Good things come to those who wait, so they say.

This time last year, Sam Cosgrove had not long scored his first Aberdeen goals – a brace against St Mirren – and was taking his fair share of stick from the media and sections of the support who were looking to him to take on the goalscoring burden from the departed Adam Rooney. He was still a month away from perhaps his lowest moment, a sending off at Ibrox best described as harsh, mitigated only by the fact that the Dons still went on to win 1-0.

That low point was also the turning point though. Back in the team after his one game ban, Sam scored in the next game against Livingston. And in the game after at St Mirren. Two in the game after that at home to Dundee, two more against Hearts and another against Celtic. The goals have barely stopped since. Sam now has 37 goals for the Dons in 60 starts and nine substitute appearances, a record bordering on the Harperesque.

A year ago, a weaker character might have gone under. Not Sam Cosgrove.

“We all need things to spur us on and to motivate you when you get out of bed in the morning. For me the main thing is having pride in what I do and also making my family proud as well. They have put so much into me and I want to repay that.

“They try to come to games, but it’s a long way up here. My mum and dad are quite busy, my sister is an avid netballer so she is usually playing on a Saturday. I can’t thank them enough for the massive support they give me. They are always on the end of a phone after ever game and I can rely on my dad for a pretty critical review of my game, even if I have scored a hat-trick! They always watch the highlights. My family all give me support and I could not ask any more of them.

“I don’t tend to look back too much. I am a person who looks forward all the time. But occasionally I will sit down and reflect on where I was. I am proud of what I have achieved and where I came from because I had a hard start in football. The manager here took a chance on me and I am very grateful to him for sticking with me and giving me the chances to prove myself.

“I have proved a lot of people wrong. I came up here and I did not have an ideal start and a lot of people wrote me off early on which was tough to take but as a footballer you have to deal with setbacks.”

Coming into Aberdeen, Sam faced a challenge greater than other new signings for at every club, the centre-forward is the talisman, the man charged with scoring goals, winning games. There’s no hiding place – nor was he looking for one.

“I know I have a responsibility to carry the team at the top end of the pitch. I have a responsibility to get my name on the score sheet and to put in a good performance.

“Under pressure you can either buckle or you can thrive. At first, I came under a lot of scrutiny but now I find myself under a different kind of pressure which is a lot nicer. People are expecting me to go out every week and put a good performance in and I expect the same from myself. That’s not going to happen every week, everyone has to have a bad game every now and then, but then it’s about how you react and come back from that, having the resilience to go again.

“I would say that my mentality has changed, though I’m still the same person. It is still about coming in every day and working hard and being the best player you can be. But since I arrived at the club I have grown up massively on the football pitch and in the real world as well.

“I came up to Aberdeen with a very limited amount of games under my belt, especially first team games, but throughout the months I have gained that experience. For example, it’s about learning what to do if someone comes short or if it goes long and about learning to play against different types of players. You are always learning and picking up on things.

“Confidence is a massive thing in football. Without that self confidence, you can’t pull off the things you do in a game. Feeling comfortable and knowing my role in the team helps. I have done a lot of work behind the scenes with the coaches about what is expected of me.

“The amount of planning that goes on here is massive. It is not always well documented but the amount of work all the coaching staff do to prepare for games is huge. But even then, when the whistle blows for the start of the game it is potentially 90 minutes of chaos! Things will go wrong on a football pitch. You can’t make everything go perfectly, so you have to be able to adapt to different situations. We can try and stick to a game plan as much as we want but things can change on a pitch and you have to adapt your game towards that – there are always 11 men trying to stop you.

“Personally, I’m in a very good place at the moment. If I don’t score then I am disappointed, but the most important thing is making sure you help the team win. I can have even greater influence on the match by continuing to improve my all round game.

“My confidence is really high and I am enjoying my football. In spells we have played very well this season and there is a lot more to come from us. It is great being part of the team when we play like that. When we are on form we are a side that can soak up pressure and that gives me and all the attacking players a platform to do what we do.

“The main point for me to work on at the start of the season was turning defences and making runs in behind. It was important I worked on not just being a static number nine. I am a tall boy and it would be a waste not to use my height at times. At times you need to do that and it is the right thing to do, but at a team like Aberdeen who are usually on the front foot, with a lot of pace in the side, I need to adapt my game to that.

“Being a dynamic number nine and working the channels, working in behind and having that movement was something the manager specifically told me to go away and work on in pre-season. It’s something I have put a lot of effort and focus into over the past few months. If you are playing as the lone striker and you are static, you can kill the team. You need to be mobile to stretch the game.

“When I came into the club I was labelled as a target man and was expected to play up front and bully people. That is how I made my name at first but in some games that’s not enough. I work as hard as I can to add that extra dimension to my game. I work on it three or four times a week in training. The coaching staff deserve a lot of credit for the work they have done with me to make me a better all round player. Tony Docherty, myself and the other forward players will go away and do some extra work on rotation in those forward areas. It is all about mixing my game up.

“You have to try and play as if you were a small striker and find pockets of space inside the box. I will happily take those taps ins that can give you an extra ten goals a season. I think I’m starting to prove that I have got different levels to my game.

“I think I showed that with that goal at Motherwell. I have watched it back quite a few times now – Greg deserves a lot of credit as he made a great tackle to win the ball back and played a brilliant ball through to me. It was a tidy finish, one of those instinctive ones. I saw the keeper running out towards me and it was a split-second decision, I thought a dink was the right thing to do. It is a subconscious thing. Sometimes when you find yourself running in on goal, you have so much time you can almost over think it. But that was an instinctive finish, it all happened so quickly.

“Once it was past the keeper, I knew it was heading for that bottom corner, I think I was already away celebrating before the ball hit the back of the net. I had tried it once in training the week before, so maybe I had got confidence from that. It’s something I wouldn’t usually dare do!”

Sam’s goalscoring exploits across these last 12 months do come with a downside of course – the world beyond Pittodrie knows all about him too. Goals don’t just talk, they shout, and plenty can hear them. The more goals go in, the more clubs will take an interest in Cosgrove.

“I don’t know how far I can go in the game, that’s for the future. What I do know is I was in a pretty bad place and it was tough to carry on going but I have got through that. Aberdeen have been really good for me and I want to repay the club by putting in as many good performances as I can.

“Right now my target is to beat what I reached last season, 21 goals. I’m on the way to that with 16 now. I can’t look too far ahead but as long as I don’t pick up any injuries, I do have 30 goals in my sights. I would be quite disappointed if I did not reach that target by the end of the season. That can only help the team.

“We have had a lot of success in recent years under this manager but because of that, when you are not doing well then people can jump on your back quickly. Within the club though there has been no panic whatsoever. When criticism comes from the outside, it just makes you work even harder to get the results. I’m sure we’ll find that consistency once we get players back.

“We’ve had a tough few weeks with the injuries and some of the results. But they are some things that you can’t control, so you have just got to get on with it. Because of these outside factors, we haven’t got too down and we still managed to pick up some points. Hopefully we can kick on in November and December as we start getting some of the players back.”