“First half, I thought we were ok in possession until the final third. I thought we were wasteful – when you have two strikers you ask them to get the ball forward a bit earlier and get crosses into the box – I don’t think we did that well enough. So a wee bit frustrated with the lack of quality when we got into that final third.

“The goals we concede are a frustration as well. I spoke to them on that.

“After the sending off obviously, they then have to sit in and you go and try and change but even up until we brought Kevin Hanratty on I thought we still huffed and puffed without being overly creative.

“I thought they defended well in fairness to them. They put their bodies on the line, they were narrow and they defended well.

“Once Kevin came on and we tweaked the shape a bit – he’s positive and he’s direct with his work and he creates opportunities by putting early crosses in the box. So he made a difference in terms of the game. If we had another five minutes would we have sneaked another one? Possibly but then when you go to penalties it’s a lottery within that and they’ve taken their five penalties better than us and unfortunately we are out of the cup.

“It’s not the end of the world especially in a game like that (Kevin being the one to miss). Hopefully the boy will be involved in bigger games than this one and have the opportunity to take penalties in shootouts to right that wrong but I’ve just said to him in there that without him, the likelihood is we would not have made it to the penalties. It’s all ifs, buts and maybes I know that but certainly when he came on Kevin allowed us that opportunity to at least get to penalties so he can’t be too down on himself.

“Playing against men is important. Obviously we had the game against Cove last week and they were a mix of first team and a wee bit younger. Whereas tonight, I think the bulk were first teamers at Inverurie and they are a team that have been going well the last few weeks. We were aware of that and knew on a night in tough conditions- both in terms of weather and underfoot, it was going to be a game where they had to roll their sleeves up and really match their physicality.

“And I think in the main we did that. It was just two succour punches in the first half and it was an uphill battle for us after that. Second half we managed to get to a certain level but not enough unfortunately.

“We put demands on them that we should be trying to win these competitions and as frustrating as it is going out at the quarter/semi-final stage of these cups, there is always a learning process and you tend to learn more in defeat than you do in winning games.

“Brilliant for the younger ones to play alongside him as well (Ashton Taylor). We’ve got two 2003’s and a 2002 playing along side him so from their point of view it is great experience and for Ash it’s just important to get 90 minutes under his belt. The fact that he wants to come and see us and play in this game is testament to Ash’s attitude anyway so it’s brilliant to see him back.

“He’s obviously a bit rusty himself- he’s not played in a long time but he’s dragging boys round about him and just that experience of playing with a player that has played that many games both in Scotland and in England will greatly benefit our young players.”