2012–13 Irish League Cup
football tournament season
The 2012–13 Irish League Cup (known as the Irn-Bru League Cup for sponsorship reasons) was the 27th edition of the Irish League Cup, Northern Ireland's secondary football knock-out cup competition. It was contested by the twelve members of the IFA Premiership, as well as the 29 members of the IFA Championship. The competition began on 14 August 2012, and ended with the final on 26 January 2013.
Crusaders were the defending champions after defeating Coleraine 1–0 in the 2011–12 final. They reached the final again this season, but were unable to defend the trophy as they were defeated 4–0 by Cliftonville in the final, who lifted the cup for the second time. This made it six different winners of the cup in the last six seasons. The 4–0 scoreline equalled the record for the highest in a final, set when Linfield defeated Coleraine by the same score in 2000.
Format
The competition was played in a straight knock-out format and was open to all members of the IFA Premiership and both divisions of the IFA Championship. Twenty clubs from the IFA Championship entered in the first round, with the remaining ten Championship clubs given byes into the second round. They were joined by the twelve members of the IFA Premiership.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “2012–13 Irish League Cup” is football tournament season. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Irish, League and football, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4628214. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2013, 2011 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “2012–13 Irish League Cup” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.