MCDERMOTT NOT READY TO PUSH PANIC BUTTON

BIG-SPENDING Glentoran may be labouring in the League’s drop-zone, but manager Mick Mcdermott is far from despondent.

The east Belfast team’s erratic form surfaced once again in Saturday’s night’s lifeless scoreless draw with Larne at the Oval.

Although they have pocketed merely two points from their opening four Danske Bank Premiership games – Mcdermott is adamant there are good days up ahead.

“Larne will be up there, no doubt about that – and we’ll be up there too,” declared Mcdermott.

“The way the League is, if you take care of the bottom six teams, then the big games take care of themselves. The disappointing result so far for me was the Glenavon one a few weeks back, which was one of those games we should have taken care of.

“So far we’ve had Cliftonville and Coleraine away and Larne at home – we’ve had a difficult start.

“Did we expect to have a couple of points? No, I expected more.

“But that’s where we are. There is no panic on our part. There is not even a concern.”

Mcdermott believes if his boys had been more careful in the final third, they would have nicked all three points.

“It was a good game of football – a hard, hard game of football,” he said. “My only disappointment was our decision making in the final third.

“We didn’t have the right execution. We had two good chances in the first half.

Robbie Mcdaid (inset) went through, but overrun the ball and the keeper dug it out.

“Then we were in a position of four against two and Robbie just had to slip Jamie (Mcdonagh) in, but he took that extra touch that meant Jamie strayed offside. So it was our decision making that wasn’t just right.”

Larne boss Tiernan Lynch insisted he garnished ‘more positives than negatives’ from the game.

“I suppose it says a lot about our club in terms of how far we have come that we were disappointed to leave a place like the Oval without three points,” he said. “There were a lot of disappointed faces in our dressing room.

“But we’ve got to build on what we’ve done.”