JIM GOODWIN, the Aberdeen manager, had the beers chilling for him as left Fir Park on Saturday evening while Steve Hammell’s hangdog demeanour confirmed just how little there has been to celebrate for Motherwell of late.
The Pittodrie side rounded off a fairly productive week with the rarity of a win on the road, only their third in 24 attempts, and a jump into third spot in the cinch Premiership. Motherwell remain a team in freefall with this defeat meaning they have now won just a single game in their last seven outings.
Next up for Goodwin’s side is a trip to Ibrox on Saturday afternoon as they look to turn the screw on Giovani van Bronckhorst. Rangers are away to Napoli in their penultimate Champions League game this week and with the pressure firmly on the Ibrox side Goodwin will look to add to it.
He had Bojan Miovski and Luis Lopes, or Duk as he prefers to be known, to thank for the goals on Saturday. The former’s was a moment of quality in the game as he dinked the ball over Liam Kelly following a perfectly weighted pass from Connor Barron while the latter wiped out any brief hopes of a Motherwell fightback after Stuart McKinstry had levelled the scores. With both starting in a traditional front two it will be interesting to see what kind of threat they will take to Ibrox this weekend.
Jack MacKenzie, who set up the winner as he eluded the attention of Paul McGinn before delivering the cross for Duk to convert has revealed that his transition from full-back to wing-back has been greatly aided by taking a look at how Kieran Tierney and Andy Robertson do it. Tierney had a few notable appearances at Ibrox with the 22-year-old keen to emulate his roving and aggressive incursions.
“When Tierney was at Celtic I looked at the way he played - very powerful, really good going forward and really good defensively,” he said. He was the main one I looked at. You want to be creating goals, scoring goals, taking shots and getting crosses in.
“On Saturday with the cross Duk headed in, it’s an unbelievable feeling, to put the team in front, got us the win in the end, it’s a really good part of the game, I really enjoy it. There’s a lot of running, because you have to press the full back and track the winger.
"I look at Hayden Coulson, Jonny Hayes the way they attack from wing back. Jonny’s brilliant, he's doing his coaching as well. Just watching him, you don’t even need to speak to him, just watch what he does on a day-to-day basis, he’s a massive influence. He probably would have learned something off Tierney and Tierney would have learned stuff off him as well.
“It is a really big week for us. Hopefully next Saturday we can put in a good shift.”
Aberdeen edged it on Saturday on the balance of play but Motherwell’s run of luck seemed tied up in moments of this encounter. They were insistent there was a penalty in the final seconds of this game with their frustration at not getting the decision compounded by a stubbornness on the referee’s part not to check the merits of the call.
McKinstry netted his second goal in a week but there was little comfort in it as the Motherwell academy graduate, back at the club on a loan deal from Leeds, voiced his dismay at the repeated mistakes of the Fir Park side as well as the penalty claim when Ricky Lamie seemed to have his shirt yanked in the box by Dons defender Anthony Stewart.
“If they’re [officials] going to make the decisions, they need to make them and not blow the whistle 30 seconds after a big penalty thing has happened, and actually look at the decision, but they didn’t,” he said. “But there’s nothing we can do on that, that’s their front. We shouldn’t have been in that situation, we should have had the game won before that.
“It’s always going to cause panic if you’re not going to getting points. We know the things we need to do, we keep not doing them. We need to focus on those things and put them right.
“We can’t score. We keep conceding sloppy goals. We as a team need to put that right.”
