We didn’t get rub of the green

APART from the result, I’m very pleased with the performance.

If you look at last week’s game, Crusaders beat us 4-0 and deservedly so. They should have beaten us by seven or eight so we went to Seaview looking for a reaction from the players.

The reaction we got was very good. You know what you get from Crusaders. Their effort, work-rate and desire is always there in abundance and we asked the boys to match that. If you do that, you have a chance of winning any game.

If you look at the overall game and which goalkeeper made the most saves, it was obviously Sean O’Neill. Don’t get me wrong, Chris Morrow missed a great chance for them too but other than that, Sean pulled off a few very good saves. They got a couple of blocks on the line too and its just unfortunate we didn’t get the rub of the green to get a goal.

I thought we matched them in all aspects of the game. We frustrated them and got in amongst them and that’s what we asked the boys to do. I thought our game-plan worked to a large extent. We tried to let them have the ball until they got into our half and then close them. We wanted to play a high line and make them play long balls because we knew that Kyle Neill and John Convery could handle them.

They changed their formation to three players in the second-half and obviously it was a midfield runner who came through and scored. We’re disappointed with that because we already had three in there and we thought we should have dealt with it a bit better. It was a lack of concentration and it’s cost us. When you’re down there, these things go against you.

We had a lot of young players playing for us. Thinking of the team we finished the game with, we had Gerard Rooney who’s 20, David McAllister 17, Ciaran Doherty 22, Kyle Cherry 18, Brian McCaul 20 – the future’s bright. Brendan Shannon’s only 23 as well so if you take John Convery, Davy O’Hare and Kyle Neill out of it, it would be a very good average age.

Kyle Neill and John Convery were very good at the back and helped the younger lads through the game. It’s all right playing young kids but you still need a couple of experienced heads there.

The future looks good but it can only be good if we stay in the league. We’ve a big, big game next week and the last thing I wanted to do was to go down to Seaview and get another drubbing. We wanted to come away with a positive performance and I felt that I got that from the boys.

If we get another good week’s work in training we can look forward to next week’s game. Hopefully we can rectify our mistakes from Saturday, bring our performance into next week’s game and we’ll not be too far away.