FULL POST-MATCH REACTION: Ballyclare Comrades manager Stephen Small on his side's Irish Cup quarter-final defeat to Glentoran

On coming away from The Oval with heads held high

"Yeah. We brought on a 17-year-old, have three or four 18-year-old’s and 19-year-old’s...our average age at a push is probably around 21.

"By and large our squad has an age profile of 17-24 and we’re coming to a place where they’ve done Premiership teams by a lot of goals.

“I thought we showed good discipline. Understandably, I don’t think we were as good going forward as we are in our own league, but our shape, discipline and how we kept our shape in the first-half especially was really good and that’s all you can ask.

"We wanted to come out of it with a performance and credit and I think we did that.”

On second goal being the killer just seconds after the break

"I couldn’t tell from our vantage point if we were a bit too deep. It was a quality ball and most of the season unfortunately we’ve conceded goals like that, which you get with young players.

"We’ve young players in the backline and Decky (Breen, goalkeeper) is young too – they’re learning all the time.

"You hope we learn from those mistakes because they're more probably individual mistakes than anything else and once we conceded the second goal it was probably going to be tough.

"We changed our shape, tried to be a bit more adventurous and we didn’t concede another goal...we could have because they had a couple of chances.

"Some of these boys haven’t been at this stage of the Irish Cup and we got everything we wanted out of it. Everyone contributed and we’re happy with that.

"We would have loved to have the fairy tale but it just wasn’t to be. We started brightly, the middle part was all them and we didn’t really lay a glove on them offensively.”

On the achievement of reaching back-to-back Irish Cup quarter-finals

"The learnings that the players have got at an early stage of their careers is really good.

"We’ve been in back-to-back quarter-finals, one at home and one away, and we haven’t disgraced ourselves...we could have probably won the game last year with taking Ballymena right to the death and this year we’ve came to a place that has full-time resources, a big squad with international players coming off the bench – it’s just a bridge too far to get through this.

"Our big moment in the sun was beating Dungannon and getting to this stage.”

On great experience for young players

"Some of those lads will play at this level. Some are 17 or 18 and playing at this level and doing really well...some of these lads have a Premiership future, whether that’s with us building and going up or somebody bringing them in.

"We’ve a great bunch and they believe in what we’re doing at Ballyclare. Hopefully over the coming years we’ll see the benefit of it (the experience).”