Gray goes back to basics in bid to bounce back after early struggles

DANSKE BANK PREMIERSHIP BARRY Gray says Cliftonville have gone back to basics on the training pitch in a bid to address their below-par start to the season.

Last week’s injury-time capitulation against Warrenpoint Town — which saw the Reds snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with the concession of two last-gasp goals — was their third defeat in seven Danske Bank Premiership outings and, ahead of today’s home clash with Ballymena United, Gray has revealed that he, his staff and his players and working hard to rectify the issues that have dogged them over the last couple of months.

“It’s a case of boiling things down and tackling them one at a time,” he explains.

“The players are as frustrated as anyone at what has been happening but they’re determined to work with us to fix it. I’ve told them that we have to focus on things that are within our control — by their nature, anything outside of that is not something we have control over.

“We need to work on making sure we do our own jobs right and, if that’s a case of the absolute basics, then that’s what we have to do.”

The Cliftonville boss believes it’s too early to be overly negative but is aware of how important it is to bounce back from last week’s shock as soon as possible.

“The game at Warrenpoint was a strange one,” he adds. “We hadn’t done anything exceptional but we deserved to be in front and, given how the game had gone, a 1-0 win for us was probably about right on the balance of things.

“I don’t know how to explain what happened in injury-time, nobody saw it coming. We’ve gone from being on the verge of back-to-back wins and consecutive clean sheets to a defeat that simply never looked on the cards.

“That sort of thing can happen in football and sometimes you can say you were just unlucky, it was one of those days. The problem for us is that we’ve had a few of those days.

“In isolation, you might be able to shake an outcome like that off — but you can’t really do that when it’s the same problems that keep coming up.

“We’ve worked hard to address them, though, and there’s a clear, united focus among everyone.

“That defeat completely changed the dynamic of what we were going to focus on in training this week and we know that Ballymena will give us an even bigger test, so we have to stand up to that and show we have the strength to get back at it.” Hard work: Cliftonville manager Barry Gray