Aberdeen skipper Graeme Shinnie was realistic in summing up the 3-0 defeat to Sparta Prague on Thursday night.
“Tough night, tough game. I thought we started the game reasonably well without creating anything, which was a problem the whole night, but I thought we settled into the game. Then we conceded a goal which I felt at the time might have been a handball, but we didn’t react well enough to it and conceded. That’s been a problem in some of the games and when you play against teams like this, they sense that and they gain a bit of confidence.
“Then when you lose a second goal, you’ve got an uphill task after that. But we came out at half-time, tried to galvanise things and get going again. I thought we started the second half okay, but again not creating enough in the final third and not putting enough pressure on them to really get ourselves back in the game. Then we give away a poor third goal and that kills the game.
“It’s has been a really difficult draw that we had. We played three of the top four, five of the top eight, so it was a really tough draw. We had to learn quickly from the Athens game, I thought we did well in Cyprus, we could have nicked that game, and from there we were a lot better in terms of our defensive side of the game.
“Overall, we haven’t done enough to score goals and give ourselves chances of winning the games, which has been disappointing. We’ve had good spells in games with possession, but sometimes teams are okay with that. They can be more dangerous when they’ve not got the ball sometimes and that’s what we’ve found out when we’ve given the ball away in dangerous areas and they’ve taken advantage.
“You have to learn from it, you lose games but you learn from them. If you don’t then you’re doing something wrong. It is very difficult, it’s been good teams that we’ve faced, but I feel like when we do have some decent momentum in games and decent control, we need to be a bit more dangerous with the ball. I don’t think we scored away from home, so you don’t really give yourself a chance to win games when it’s like that.
“But now we want to get back into Europe as quickly as we can, it’s where the club always wants to be so now we’ve got to move on from it and focus on the league season now and trying to get back into a position where we can qualify again. Now it’s a case of getting the pilot to put his foot down as quickly as he can, get home, recover on Friday, come in Saturday and then focus on Celtic. It’ll be a tough game, it always is at Parkhead, but it’s one that we’re looking forward to and one that we’re looking to go and win. The boys are looking forward to it.
“We’ve put ourselves back into a position where we want to be, fighting around the top. It’s really tight up to third, but especially over this Christmas period with so many games, it’s about trying to put as many points on the board as you can and then when you come out the other side you have an idea of where you are. We’ve just got to focus on us. We had a really bad start, but we’ve been able to turn that around. We’ve still got a long way to go, we’ve still got a lot of games to play and points to pick up, so we have to keep that momentum going.”
