Paddy: Much to assess

Paddy McLaughlin says he will focus on Cliftonville’s response to last night’s heavy defeat against Larne and leave it to others to assess the performance of the officials at Inver Park.

Though referee Stephen Gregg made a host contentious decisions over the course of the evening, McLaughlin acknowledged that the Reds fell below standard in the 4-0 reverse but did concede things might have been different had one or two rulings gone in their favour – including the call to send Sean Moore off for a challenge on Aaron Donnelly.

“It’s a harsh scoreline because a lot of the controversial calls that were made in the game went against us,” he reflected.

“The red card had a major bearing on the game – it’s a major call by the referee and I don’t believe it’s the right one. We’ve had Joe Gormley played in one-on-one with the goalkeeper and he’s called it back 60 yards for a free-kick rather than playing the advantage and us maybe scoring the equaliser.

“We’re not hiding behind a poor refereeing performance, though. We were poor in the first half-hour of the game and the last half-hour of the game but, in between that, I thought we competed well, played some good stuff and created a couple of chances. Joe’s had a chance and Ronan (Hale) has had a chance to equalise.”

The Manager added that he had no choice but to accept Gregg’s decisions and that he would be channeling his efforts into ensuring his side produced a better display next time out.

“The performance of the referee has left a lot to be desired but you just have to take his word on it if that’s his honest assessment of the game,” he continued. “If that’s his honest decision making, that’s fair enough – we just felt a lot of them were very controversial.

“The red card is a really, really poor call and then there’s a foul on Odhran Casey in the build-up to them making it 2-0, which kills the game. That’s another poor call, but there’s nothing we can do about that now. We just have to let the assessor deal with the referee’s performance and let me deal with the team’s performance.

“We’re disappointed with how we played. Let’s not hide behind a poor refereeing performance, we have to also accept we’ve conceded four goals and that’s not good enough by our standards.

“We’ll dust ourselves down and lick our wounds. It’s a disappointing night for us and a really disappointing scoreline but we’ll not get too down on it – we’ll get back to work on Monday and prepare for another tough game against Coleraine next Saturday.”