Anthony Stewart has scored at Wembley – and the skipper says Aberdeen shouldn’t “fear” Rangers in their bid for victory at Hampden.
Jim Goodwin’s Dons meet the Gers in the League Cup last-four at the national stadium on Sunday.
Fourth-placed Aberdeen are currently 20 points and two slots behind Michael Beale’s side in the Premiership standings, and suffered a devastating 3-2 defeat to their rivals at Pittodrie on December 20, where they had led 2-1 going into injury time.
However, with a place in a cup final at stake, Stewart has told his team-mates not to be overawed by the occasion – or their opponents – and to remember it is 11 v 11 at Hampden.
And Stewart has experience of performing on the big stage – he scored as Wycombe beat Oxford in a Wembley play-off final to reach the Championship in 2020.
Revealing he plans to revisit a “secret” pre-match ritual which has brought him success in big games previously, Stewart said: “I’ve got a little pre-match thing I do for myself before big games like that so I will hopefully revisit that and it can give me the same success it gave me then.
“It’s a little bit of a secret – I basically have a few notes and a few things I set myself, personal targets, and I go through them and read them the night before and manifest it.
“It’s just something I do for myself. It might not help for everyone else, but for me it does.
“It’s important not to strike fear into ourselves. It seems, from what I have learned from coming up here, that a lot of teams fear Celtic and Rangers.
“They are very good teams, but at the same time it’s 11 men on the pitch and it’s whoever performs best on the day.”
Stewart, 30 believes lessons have been learned from the 3-2 Pittodrie loss to Rangers, admitting it took some time to get over Scott Arfield’s 95th and 97th-minute double to condemn Aberdeen to defeat in a game they had looked certain to win.
“It did take a little while, it was a massive blow with the style we lost the game,” Stewart said.
“We did well to go ahead and had control of the game for large periods and two lapses of concentration meant we lost the game.
“But it’s something that we do learn from. I always say you don’t learn from your wins all the time, sometimes it’s the losses where you take your biggest lessons from, and that was definitely one.”