Jim Goodwin was understandably very pleased that Aberdeen had seen off the challenge of Partick Thistle when he spoke to the press after the game.
“The most important thing in any cup competition is you make sure you’re in the next round. If you’d offered me a stuffy 1-0 with a 95th minute winner before the game, I’d have snapped your hand off. As it was, I was delighted we got ourselves a three goal advantage and went on to win from there.
“People will say we should have done better in the second half and controlled it more. I can’t argue with that but I’m not really interested in over-analysing the second 45 minutes because we are in the semi-final draw and we’ve given the supporters a trip to Hampden to look forward to.
“I changed the system after the break, we went to a back four, and that may have disrupted things a little bit, it didn’t pay off the way I hoped it would. I thought we’d get more advantage in the wide areas, but at the same time, Partick Thistle were in a position where they could afford to throw men forward, they had nothing to lose. They did exactly what Ian McCall would have asked of them second half and they made it a bit nervy.
“A lot of our players have never been in this situation before where there is so much at stake. Hopefully we’ll get more experience of going this far in a cup competition will stand us in good stead and next time, hopefully we’ll be able to handle that pressure a little bit better. But full credit to the players, the attitude and application was good and the standard was where it needed to be. We could have made life easier, we should have scored more goals, but 4-1, into the last four, it’s exactly what we wanted.
“Ryan Duncan’s goal at the end was outstanding, it was just what we needed at the time to kill the game off, and he’s another fantastic academy talent who has come through the system. The coaches and the scouts in the academy deserve huge credit, let’s not forget the hard work those guys do in developing these young kids.
“Going a long way in the cup competitions is something we are looking to do on a regular basis here and we make no secret of that. You leave yourself open to criticism if it doesn’t happen, but thankfully, in the first one of the year, we’ve reached the semi-final and we’ll see what happens from there in January.
“We can’t be content with just getting to semi-finals. We have to refocus when that game comes around and give it our all to try to get to the final. If you do that, then it doesn’t matter who the opponents, are anything can happen on the day. I’ve been there with St Mirren as a player where we were huge underdogs but managed to get the job done.”
