Following Ross County’s late, late equaliser, Jim Goodwin had mixed emotions as the Dons went third in the league despite dropping a couple of points.
“After a game it is sometimes hard to analyse things because emotions are high. But I don’t need to watch it back to know we shaded the game. I’m not going to say we battered them because we didn’t. They’re dangerous on the counter-attack, or when they’re pumping long balls into the box. But I thought the centre-halves coped well and the midfielders did well picking up the pieces around that.
“It is another point on the board, and any away day in this league can be tough. You don’t travel anywhere and expect a comfortable ride. We knew what to expect, but when you concede so late, it feels worse. We should have had two more points and opened up a bit of a gap to fourth place and closed in on Rangers, but it wasn’t to be.
“I thought we played really well first half, controlled it for long spells albeit we got hit on the break a couple of times, but I was pleased with the way we played all in all, without peppering Laidlaw’s goal enough. That would be my only criticism of the first 45 minutes.
“We played some good football from back to front, but there were moments where we were just a bit slack in our passing around their penalty area. If we’d been as crisp as we needed to be, it might have been different. We didn’t capitalise.
“It got more scrappy after the break, more of a dogfight. You know what you’ll get here, they’re a direct team, playing long balls into Jordan White, you’ve got to compete with him and be aggressive on the second balls. We did that really well for the majority of the game.
“The way the second half was going, it looked as if one goal would be enough to be decisive for either team. I didn’t think we needed the extra midfielder, so I brought Duk on. He has made a real impact in the last four games he’s come on, he’s champing at the bit now for a start. The formation we’re playing has one striker at present, Miovski has the jersey, but in the second half, I had them both on up top to get at County’s backline. We weren’t happy to just draw 0-0, we wanted the win. It almost worked.
“The goal was a bit of brilliance from Duk. People will talk about the finish but it was an all-round goal. It was his link up play at the start of the move, taking the ball in on the halfway line and setting Matty Kennedy away, then he busts a gut to get in the middle and that pleased me as much as the finish, which was out of this world.
“Scoring so late on, you hope you’ve done enough to win it, because I didn’t really feel like County were troubling Kelle Roos at all, I thought we were coping admirably. So to lose a goal in the last half a minute of added time makes it tougher to take.
“We’re disappointed we didn’t get another clean sheet because I felt Anthony Stewart and Liam Scales deserved it. Kelle’s had nothing to do. He made a great save initially from their throw in when they scored, a reflex save with his right hand but on of our players missed the clearance from there and Jayden Richardson slipped as he was trying to clear, so it was a catalogue of errors in the goal that we conceded and that is disappointing because it was scruffy and very avoidable.
“It’ll take a day to get over that late goal, but there are plenty of positives from today that far outweigh the negatives.”
“It’ll take a day to get over that late goal, but there are plenty of positives from today that far outweigh the negatives.”
