Gary pleased with efforts

The Blues pushed the league’s second placed side right to the end and had enough chances to at least earn a draw. The boss was delighted with the efforts of his team and says more displays of that level will see his side pick up their fair share of results.

It was a good performance from the boys,” he said.

The game against DC on New Year’s Day was the most disappointing we’ve had since we came to the club. Everyone plays badly once and nothing goes right for them, that’s what happened to us but it wasn’t good enough and we asked the boys to bounce back on Saturday.

We asked them to come back against a very good Crusaders team and to show the effort and passion that they have in most games.

I think we were very unlucky not to come away with at least a point. I’m not going to criticise the boys for those performances because if they give performances like that every week, we’ll be ok.

We were very sloppy in the first five or ten minutes of the second half though. Kris Lindsay went off and Eddie (McCallion) went into centre-half. They got in a couple of times but we assess our chances as well. Ciaran Martyn, Guy Bates and myself all had chances we should have scored. If one of those had gone in, it would have at least made it a draw but things didn’t go our way.

“Andy Coleman made a mistake but he was man enough to hold his hands up. He’s only made a couple of mistakes all season, which is incredible for a goalkeeper.

He should have stopped their second goal and should have come for the cross for their third but everyone’s entitled to a bad game.

On the other side of the coin, if we had scored our good chances, Andy’s mistakes wouldn’t look as bad. It’s a team game.

Nobody gave us a chance at the start of the game but on our day, we can compete with the best and we showed that on Saturday. When we’ve played the top teams, bar Cliftonville, there hasn’t been much of a difference. We’ve competed with them and that’s the most pleasing thing. We’ve at least let them know they’ve been in a game because last season, we weren’t doing that. The most important thing this season is seeing signs of improvement.

Yes, it looks bad that we’ve been beaten four games in a row but we’ve played Portadown, Linfield and Crusaders in that. We’ve had one really bad day at the office against DC.

We just didn’t get the rub of the green on Saturday. With a bit of luck, we would have got something out of the game and would have been very pleased.

Kris Lindsay got a bang on the knee and that’s why he was brought off. Hopefully it’s just an impact injury. If it means him missing one match then so be it.