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“I am glad we have been busy this week with trying to sign players and re-signing players. And this will continue over the next few weeks.

“We have had to try and deal with a few players leaving over the summer and I am confident we will deal with it absolutely fine. It is important we embrace the new players coming in and embrace the challenge ahead.

“I have tried to get Greg Stewart before. I tried to get him before he went to Birmingham. We also enquired about a loan deal before. The move south has maybe not worked out quite as well as he would have liked but there have been three mangers there recently which has made it hard for him.

“The finances dictated that he landed up in the Championship but now we have got him and I hope to get even better performances out of him. I think he is joining a fantastic group of players. We will give Greg the opportunity to be that player week in week out and hopefully the encouragement and the motivation for Greg to play week in week out will drive him on to the types of performances that got everyone noticing him at Birmingham.

“He was always someone we were aware of when we played against him. We had to try and deal with his threat. I loved the number of assists he had for Dundee as well as the number of goals he scored. Bearing in mind the types of players we have lost in those (attacking) areas, I think he will be very important to us.
“I'm not going to comment specifically on any other particular targets. We're normally linked with good players and I'd rather be linked with good players than not, but it's difficult in this day and age to keep things under wraps.

“But I would have to say on Steven Naismith, there's absolutely nothing in it.

“We're hopeful on a couple of players that we've been linked with. We're trying to bring a level of player and Shaun Maloney is that type of player that we've been used to having here. We're trying to bring exactly what we need to the team and the challenge ahead but there's nothing more to say on Shaun. Or on anything else.

“We have to be respectful and a lot of these players have been linked with other clubs. I'd rather speak about the merits of having the player with me when they're sitting in the building.
 “We have brought one or two good options in already with Greg Tansey and Ryan Christie. We have recalled Danny Rogers to work alongside Joe Lewis this season. With Ash leaving we'd like to bring a centre-back in, a different type of striker and we'll probably look at the wider areas of the pitch.

“Unfortunately for us Terry Taylor (U17 player) and his family have indicated that he wants to take up the option of going to Wolves. He's still our player so there's a transfer fee that has to be agreed with that but we're very close to getting a deal done. There's set guidelines and channels that need to be met and Wolves are well on their way to doing that.

“It's no real surprise that other clubs have taken our first team players. Jonny Hayes has brought such a high level of performance to us and he gets to a certain age, then the obvious advantage of going and earning more money, you've got to take that into account.

“When I sign any player, part of the pitch is, 'come here, establish yourself, we will give you the platform with the potential to move on again'. So I've got to be real and authentic when opportunities come along for my players.

“I'm comfortable with my players being linked with other teams, but we'll decide when they leave. Part of the assurances I was looking for in staying at Aberdeen was that we wouldn't be selling any more players, certainly in this window. We're keen to add players, we feel enough have left the building.”