Irishman Jonny Hayes has rubbished claims he and his Aberdeen teammates threw ex-manager Jim Goodwin 'under the bus' following embarassing defeats to Darvel and Hibernian.
Aberdeen made headlines after losing their Scottish Cup tie to minnows Darvel and just days later were hammered 6-0 by Hibernian. These two results followed a humbling 5-0 thrashing to Hearts. Goodwin was sacked almost immediately after the demolition by Hibs.
These successive defeats have gathered significant negative publicity and Hayes admits he and his teammates are in no positio to argue with any of it, "We have to accept it unfortunately. I don’t like to see ex-players level things like that at myself and my team-mates."
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“Their motive for saying that is up to themselves but we can’t defend performances and say we have been anywhere near good enough."
“I have seen a couple of comments about throwing the manager under the bus and whilst from the outside it maybe looks like that, that certainly wasn’t the case.
“Jim is obviously not here any more but the boys did look up to him and responded well to his training. Unfortunately we just didn’t respond on the pitch recently when it mattered."
Barry Robson has been named caretaker manager and is hoping to re-focus the players after a damaging period,
"I remember a great coach said to me once, ‘just run about on the pitch’.
“You can all laugh, but if you speak to any great manager and when you do that, it is amazing, things will start to turn for you. It is what the fans want. You can start winning second balls, all these basic little things.
“I’ve said that to them. We’re here to help them. We’re not here to ridicule or say ‘why did you do this?’ or ‘why is that?’ No, it’s not about that. You’ve got to try and help the players and it needs to come from within, from them as well.
“We’re here to try and help. We’re here to show what it takes to be an Aberdeen player and the things we expect to see from an Aberdeen player.”
This is Robson's second caretaker spell at Aberdeen in the past year. The former Celtic player has ambitions of permanent managerial roles in the future but he say's he's happy to help out his boyhood club once more,
"They’ve asked me to come in and help the football club, which I’m always going to do."
“I am an Aberdeen boy, I am an Aberdeen fan, I’ve been here a long time. I love the club. I know it inside out. We’ve got two huge games coming up. We have to try and get results in these next few games.
“I’ve got aspirations to be a manager one day and I will be a manager one day. I think that’s clear, I’ve said it before, we all know it. I’ve been working on different things as a coach and having loads of different experiences.
"Let’s just get through this next couple of days.”
