Following defeat to Motherwell, Dimitar Mitov was the player who spoke to the media made it very clear that he and the rest of the squad need to turn Aberdeen’s form around on Tuesday night at Tannadice.
“It’s nowhere near good enough for the standards and the demands of this football club.
“We as players, we need to take responsibilities. It’s our fault, no-one else’s fault but the players. Because fundamentally in football, you need to want it more than the other team, you need to run more, you need to tackle better, you need to sacrifice more, you need to encourage each other better. We didn’t do that today.
“We need to go home, look ourselves in the mirror and think, ‘How can we be better? How can I sacrifice even more?’ Because we have everything to be successful, from facilities, from information before the game, everything. And I mean everything. We as players, we need to go home and take full responsibility for today.
‘If you lose the ball, all the other players need to run back, not think, ‘Oh, somebody else is going to make up for my mistake. I need to run back.’ We need to demand more from each other on the pitch. If somebody’s not doing something right, it needs to be called out. If we do something nice, encourage them, tell them he’s done something nice. This is how the team grows. But at the moment, we’re not doing this, and it just becomes so disconnected. We become so open and it feels like it’s just easy for the other team.
“But that’s only something we can fix on the pitch, because everything we do leading towards the game on Saturday is being given the best information on how to play against the opposition. But when it comes to the weekend, for some reason, we just forget all the information we had and we just play our own game. But we need to take responsibility. We need to be better because it’s nowhere near good enough for this football club.
“It’s our job, it’s our responsibility to excite the fans, to give them something to lift and support the team. I fully understand the fans’ frustration, because they have every right to say their opinion, because it’s nowhere near good enough. But the only people that can change that is us players on the football pitch. We have to perform on the pitch. We have to do it.
“We have another huge game on Tuesday where we need to go there, be the best version of Aberdeen that we can be because we have top players in our team and go there and try to win the game. We need to fix this.
“This is just the basics of football that you need to do every single week, regardless if you’re playing against the best teams or the teams that are not as good. It’s the same. We give respect to every opposition that we play, but we need to go there wanting to win the game more than the other team.
“Every single one of us knows we haven’t played well. and every single one of us wants to be better and be successful for this football club because it’s an amazing football club. I back my teammates. I back all the coaching staff. We’re going to turn this around.”
