Gartcarn assistant Scott Mills has no complaints about Port Glasgow's 4-3 win and told his side they can't keep giving teams a two-goal head start.
Gartcairn fought back to 2-2 and then 3-3 in an end-to-end West Of Scotland League thriller at MTC Park, but ultimately lost the game 4-3 to their visitors.
Mills has no complaints with the loss of three points, but didn't agree with Steven Saunders' red card, which was a major turning point in the game.
The coach was deputising for Willie Kinniburgh, who is self-isolating following his return from a trip to Italy, and said: "I said to them you can't give teams a two-goal head-start like we did.
"We spoke about it in pre-season when in one of our games we were 2-0 down at Shotts after five minutes, and I just feel like that was deja vu today.
"I don't know what we need to say to them to try and get them out of that mind-frame so that's something we need to work on.
"To be honest I think they deserved it in the end - the mistakes we made didn't really give us a platform to play.
"We scored really good goals, but if you give away the calibre of goals that we did you're always going to be battling uphill.
"I was disappointed with the start, and it was something we were on to them about, about starting fast and being aggressive, but I thought they started better and were more intense.
"I thought we controlled the ball and had a lot of good passages of play, a lot of stuff we had worked on, which was the only positive I can take from the day.
"But as the game grew on it became scrappy, it was end-to-end, and it became an old-fashioned game, so it was really frustrating at the end."
On Saunders' dismissal, Mills said: "The red card was disappointing, it was a disappointing decision. I spoke to the ref at the end but he's not interested in listening.
"There was an offside for one of their goals, but they're claiming the penalty we got was dubious, so these things maybe balance out.
"I felt that our player won the ball very clearly - he might have taken the man but he won the ball - and I don't think it was dangerous."
Gartcairn are away to Lugar Boswell Thistle on Saturday and Mills is looking for a reaction.
He said: "We need to draw a line under this and move on to Saturday. We've been waiting so long to get back and then we let ourselves down in the first game, so I actually wish we were playing Lugar tomorrow.
"We need to get back in on Monday night, shake this away, and get right onto the park next week and hopefully we can make amends then."
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