Christmas spirit

Jim Magilton sung his players’ praises after Cliftonville emerged victorious from a gripping St Stephen’s Day Derby at Solitude.

Having seen Rory Hale’s opener cancelled out by Crusaders midfielder Lloyd Anderson, the Reds had to dig deep before eventually plundering a dramatic winner through Ben Wilson.

Magilton acknowledged that his side can play much better but had absolutely no complaints about their spirit and application after sealing Cliftonville’s first festive derby home win since 2012.

“We’ve played really well at home,” he reflected on the season so far.

“We’ve played with a lot of fluency and fluidity in our play, but you have to give Crusaders so much credit because they’ve obviously learnt from that and they asked real, tough questions of us.

“Whilst I want us to play a certain way, and the players have bought into that and been brilliant, we had to show another side of ourselves – and that was character and guts and a real determined team effort. Even the lads coming off the bench, it was just an all round fantastic team performance without being at our absolute brilliant footballing best because the Crues were very good.”

The Reds’ afternoon might have been a little more straightforward had they been awarded a second-half penalty when Stephen Mallon was tripped inside the box by Josh Robinson and, though he felt referee Shane Andrews had a good day at the office, Magilton questioned his decision not to point to the spot on that occasion.

“I thought the referee handled the game pretty well but I don’t know; we’ve had one penalty here all year and we’ve had a couple that are, in my opinion, stonewallers and he’s in a brilliant position, so how he’s not given it is beyond me,” he said.

“The fourth official was brilliant and handled the situation very well because you can get a bit excited, but he defused it very, very well – but for me, it’s an absolute stonewall penalty and it’s another one that we haven’t got.”

On the occasion as a whole, the Manager added: “We were just off it but we have to credit the opposition. It’s a local derby we haven’t won in 11 years so there’s a lot of pain and hurt there, but we got over the line and that’s all I can say. I think that the players deserve so much credit for that because, on another day, you can lose games like that but today we showed a real tenacity. The lads’ contributions off the bench were huge – everybody just got together and said ‘right, we’re going to try and win this game’ and we managed to do that.

“We didn’t create a lot of opportunities. There are many ways to win a football match and we demonstrated a way where the football we’ve played here went out the window – it was more guts and togetherness. That’s what I loved about it most.”