Jamie McGrath knows Dundee “will smell blood’ but he wants to make sure that Aberdeen react to their Premier Sports Cup semi-final beating and it becomes nothing more than “a slap on the wrist”.
Jimmy Thelin has got his team back in at Cormack Park as they look to recover from their 6-0 Hampden humbling at the hands of Celtic. The positive is that it was Aberdeen’s first defeat under Thelin and their only one in 17 games under him.
McGrath and the Dons aim to get back to their imperious Pittodrie form that has seen them win every home game and they want to continue that when Dundee visit. The Dons beat them at Dens Park, in a close encounter, earlier this season. McGrath admitted: “I think everybody watches every Aberdeen game so we can’t let that affect us. We know the pressure of playing for Aberdeen.
“Hopefully it won’t affect us too much. We’ll take a lot of learning from it (the semi) but of course, we are very, very disappointed to lose in the manner we did.
“Yeah, we’ve played Dundee already but no game in this league is easy. Every team can take points off everyone and we’ve seen that so far this season. They’ll be coming there, probably smelling blood so we have to be on it from minute one and get a good week’s training behind us.”
Aberdeen are joint top of the table but McGrath and his team aren’t getting carried away and were brought back to earth with a bump by Celtic. McGrath admitted: “Yeah, we’re not really looking at the league table or that. We’re just looking at one game at a time and Dundee is next so we have to obviously not let last weekend affect us too much.
“It was a very disappointing day but we were back in on Tuesday and regrouped. We’ll have a lot of meetings on where we went wrong and where we can improve but yeah, certainly there’s a lot to learn from today and take it into next week.”
Aberdeen had looked to be running on empty after their midweek win over Rangers. McGrath knows that was no excuse for their Hampden howler. The good thing is they have an entire week to prepare for the Dark Blues. The former St Mirren star stated: “I don’t want to make excuses because Rangers played Wednesday night but yeah, it was definitely a tough game Wednesday night. We definitely emptied the tank but I don’t know if that had an effect.
“Celtic obviously played Wednesday night as well so we can’t really use that as an excuse but yeah, from minute one we didn’t look at our brilliant best. Normally even when we’re not at our best we find a way to stay in the game and disappointingly today we conceded from a set play and before you know it you’re two-nil down.
“Yeah, it gets tough. There’s a lot of learning to take and it’s a slap on the wrist but hopefully we can learn from it, learn quickly and bring it into the weekend.”
Thelin was never too high when Aberdeen were winning and isn’t likely to go the other way now. It is all about steady improvement and getting Aberdeen in a place where they can regularly challenge Celtic and Rangers. We have our principles and we’re never going to go away from them and every week we’re adding something to the mix,” McGrath added.
“We’re learning constantly. It’s still very early days under the manager and we have to learn quickly. I think we have learned quickly so far. I think we look like a right good team on our day but we can still obviously improve. “We’re trying to catch the likes of Celtic and Rangers so yeah, there’ll be blips in the road but hopefully now that’s us for a while.”
The majority of the Red Army stayed at Hampden to show their appreciation of their team and McGrath wants to repay them. The midfielder acknowledged: “We have to bounce back next Saturday and give the travelling fans today something to shout about because they were on our side singing at the end of the game. They could have easily turned on us but to see them standing there, not leaving and singing right to the end, it was very pleasing.”