Graeme Shinnie has urged his Aberdeen teammates to channel the pain of losing the Viaplay Cup Final to Rangers into quickly climbing up the league.
The Dons have struggled to balance a deep cup run and European group stage football with the domestic toil of the Premiership so far this term. They currently sit in 10th place, just five points clear of bottom placed Livingston.
Given the quality in Barry Robson's squad, including £5m rated striker Bojan Miovski, and the significant wage spend lavished by owner Dave Cormack, the expectation of the Aberdeen hierarchy will be for a quick improvement in results.
And captain Shinnie wants to ensure there's no residual fallout from the narrow defeat at Hampden on Sunday by using the loss as fuel to jumpstart their Premiership campaign.
“I told the boys after the game we need to use the hurt as fuel for the rest of the season," he said. "We can’t afford any sort of hangover, we need to turn our league season around. We need to use Sunday’s game to drive us on.
“For a lot of the boys it’s their first cup final in Scotland so dealing with losing it is a new experience for them. It hurt on Sunday but we have to digest it, forget about it and move on. There is a long way to go, we have a lot of league games and there’s also the Scottish Cup to go for.
“The league is where we are focused now so it’s a good thing to be playing again on Wednesday. In football it’s always a good thing when you have a game quickly after a defeat because it’s a chance to get going again. We need to put a run together now, put the league form right and start climbing up the table.
“We had a good result in Hearts in the league so we need to build on that, get some momentum and get up the league."
While Aberdeen performed well in the Conference League and remained competitive in all their games, the added challenge of playing every three days is one they are getting used to for the first time. For Shinnie, it's been amongst the most difficult spells of a long career on both sides of the border - and that includes his stretch in the notoriously physical and relentless English Championship.
He said: “This season has been gruelling, to be honest. It has been tough, one of the toughest I’ve had in football. We have done a lot of travelling and had a lot of big games - but that’s what it’s like when you’re at the level of playing in European group stages and cup finals.
“It comes thick and fast and you have to deal with it. It has been tougher than playing down south because in the European games you put so much into them. But that’s what you want to be doing as a club, so we have to get used to it and learn how to deal with it.
“Now we have a run of league games we need to win to get to where we want to in the table. We went on a great run last season to get up to third so of course we believe we can do it again. We have had some poor games this season, we’re not going to lie, but we have also had some good performances as well.
“We know what we’ve got in the squad and the quality we’ve got. But there has been enough talking now, we have to start doing it on the pitch and pick up.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here