GRAEME SHINNIE’S decision to shun social media platforms, not to say deliberately avoid reading newspapers, kept him in the dark over the pre-match pronouncement from Neil Lennon that his Hibernian team played the second-best football in the country.
Neither Shinnie nor anyone in the atmospheric Pittodrie crowd would have seen the Hibs manager’s boast as anything other than preposterous as Aberdeen crushed their opponents with comparative ease over 90 absorbing minutes.
Of course, as the Aberdeen manager Derek McInnes conceded, Lennon ought to talk-up his team when offered the opportunity, although the Easter Road coach balanced his pre-match praise with a post-match verbal mauling as he dissected considerable Hibs flaws on the day.
Shinnie, whose early strike was the signal for he and his team-mates to begin their torture of the visitors, recognised Aberdeen’s afternoon’s work was more comfortable than expected.
“Yes, we made it that way,” he said. “It was probably our best performance of the season. We did everything we wanted to do. We got right on top of the game and Hibs and we didn’t let them settle into the game at all. When you do that you get your rewards after that.”
There was special praise for Gary Mackay-Steven, whose two first-half goals – one of which highlighted a glaring lapse in concentration from Hibs defender Efe Ambrose – and a third, half-an-hour from the end, may be enough for him to secure a start against his former club, Celtic, at Parkhead on Saturday.
It is difficult, however, to imagine the Hoops will afford him the time and space he had courtesy of a haphazard Hibs rearguard. But Celtic, Shinnie insists, can be beaten.
“We always feel we have the squad to do it,” he said, “but it is easy saying that you have to go out and do it. We want to stamp a bit of authority on the game and hopefully we can come out with the win.”
When the Dons captain deflected Anthony Stokes’s shot past his own goalkeeper a minute from time, it was a meaningless conclusion with Lennon’s mind on reaching the changing room to address his flops.
“Obviously he’s not happy; what would you expect?” was how Dylan McGeouch described his manager’s mood.
“He knows we’re capable of much more as a team. Everybody who played didn’t reach the standards we know we can play at. He let us know that, but I don’t think he had to rant and rave at us because we knew that at half-time and after the game that it wasn’t good enough.”
McGeouch was not alone in the provision of sub-standard work and Lennon was right to suggest his goalkeeper, Ofir Marciano, was “lacking in confidence”, although he chose not to criticise Ambrose for his dithering prior to Mackay-Steven’s second goal.
And that “second-best team in the country” label?
“It’s okay saying that,” McGeouch said, “but as a team we need to go and prove it and we didn’t do that here. We know we can play good football when we get the ball down and start knocking it about. But we need to earn the right and we didn’t do that. We were outfought and we gave them slack goals and gave them a lift at home. They were able to express themselves when they got a few goals up and we were up against it.
“We are embarrassed to put out a performance like that. You look at last Wednesday night against Rangers when we played really well and didn’t get the result, then we play like that against Aberdeen; it’s just not good enough.”
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