30 December 2023

You can’t serve that up – Barry Robson angry as Aberdeen fall to St Mirren

30 December 2023

Aberdeen boss Barry Robson was left angry with his players after the 3-0 cinch Premiership defeat to St Mirren.

The Dons fell behind to Mark O’Hara’s early drive and survived a scare when the same player missed a penalty six minutes later.

But a close-range strike from Jonah Ayunga and Greg Kiltie’s injury-time spot-kick had the Buddies making the lengthy homeward trip in high spirits, while Robson was left to seethe.

“I’m really angry actually,” he said. “We weren’t good enough all over the pitch and I’ve made sure the players know that. They need to take responsibility for it, and me as well.

“You can’t serve that up. We’re a lot better than that – I don’t think we picked up any second balls in the middle of the pitch, we weren’t good enough in either box, and you get punished.

“The performance surprised me – I didn’t see it coming. There’s no excuse – I am angry and I’m not having that.

“Not every game is going to be perfect – you’ve got to do the basics right. I have to apologise to the fans because that wasn’t good enough. I won’t accept that and I know they won’t accept that.”

St Mirren boss Stephen Robinson admits his side have not been scoring enough but was pleased to see them put that right in difficult conditions at Pittodrie, in what was a first away win since September.

He said: “It’s been coming. We’ve had some very good performances but what’s let us down as a collective has been not taking our chances, and we’ve been conceding from set-pieces.

“We were able to improve on both of those today. The general performances have been very good but today we were able to put up a good defensive performance and a clinical performance in attack.”

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