Jimmy Thelin would love one of his Aberdeen strikers to pick up the gauntlet and hit 20 goals.
The Dons, who head to Hibernian for Tuesday’s clash, have been on form but their goals have been spread around their squad after Bojan Miovski was sold to Girona. Pape Habib Gueye has been out for several weeks but is still their top scorer with five goals.
The likes of Kevin Nisbet, Jamie McGrath, Topi Keskinen and Nicky Devlin are all sitting under him on three strikes, while Ester Sokler and Peter Ambrose have just one league goal each. Thelin, who is looking for his Aberdeen squad to bounce back from their first league defeat, said: “The most important thing for me is how we create chances and which areas we want to arrive with x number of players. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be the number nine, it can be someone else, but the most important thing is that we can see it’s happening over time.
“Of course I’d be happy if someone scores 20 goals, but it’s not easy to find these players. The most important is how many goals the team scores together over a season and share this responsibility so you’re not so reliant if someone gets injured or someone disappears, you’re not out of ideas. So I think that’s why we want to create now and get players better and better in their positions.”
The likes of Scotland star Nisbet has shown in the past he is capable of getting to those levels and will be looking to get the chance on his return to Easter Road tonight. He is one of many in the Aberdeen squad who could hit that 20 mark. Thelin stated: “I don’t want to put that pressure in the future, but we can talk about that after another few months, but it would be nice (if a striker hit those sorts of levels).
“Yeah, if the team can help them to arrive in this position and get the opportunity.
“We want to get into certain areas, but we want to do it more and more and sometimes we feel like even if we score it is not because we had to create X number of chances per game. That’s what we focus on and we know if we do that consistently, we know we’re going to score. That’s our focus.”
A lot of people expect Aberdeen to get back to winning ways at struggling Hibs. The Edinburgh giants are bottom of the table but Thelin knows it is still early in the season and a lot of things can change. He has also seen it in his homeland where big clubs, like IFK, have struggled at the wrong end of the table.
The Aberdeen boss said: “Yeah, but the season is not over yet. “It’s still, I think, only one third played. It happens also in Sweden sometimes. We have some clubs there that have been really big clubs, but you get in this period and then how you get out of them is the most important thing. “So football, that’s why it’s such a passionate sport because it’s really complex sometimes how you can get stable over some years and it takes time to build a consistency that can be good every year.
“When you’re building sometimes you can take some steps backwards and then you get two steps forward. I don’t know Hibernian as a club. I don’t know the people who work there. I don’t know so much about it.”