Nicky Devlin was frustrated that the Dons didn’t do enough to make life difficult for Celtic at Pittodrie.
“It’s important this year for us to have a good home record and we wanted to start with the first but ultimately, I don’t think we’ve done enough in the game to trouble Celtic. They had a lot of the ball and a lot of pressure at times without creating too many clear cut opportunities but on the flip side of that I don’t think we troubled them anywhere near enough.
“We had a couple of opportunities on the counter-attack and to be fair to Celtic, they defended them really well and limited us to creating almost next to nothing. We have to improve, we know that. We have to be much more of a threat when we’ve got the ball.
“When you look at the table, it’s never nice to see your team where we are. We’ve had two difficult fixtures, but fixtures where we wanted to pick points up. It’s not an excuse that we’ve had hard games. Everyone has to play these games. We wanted to pick points up from them. It’s the opposite from last year. We obviously started amazing last year. We’ve started with two defeats now, so we have to bounce back and we need to do that starting next week against Morton.
“We’ve got new players in this year that are still trying to get used to the way the manager wants to play, understand that games in this league aren’t easy to win. We’ll hopefully pick up when the league campaign starts back in three weeks now. We’ve got three games before our next league game and we want to make sure we progress in the two competitions.
“Hearts is probably one of the hardest away games we could have had to start with and then probably the hardest home game. If they new boys were not aware of how difficult it was going to be in the league, they’ll be aware now.
“It’s important for the rest of us to give the boys up front more opportunity. There were times today Kusini was having to feed off balls that weren’t great quality into him, fighting against two big centre-halves, which was making it difficult. We have to get the ball in better areas, play more to his strengths. It’s his first taste of being up here, it’s only his second game in the league. We need to do a wee bit more to support him and get the ball into areas that we know he can be dangerous. We’ve seen it in training, we’ve seen it in some of the pre-season games. We need to produce better service.”
