Derek McInnes hopes his Aberdeen players can grasp the chance to redeem themselves this weekend following their painful Betfred Cup exit to St Mirren.
McInnes’ men return to St Mirren today on league business and the Aberdeen boss is eager for his side to go some way to making amends for the cup loss by taking all three points this afternoon.
He said: “I don’t know if it’s the perfect fixture, but I’ve got to say that, although it was a late goal that separated the teams, we were outplayed. Particularly in the first half. Outworked and everything else. St Mirren were the better team.
“So off the back of a disappointing result like that, you just want to play the next game as quickly as possible. The fact that we need to go back down there again, we know what to expect.
“St Mirren are probably not going to change too much. We need to try to do better and implement what we want to do on the game. We had to change our shape during the game, which I’ve been reluctant to do because our shape has been good this year, but we did that to play against their shape.
“So what we want to do is be the team we’ve been for the majority of the season so far. If we can do that, then we give ourselves a far better chance of winning.
“A win on Saturday will take us joint second with Celtic. We have had a strong start to the campaign.
“Nobody at our club has felt good about ourselves since Saturday. We can lose to Premier League opposition when we are not right, and we were not right on Saturday in the first half.
“It is addressing that and what needs to happen from our point of view and move on.
“Three points is the perfect antidote to how we are feeling. We will need to work hard for it.”
The Dons have lost only once away from home in the league this season and McInnes believes the lack of crowds is having an impact on fixtures in the top flight.
He said: “Probably. We’ve always been quite a good team on the road anyway.
“It was last year’s home form that really impacted upon our season, because it wasn’t good enough.
“Our away form has been pretty consistent over the period. For us, it has been much the same, but in general (without crowds) the game just becomes about the game and the emotion of the crowds and decision-making by players and referees has been neutralised or sanitised a bit.
“It’s just about the performances. Home or away, most weeks we are expected to win games, so with or without fans, the demands are still there for us, certainly.”