It's good to talk says Crusaders boss Stephen Baxter

The visitors’ changing room was closed for well over an hour after the final whistle as the Crues tried to sort out where it had gone wrong in the previous 90 minutes.

Speaking afterwards Baxter insisted there was no shouting and added that it is important to talk together as a group when things don’t go as planned.

“When you lose three games on the bounce you should have a conversation,” said the Crusaders boss.

“There was no shouting and we are all grown up men and was important to have a conversation with the players about why you were out battled, why you were second to the ball, why you aren’t playing with any rhythm to your game and why you are two yards off people in the centre of the field, why you are not creating enough opportunities and why you aren’t holding the ball up front.

“It’s better to ask those questions and talk about the team dynamic that didn’t work against a team who did all of those things well.

“It was good to have that conversation when you don’t feel you needed to get out of the game.

“I have been doing this for 15 years and we have had many a conversation.

“We have been at Windsor and lost heavily many times – seven and eight – and because football is so professional nowadays you don’t do this over 90 minutes of football.

“There is a week’s preparation goes into preparing for a game like this and sometimes those best laid plans can hit you like it did this morning when Billy Joe Burns phoned me at 11am and said ‘I can’t talk, my throat is closed over, I had a bad night’s sleep and I don’t think I’ll be able to play’.

“Then he rings you at 3 and says he is definitely out and you have to re-adjust your plans. That can happen.

“There are plenty of players capable of coming in and doing what they are meant to do.

“You have these conversations from time to time and work out where you think it went wrong, get back to the drawing board and need to ask professional footballers to give you reasons why they think it went wrong and then you have to get back on the horse again as soon as possible because you have an Irish Cup next and a lot of big league games.

“Football can be interesting where you are fighting all season and then you get a League Cup, league game and Irish Cup match within two weeks and where you hope to win three trophies you could end up winning no trophies.

“So it is good to have conversations and try to iron out things you are not happy with.”

So did Baxter get the answers he was looking for from his players?

“Yeah, these guys are grown ups. They are very respected and highly decorated players,” he said.

“There are players of a certain age in the team and they will hurt probably more than you’ll ever believe. It was a manly conversation.

“The last thing I was going to do was have a shouting match and send them home in even worse form. It all ended up with a handshake and a hug from everyone to make we are in it together. You win together, you lose together.

“You have to function as a group of people and its good to get all of that talked about. They are all good guys and I have so much respect for what they do and how they do it.

“The big disappointment from their point of view is that they let the fans down against Linfield. Ultimately we set the team up.

“Everybody works incredibly hard and when you get a big crowd in like in last week’s League Cup final and didn’t get the right result and then this week the players will be disappointed we didn’t get the right result and that we played very poorly. We let the fans down and that hurts all of us.

“To lose in the manner we did it will sting us and that’s why it is good to talk about it so we are all feeling slightly better.”

It was a different story for Linfield, who made it four wins on the bounce.

Striker Andy Waterworth picked up his sixth goal in that run and boss David Healy was full of praise for him.

“I love Andy,” he said. “He’s a big game player. Off the top of my head, three goals against Cliftonville at Solitude to win the league, his second is still the best goal I’ve seen in the Irish League, and again I look at that from a Linfield point of view, individual brilliance.

“He scored a hat-trick a week later in the Irish Cup Final, he scored the winner in the League Cup Final against Ballymena last year, the winner when we won the league at Ballymena.

“We have varying different views with Andy, and we had a chat around the New Year and thankfully we did give him a break.

“I was probably expecting too much from Andy again, and fair play to him, he has adapted his game.

“He doesn’t have the blistering pace he used to have but his all round game has certainly developed and as you see when it bounces in and around the box, he’s got that habit of being in the right place to score goals,” added the Linfield boss.