“Spirit of The Eighties” – Distillery v Portadown
Our matchday programme – “The Spirit of the Eighties” – is returning for 2025-2026 season and the first programme of the new season has been printed for our pre-season friendly against Portadown.
Programme editor David Hunter writes; “This is the fifth season that “Spirit of the Eighties” has been produced so thank you to everyone, home and away supporters, who purchase a programme which in turn helps the club.
The programme team – Dawson Simpson, Cameron Moore, Neil Partridge and myself – have agreed to guarantee the club at least four programmes this coming season. It’s the same arrangement as last year, but we did go on to produce eight programmes over the season. Once more we will produce them for selected games and flag these up in advance on our social media – our standard format will be an A5 programme, full colour, and usually 8 pages to give you a tangible read with hopefully lots of interesting and memorable content as well as current news and features etc.
For the first programme of the season we are running with 12 pages given the amount of content we have included. We pay tribute to club LEGEND, the late Roy Welsh, with a three page tribute including some material not previously on-line and additional photographs.
Distillery manager Stephen Hughes shares his thoughts about the pre-season plans and his expectations, and we have a “colourful” article on Portadown boss Niall Currie and his playing spell at “The Whites”.
We have a “Retro 20” report and photographs of a game between the sides in the 2005-2006 season as well as a page on Portadown’s last visit two years ago. In addition to an event remembering “The Great War” in France, we also look back to Northern Ireland’s World Cup connection with the city of Halmstad in 1958 and link that up with Roxette and a few Ferraris in 2025!
The club has a long tradition of producing programmes, I am glad we are able to continue that for this season, and in so doing have produced a great pre-season programme to get us up and started. Thanks for your support.”
The programme remains priced at £2.00, and will be available just inside the turnstiles at New Grosvenor, as usual.
