After his Aberdeen side bounced back from defeat at Kilmarnock with an emphatic win at Motherwell, Barry Robson challenged his team to stay in the fight on all fronts ahead of a tough series of games, starting with the Viaplay Cup semi-final on Saturday.
“We’re up to sixth, we’ve a home game in hand after the Dundee game got called off, we’re in a semi-final on Saturday, we’re fighting hard in Europe against some huge teams, we need to keep it going.
“It’s extremely important that we win games in the league, but it’s no secret that the games where we’ve been poor have come off the back of playing in Europe. We need to get better at that. It’s the emotion that impacts on you, I know that from being a player myself in those games. Thar’s especially so with the way we’ve performed in them, coming close to some really good results.
“But there have been times this season already when we’ve been really, really good, easy on the eye as well, but we are still a work in progress and we want to get better and stronger all the time, but we’ve built a brand new team.
“They’re a really good group of players, they work so hard but it hasn’t been easy because we don’t get many training sessions at the moment. We’ve not worked together as a group really, and that’s been frustrating. I can’t be happier with the attitude of the group. You see the subs tonight, supporting the team, jumping off the bench to celebrate, that’s the bond we have and that we will need all season, just as we will need it with the supporters.
“I’ve had nothing but unconditional, unbelievable support from the fans since I came into the job. They’ve been outstanding. I just wish we could have given them something positive as a result against PAOK or in Frankfurt. We need them to back us and they have done that in numbers.
“They get you through the games where you need to dig out a result in difficult circumstances. We’ve got a lot of hard games coming up and we have to stay in the fight in all of them, stay in the fight in the league, and hopefully we can find a performance and a result on Saturday at Hampden, in what is a really difficult game for us.
“We were good all over the pitch tonight. We passed it really well, and I have to give credit to Motherwell for the quality of the pitch because it’s night and day from what we were playing on at the weekend. That helped us bring some speed to the game, we transitioned really well and I thought we thoroughly deserved the win. Now we have to take that forward.”
