First Luke McCullough goal helps get one over on dad Dean as Glentoran seal win

At 27, the centre-back is too young to remember his dad Dean’s work in both penalty areas for Glenavon during the 1990s but he enjoyed a post-match smile at finding the net as the Glens left Lurgan with a welcome win following high-profile back-to-back Premiership defeats.

“It’s my first goal for the Glens...it’s about time I popped up with one,” said McCullough. “More importantly, it’s about getting the three points today, we knew it might be a grind so delighted to get it done - especially after the last week or so, we needed to bounce back.

“My dad likes coming back to Mourneview, he had good years here...so it’s nice to get one up on him today as he was probably cheering for Glenavon!

“The goalkeeper didn’t get a clean contact on it (Hrovje Plum’s free-kick) and the ball fell nicely for me so I was able to help it back into the net and am delighted.

“We’ve 10 days now without a game so it would have been awful spending that time thinking about three defeats, if we had lost here today.

“Thankfully, we’ve done a wee bit to try and help ourselves today and now it’s about using the next 10 days to iron a few things out and go again.

“We’ll be in training so have time to work on stuff, get our defensive shape as a team.

“Today we managed to bounce back quickly with the penalty kick and that helped to settle us down.

“I think after that we managed to see out the game quite comfortably.

“In the first half we were totally dominant and should have been more goals in front with better decisions in the final third.

“But very few teams come here and are comfortable so it’s all about three points.

“We didn’t come out well enough in the second half, so let them get on top of us and pick up second balls so it’s just about the win no matter what way it came.

“We’ve quite a young squad so there’s still boys probably learning that side of the game (game management)...but if we want to go anywhere we need to learn quickly to see games out once in front.”

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