With seven points now from six away games this term after the win at Motherwell, Jim Goodwin was happy to point to improvements on the road from the Dons so far this season.
“People talk about our away form, but this season we’ve won at St Johnstone, we drew at Ross County. The Dundee United defeat was the only really disappointing one, given that we went down to ten men at Hibs.
“We were poor at Tannadice, we knew we had to bounce back from that, we knew we owed the travelling supporters after that. They’ve been immense all season, there won’t be many clubs out there with a better away support than ours and we let them down at Dundee United. Today, we gave them a good performance and a good result to enjoy on the road back tonight.”
Aberdeen have switched to a back three and a front two over the last week which has seen them win three out of three, and the manager explained the thinking behind that change.
“Ross McCrorie plays that position at the back so well albeit he’s played so well for us in the middle of the park. I do feel sometimes we miss his energy and drive there, but he’s a natural right sided centre-half.
“We have been playing with three up front with Bojan Miovski on his own through the middle, but we wanted to get Duk in alongside him, so we took a little gamble on this system against Hearts and it’s paid off. Duk and Miovski work so well as a pair. One goes short, the other goes in behind, they do a lot of unselfish work to free up space, they look out for each other, so I’m pleased both scored.
“The first goal was a real piece of class from Miovski and thankfully VAR was here to make sure it stood because it would have been a travesty if it had been chalked off.
“The second goal was everything we spoke about in the week, trying to get the advantage in the wide areas and getting the quality of ball in. We’ve not done that enough of late, but Jack MacKenzie put a brilliant ball in, good movement from Duk and a good header.
“The first 15, 20 minutes I felt really comfortable, we got in front and we were in complete control. It became scrappy after that to the break, we were missing the midfield out too much and so we spoke about that at half-time and we tried to get Barron and Clarkson in the game more.
“We got in some really good goalscoring positions. Duk will be disappointed he didn’t score the one-on-one, because we felt his pace would exploit the high line that Motherwell play, but it was a good recovery run from their defender.
“This has been a very difficult place for Aberdeen to come in recent times so a win here is very welcome.”
