BACK FROM THE BRINK.. East’s Seaview glory may never have been

“ONE more unfulfilled fixture and we were getting put out of the league.”

It’s hard to fathom now, with the images of their jubilant class of 2018 parading the Steel Cup at Seaview last week still fresh in the memory, but these were the words of John Spence speaking to Match On Tuesday just five years ago as East Belfast teetered on the brink.

The once proud and heavily-decorated Amateur

League club, outstripped by

Sirocco alone when it comes to silverware, were a basket case back then, lurching from one tanking to another and with their very future hanging precariously in the balance.

Spence (below) wasn’t overstating the matter either. Having forfeited some league points already due to their failure to field a team, it was literally one more unfulfilled fixture which stood between survival and the suits of the NAFL pulling the plug. Several clubs have hit the wall in recent times, Nortel chief among them, but the East would have been the biggest casualty of them all.

An unimaginable fate for a club with arguably the most storied history in the Amateur League, and inarguably the greatest record of producing players, including the eight former Northern Ireland internationals immortalised on the wall at their home ground in Sydenham – Billy Caskey, Billy Humphries, Sammy Mccrory, Ian Lawther, Walter Bruce, Roy Coyle, Tom Casey and Warren Feeney.

Thankfully, disaster was averted and last week, after clinching a third Steel Cup triumph in style with a 3-0 win over Sirocco – a record haul in the competition for an Amateur League club – the comeback story of East Belfast was complete. In the build-up to the final, much of the talk centred around their two ex-irish League men in attack, lifelong friends Danny Mckee and Stephen Cockcroft, the former the club’s leading goalscorer, the latter the man who makes them tick.

And both rose to the occasion, delivering performances worthy of their reputations to hand the men from Sydenham a first triumph in the 125-yearold competition since 1992.

“We’ll get the East back to the way they were years ago, competing for trophies again.”

Also the words of Spence in that interview five years ago.

How prophetic they now seem after Stephen Matthews’ men landed the biggest and most prestigious of the lot, the Steel & Sons Cup.