Ferguson revels in happy home dressing room again

The long faces of the players who trooped out on Monday night following the Irn Bru Cup massacre by Linfield were replaced by beaming smiles after Saturday’s win over Crusaders

“It’s a lot better when you see the back-slapping in the changing room rather than being down in their boots,” said boss Glenn Ferguson.

“It’s been a hard week for the players and backroom staff.

“We’ve been thinking about it and talking a lot on the phone about what to do and not do.

We had a good chat before the game, put down on paper what we thought went wrong, didn’t dwell on it, scrunched it up and put it in the bin and that was the end of it – we wanted to be more positive.

“We’ve tried to instil confidence in the players but not arrogance. Although we were on a great run it wasn’t a case of having to be brought back down again.

“We went out positively and, going a goal down after being dumped six during the week, they could have very easily crumbled but they stood up to be counted.

“I’m particularly happy with the two centre-backs and two full-backs because they came under a lot of pressure but we won a lot of headers and second balls.

“They had a couple of half-chances that we dealt with but over the course of the game, particularly the last 10 or 15 minutes, when they went three at the back, we created a lot of chances.

“If David Cushley is injured, he will play on and run through a brick wall but it got to the stage where he couldn’t do any more so we put Neil Lowry on, gave him a job to do and he carried it out. “He looked a top class player when he did that – he roasted Colin Coates a couple of times and that’s not easy to do.

“He worked hard and gave us a more of an impetus going forward,” added Ferguson.