It was a night of contrasts for the Dons at Livingston and Jim Goodwin analysed the good and the bad after the game.
“We lost the game in the first 20 minutes, simple as that. I was really concerned at 2-0 because we looked a shadow of the team we have been lately. The first goal was really disappointing, it’s not a great corner, we should cut it out at the near post and react better thereafter.
“The manner we started was extremely frustrating for me because we spoke about how they come flying at you, you know what you’ll get, balls into the box, getting after second balls, all that. They did the basics much better than us in that first 20 minutes. We just didn’t play well, that happens sometimes. We will analyse it and talk about why we didn’t react properly from the first minute and learn from it.
“We settled down after half an hour, we came back into. Scoring the penalty just before the break would have helped, albeit we wouldn’t have deserved to be 2-1 at that point.
“People make a big deal over formations and you can say the back three didn’t work, but there were a number of individual below par performances on the night that contributed to that. We changed it at half-time, Matty Kennedy came on and was excellent and added some creativity.
“As poor as we were on early on, I saw a lot of real quality football in the second half too, one of the most one sided halves of football I’ve seen in a long time, but it wasn’t enough. We should have come away with something but it didn’t happen for us.
“It isn’t a night to be apologising for anything other than that first 20 minutes because after that, second half especially, we were excellent. We just couldn’t quite claw it back. If we can play like that for 90 minutes instead of 60 or 70, then we’ll give ourselves a far better chance of winning games.
“Second half, it’s as well as we’ve played in weeks. We’ve had more goal attempts than in the last four or five games. We were nowhere near as good as that in the second half against Hibs on Friday and scored three goals. We didn’t play as well as that at home to Hearts and won 2-0.
“The reaction we got in the second half gives me a bit of confidence back because the first 20 minutes certainly was alarming. We were making mistakes, individuals doing things they haven’t done all season, yet we end up with more than 20 goal attempts, more shots on target than in weeks gone by, missed a penalty. I don’t think we deserved to lose the game over the 90 minutes given the second half reaction, but you can’t give Livingston a two goal start like that, simple as that.”
“The reaction we got in the second half gives me a bit of confidence back because the first 20 minutes certainly was alarming. We were making mistakes, individuals doing things they haven’t done all season, yet we end up with more than 20 goal attempts, more shots on target than in weeks gone by, missed a penalty. I don’t think we deserved to lose the game over the 90 minutes given the second half reaction, but you can’t give Livingston a two goal start like that, simple as that.”
