 15 August 2019, as the club announced its intention to withdraw from the Premier Intermediate League, with a view to reforming youth structures and resuming senior football activities for the 2020-21 season. It was announced on 29 June 2020 that Lurgan Celtic’s application to join the Mid-Ulster Football League was accepted, and the club played in the MUFL Division 3 for the 2020-21 season, which was suspended due to Covid. The first full season back playing for the senior team was 2021-22 at the end of which saw the team gain promotion to Division 2 and win the John Magee Memorial cup.

Michael Smyth and Donie McCourt agreed to take over the management of the squad upon its return to action and this season has seen a highly competitive league with FC Mindwell and Bessbrook United vying with Lurgan Celtic throughout the season for the promotional spots in the league. FC Mindwell started the season in phenomenal form and won each of their opening 19 league games to open up a healthy lead at the summit of the table.

The Hoops opened their own season with convincing wins over FC United of Lisburn, Damolly, The Dons and Lisburn Youth, before falling to defeat at home to Castlecaulfield. Throughout this time Dwyer Lavery, Aaron Withers, Gary Gilmore and Paddy Toman were regulars on the scoresheet, as the team showed glimpses of the excellent talent and scoring prowess they possessed. Bessbrook and the Hoops were neck and neck with little quarter given, and it was no surprise that the first meeting of the sides saw an entertaining match end level at 2 goals a-piece.

As the season entered post-Christmas fixtures Mindwell looked uncatchable; but things turned in Bessbrooks favour for the second promotional spot when a disappointing draw away to Loughshore, was soon followed by a narrow defeat away to Tollymore United, which seriously dented Celtic’s ambitions. Both games had been played in tough conditions, but the players also failed to turn up in the contests and tough questions needed answering by the squad. With a game looming against unbeaten Mindwell, it was acknowledged that realistically only a win would push the Hoops back into the mix and so it fared out, as the team produced probably one of its best performances of the season to administer a 4-1 defeat to the visitors in devastating fashion.

Michael Haughian and Michael McConville were turning in excellent performances in addition to the attack-minded players in the team, including the January addition Jonny Reynolds; as they soon put a fantastic run together that saw 11 league wins produced on the bounce, coupled with a John Magee Memorial cup run that took them to the final. The league form saw them soon bypass Bessbrook and promotion was secured with a game to spare. It had been a fantastic achievement by the management and playing squad, although a Cup final loomed to round off what would hopefully be a hugely successful season for the Wee Hoops.

The final saw them pitted against Castlecaulfield, who had proved tough opposition in the league, and on Wed 8th June at Holm Park, Armagh, the final was played. Celtic took an early lead courtesy of player of the year Paddy Toman, before Castlecaulfield equalised before halftime. Whilst there were opportunities for Celtic to regain the lead in the contest, the match entered the final quarter with both teams locked level. With thoughts drifting to extra time, young player of the year Michael McConville coolly slotted home to secure the win and John Magee Memorial Cup success for Lurgan Celtic. The team will enjoy the brief break before returning with plans afoot for the new season in MUFL Division 2.

The club cherishes its PAST, works hard in the PRESENT and endeavours to plan for the FUTURE. We are a club that is open and welcome to all; and seek to encompass and represent all members of the community and society in which we operate.