Jack MacKenzie was happy to come through a testing afternoon against Bonnyrigg Rose but admitted there were areas where the Dons need to improve.

“We gave them too much encouragement in the first half, Nicky had to clear one off the line, and that’s not good enough from us. I didn’t think we controlled the game as well as we could have. Saying that, you can slip up in these games, but we didn’t, we won 2-0, we’re in the last eight, and we’d have taken that before the game.

“We’re looking to get as high up in the league as we can but we also know that wining the Scottish Cup guarantees you European group stage football too, so there’s extra incentive there.”

Neil Warnock enjoyed his first game at Pittodrie and MacKenzie feels the side has made some steps forward this week.

“It’s been a good week under the new manager. It’s been very contrasting games from playing Rangers at Ibrox to playing this one, but he’s getting his message across. It’ll take a bit of time to adapt but we’re all willing to learn and get better. We’ve all taken to him really well.

“The approach is just taking one game at a time, but we all know the league form isn’t good enough, we’ve two home games coming up and we need to be taking six points from those. We need to start building some momentum and hopefully we can start doing that now.

“I don’t think we’ve controlled games the way we need to this season, especially in the league and, especially at Pittodrie, we haven’t taken the initiative often enough. We haven’t picked up as many points as we wanted to here.

“I think we all need to step up, we all need to be leaders on the pitch. Shinnie is great at that, but we need to have more of us doing a similar job to him, whether he’s on the pitch or not. Same with Bojan, he’s flying, he’s a brilliant striker, but we need to help him out up there, we need to chip in and we know we need to score more goals overall.”