Moyola Park

Long before the Irish League existed, a handful of players around Castledawson, in County Londonderry, put together a football club to test themselves in a game still spreading through Ulster. That side, formed in 1880, needed only a season to leave its mark on the sport's early history.

On 9 April 1881, in the first final the Irish Cup had ever staged, the Castledawson team beat Cliftonville 1-0 and became the trophy's inaugural holders. The Irish League itself did not exist yet; it was founded nine years later, in 1890, and Moyola Park stayed outside it, playing on in junior and intermediate football for the best part of a century. The club won the Irish Junior Cup in successive seasons, 1973 and 1974, and was admitted to the Intermediate grade in 1978.

Entry to the Irish League's Second Division followed in 1991, and Moyola Park won that division in 2001-02 under manager Eric Holliday — the closest the club has come to matching, at senior level, what it had already done as an amateur side sixty years earlier.

They play as The Park, in royal blue and yellow, at Mill Meadow, a ground with room for around 2,000 that the club moved into in 2009. Cliftonville, the opponents from that 1881 final, remain the name attached to Moyola Park's history more than any current rival — a link kept alive less by regular meetings than by the fact that Irish football's first cup final still belongs to both clubs.