Graeme Shinnie says Aberdeen’s Betfred Cup exit must be the wake up call to shake them out of their recent slump.
The Dons captain was gutted to see one of Derek McInnes’ biggest pre-season targets – delivering cup success – blown out of the water by Motherwell’s powerful performance on Thursday night.
Now Shinnie believes they must use that as a catalyst to kick their Premiership campaign back into action after dropping points in their last two league games in draws with Kilmarnock and Hearts.
He knows that to have any hope of keeping pace with champions Celtic they can’t afford many slip-ups like that.
So anything less than a victory on their return to Fir Park tomorrow, after their 3-0 defeat two days ago, will not be good enough for the high standards set over the last three years.
Shinnie said: “This was a massive wake-up call for the whole team.
“We can’t just turn up and expect to win. We have great ability in the squad and players we know can win games for us.
“But first and foremost you have to work hard for each other and fight for each other. If you do that then the other parts of it come through afterwards. We have not had too many of these results in my time at
Aberdeen but it doesn’t make it any easier.
“Thursday night simply wasn’t good enough from anyone in the team, right through me to everyone else.
“I don’t think anyone got pass marks, really, and we know it wasn’t anywhere near good enough.
“We need to take a good look at ourselves because it wasn’t just the Motherwell game, the past few displays haven’t been up to standard.
“We need to analyse everything and improve.
“I don’t know why it has happened. In some of the games we have started well and then taken our foot off the gas a bit.
“We have let teams have chances and when you do that they gain confidence and come back into games. But against Motherwell I don’t think we even started well.
“We need a reaction on Sunday, we have to bounce back and make sure this loss is a minor blip. We don’t want to go three league matches without a win, we have made a lot of progress in the last few seasons and we have to keep that going.”
