Larne manager Tiernan Lynch insists Thursday night’s 4-1 mauling at the hands of Shamrock Rovers can be a positive in the long run.
But in order to learn from the chastening experience in the Europa Conference League, there can be no hiding place for either the Larne players or the coaching staff.
There must be no sulking, no deflection and no dereliction of responsibility for Larne if they want to recover from a setback that left the home side and their fans shellshocked at Windsor Park, says Lynch.
The Invermen stepped up in class when they became the first Irish League team to reach the group stages of European football and their shortcomings have been brutally exposed in the 3-0 defeat to Molde and the meek surrender to Rovers.
Lynch certainly did not duck his responsibilities when he spoke earnestly about what was a mildly traumatic experience in the post match press conference, revealing how quiet the dressing room was after the defeat.
“Deathly quiet, and rightly so”, said the 44-year-old manager.
“We have to take our medicine. I’m the first one to tell all of us collectively how good we are when we do well, so we also have to be able to take the criticism – me included – when we don’t deliver, and we didn’t deliver on Thursday night.
“You can do one of two things from defeats and poor performances; you can fingerpoint, or you can learn.
“We made it very clear, under no circumstances are we sweeping this under the carpet.
“Under no circumstances are we just going to move on to Portadown on Sunday.
“We can do one of two things; we can suck our thumbs and feel sorry for ourselves, or we can look to put this right.
“We have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves what are we going to do about it.
“That’s the question we have to ask and I don’t have the answer, time will tell.
“It won’t be an overnight fix, it’s a process.
“It took us eight years to get to this point and we have to keep trying to learn and improve from this.
“Hopefully we can turn this around.
“Thursday night was another fantastic learning curve experience for us, not things I’m going to share in public, things we talked about in the changing room afterwards, areas of our game that just weren’t good enough.
“If we are serious about Larne being a team that is going to do this again, and maybe even get to the stage where you can potentially compete, there are things that need to change and we know that.
“That has to be our barometer. That has to be the level we want to play at and the question we need to ask ourselves is, how do we get there?
“What do we need to do to get there?
“Hopefully we will learn as a group.”
Next up for the humbled Sports Direct Premiership is a trip to Shamrock Park tomorrow and a game against Glentoran at The Oval next weekend before they take the European stage again.
Swiss club St Gallen are the first of four remaining opponents in the Europa League with Olimpija, Dinamo Minsk and Gent also lined up before the end of the year.
Lynch will also want to maintain his pursuit of a third successive league title at the same time and it remains to be seen if Thursday’s defeat will impact Larne for the remainder of the season.
“That depends very much on us.
“We knew what we were getting from Rovers.
“We knew the challenges, we knew what we were getting into.
“What we didn’t do was we didn’t deal with them in a manner that we thought we could, and we got punished badly for it.
“There are definitely things out of possession that we need to do better, yeah.
“But it’s probably the bigger picture that I’m talking about in all of this.
“There were lots of things from the Molde game and lots of things from Thursday that we have to improve on.
“We have to get better. We very much have to look at ourselves in the mirror.
“If you want to compete at this level, you have to be better.”