Liam Beckett

I was both honoured and privileged to be a guest of Crusaders vice-chairman Mark Langhammer at the ‘Legends’ table during last Saturday’s celebratory dinner for departing manager Stephen Baxter.

It’s been a pretty hectic week, particularly for us here in Northern Ireland, with election fever at times reaching boiling point.

There’s so much hype nowadays about the distance players cover in a game that I often wonder if these type of stats are actually overshadowing the very basic requirement in football which used to be quite simply how the player actually played.

As a young kid growing up in Ballymoney, cash was never really something I had to worry about with regard to how I spent it — because we didn’t have any.

As a young kid growing up in Ballymoney, cash was never really something I had to worry about with regard to how I spent it — because we didn't have any.

As we grow older, I am becoming more and more aware of a growing number of my former team-mates and opponents who are struggling either with ill health or have become victims of that dreadful affliction dementia, and I often wonder could we as a united sporting family do more to help?

Larne certainly bucked the trend of Irish League clubs in Europe in the summer of 2024 when they pulled off a truly superb 1-0 win away to Ballkani in their UEFA Conference League Third Qualifying Round tie.

Sometimes the biggest showpiece in domestic football, the Irish Cup Final, ends up a huge disappointment, something of a damp squib, all a bit of an anticlimax after all the preceding weeks of hype beforehand.

As a team, they may well be struggling in the table charts but, in terms of playing surfaces, it’s Glenavon who have the best pitch in the Premiership.

Let’s shred this myth once and for all — it’s not asking too much of Irish League players to play a midweek game as well as a match on a Saturday.