topflight

Omagh Town: The top-flight player who is reviving his fallen club

Omagh Town were founded in 1962, but their heyday came in the 1990s when they were challenging in cups, in the top half of the league and playing in the Intertoto Cup in Europe.

“We had the good days, the glory days back then,” said former striker Andy Crawford.

“St Julian’s was a fortress when we were going really well. We were a thriving team back then.”

While Gaelic football was the dominant sport in Tyrone, with St Julian’s Road a stone’s throw away from the imperious Healy Park ground that the county’s four-time All-Ireland winners call home, Omagh Town played a key role in the community.

Manchester United’s treble winners, as well as Liverpool and Chelsea, all came to play the club in charity matches in the aftermath of the Omagh bomb in August 1998, in which 29 people were killed and hundreds more injured in one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The games were a show of the club helping the town to come together, but their financial issues continued into the start of the new millennium and Crawford, who joined Linfield a year before the club’s eventual collapse, said “the cracks were starting to show” by the time of his departure.

Relegation in the 2004-05 season, along with the closure of their social club, were pinned as the reasons for Omagh Town’s demise as more than 60 years of history were gone in an instant.

St Julian’s Road lay derelict for years, and in 2020 it was turned into a public park where there still sits a small memorial to mark the visits of the Premier League teams in the aftermath of the bomb.

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The Prem: Former Hundred champion Rob Calder on rugby’s top-flight relaunch

A record 1.26m television audience for Bath’s victory, combined with demand outstripping supply for the 82,000 tickets, suggests the Premiership is nurturing new fans.

There has been big growth in engaging supporters between the ages of 18-34, while Red Bull’s reported interest in buying Newcastle Falcons would tie in perfectly with a parallel aim of attracting youth-orientated brands.

It is a brief Calder has worked to before.

Before he arrived in rugby, he was the commercial director for the Hundred, the neon-spattered, slog-heavy cricket format that launched in 2021 and raised more than £500m with the sale of its franchise sides earlier this year.

That was revolution. In rugby, Calder is aiming for evolution.

“With the Hundred, we were clear that a distinctly new approach was going to be critical to get to the next generation,” he says.

“When I did research on the Hundred though I looked at rugby clubs and how they compared in terms of appeal to younger audiences and they actually performed pretty well.

“There are some strong brands in there – be it Harlequins or Leicester Tigers or others – with legacy and awareness of those identities.

“So I think we’re starting from a different level with rugby.”

The rebrand will include more behind-the-scenes content from the league’s bright, young things and more intelligent highlights, with dramatic moments, such as shuddering hits, try-saving tackles and interactions between players, included alongside the scores.

Some of the strategy is more mundane than the marketing, but just as important.

“The first time people come to rugby grounds, we have got to make them welcome,” says Calder.

“We’ve got to point out where everything is, to make sure there’s enough toilets for women, that the facilities are clean and the rest of it.

“Rugby is probably a little bit behind where some sports are, but that’s a massive focus for us.

“We’ve invested in gathering match day experience scores from fans and match day experience training with the clubs.”

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Rob Baxter: Exeter boss wants to write-off worst-ever top-flight season

Baxter has taken a more hands-on role coaching the side since long-serving assistants Rob Hunter and Ali Hepher were dismissed after the defeat at Gloucester.

That loss was the nadir of a season which saw Exeter lose all four of their European games and win just four league matches – two of them against Saracens and Northampton who were without many of their international stars.

But in recent weeks Exeter have improved and had chances to win the game, against a Sale side who knew victory would secure a fourth play-off campaign in the past five seasons.

“A lot of teams need a dedicated start point – that Gloucester game was a dedicated start point for us,” Baxter added.

“No player can come into my office when I’m talking to them and go ‘everything was fine, I don’t know why we’re reacting’.

“You need that sometimes, you don’t need anybody having any second doubts that what’s on the field isn’t good enough.

“We had that and now things are changing, and you can feel a change. But I think we probably needed that and we needed someone to go ‘this is not good enough, things have to change’ and that’s what’s happened.”

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