After leading the Dons out at Elgin City in the Scottish Cup, Nicky Devlin was delighted to be heading back to the dressing room after the game with a win under their belts.
“It’s been a long time since we won, far too long from our point of view, but it was nice to get a win. It was a difficult game, and fair play to Elgin, they made it a real good cup tie. It was just good to get back to winning ways and hopefully we can use this now to kick on.
“We knew Elgin are flying high in the division they’re in just now, so we knew they could cause us problems if we weren’t at it. I think the first 10 or 15 minutes, we didn’t start great. That gave them a wee bit of confidence and they got into areas where they could have hurt us. Our first goal was obviously crucial and I think it settled us down a little. In the second half, I thought we were good and could have scored another couple of goals, to be fair.
“When you’re away from home against teams like this, it’s always difficult. They’ve got a brilliant home record this year, I think they’ve only lost a couple of times up here. We knew how difficult it was going to be and we didn’t really want to give them any encouragement, especially at the start of the game.
“Unfortunately we gave them a couple of moments and so we had to show character to come back from that. They were still a threat from set plays. A couple of times on the counter, they’ll maybe think they should have done a wee bit better, but once we got ourselves in front, I thought we dominated most of the game.
“As much as it was a good win here today, there’s no point in coming and doing it if we’re not going to use that to start going in the right direction again. I’m sure the manager during the week will go over things he was happy with, I’m sure there will be some stuff he wants us to improve as well, but it’s hopefully a springboard for the rest of the season.
“It’s been a bit of a strange season in terms of the highs at the start to the lows we’ve been having for the last couple of months. We need to get a run of consistency. It’s going to be difficult to replicate the start to the season we had, but if we can start picking points up in the league, then hopefully we can finish strong and come the end of the season, we’ll be in a good place.”
The win sends Aberdeen into the last 16 with hopes of another good cup run to come, something Devlin relishes.
“Every competition since I’ve been here, we’ve reached the semi-finals minimum, but we don’t want to just be a team that gets to semi-finals and finals. We want to go and try and win things. I think that’s why everyone comes to a club like Aberdeen. You want to put yourself in positions to win trophies. We had to come here to win today, especially for the fans.
“The supporters were here in numbers, it’s probably quite local for them for an away game! It’s probably one of the ones that’s closest, but we’re pleased to give them a win because they’ve stuck by us in this run, whatever it’s been, when they could have easily turned, because some of the performances weren’t good enough. They’ve stuck by us, and they can go home happy now.”
