Head knocks ought not to be contagious. But when Duk and Richard Jensen crashed craniums shortly after the half-hour mark, the entire team seemed to sustain concussion by proxy.
To that point, Aberdeen had been the senior figures in the match. Though they had created little other than the vague sense that a goal would somehow eventuate, they were playing on the front foot and had seen nothing to cause them fear.
But with Jensen off to have his wound sealed, the Dons elected to enter a phase of protective action.
Presumably it was intended to last only for as long as they remained short on numbers, but the shell Aberdeen retreated into was one from which they didn’t reappear until almost too late.
When the heavily-bleeding Jensen was ushered indoors it was at a time when the Dons were beginning to wind up the pressure in pursuit of what felt like an important first-half opener.
Instead his countrymen were afforded the chance to gain a foothold in the extended period which followed, and they forged on from it after the interval.
Whether Aberdeen would have stayed on top had Barry Robson acted immediately to send on a replacement 11th man will never be known.
With that question in the air, however, it was certainly handy that Jensen’s was the forward ball that set up Bojan Miovski’s equaliser and the quest for a winner which burned briefly thereafter.
In the end, it is a result to suit neither side in a group from which qualification was a long shot from the outset.
If the Dons had been banking on sore heads this morning, they would have wished for them to come from celebrating landing a knockout shot on HJK rather than the after-effects of repeated blows in a drawn fight.
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