Dundee smell Aberdeen blood but Jamie McGrath urges Dons not to give them any after Celtic annihilation

Jamie McGrath knows Dundee “will smell blood’ but he wants to make sure that Aberdeen react to their Premier Sports Cup semi-final beating and it becomes nothing more than “a slap on the wrist”.

Jimmy Thelin has got his team back in at Cormack Park as they look to recover from their 6-0 Hampden humbling at the hands of Celtic. The positive is that it was Aberdeen’s first defeat under Thelin and their only one in 17 games under him.

McGrath and the Dons aim to get back to their imperious Pittodrie form that has seen them win every home game and they want to continue that when Dundee visit. The Dons beat them at Dens Park, in a close encounter, earlier this season. McGrath admitted: “I think everybody watches every Aberdeen game so we can't let that affect us. We know the pressure of playing for Aberdeen.

“Hopefully it won't affect us too much. We'll take a lot of learning from it (the semi) but of course, we are very, very disappointed to lose in the manner we did.

“Yeah, we've played Dundee already but no game in this league is easy. Every team can take points off everyone and we've seen that so far this season. They'll be coming there, probably smelling blood so we have to be on it from minute one and get a good week's training behind us.”

Aberdeen are joint top of the table but McGrath and his team aren’t getting carried away and were brought back to earth with a bump by Celtic. McGrath admitted: “Yeah, we're not really looking at the league table or that. We're just looking at one game at a time and Dundee is next so we have to obviously not let last weekend affect us too much.

“It was a very disappointing day but we were back in on Tuesday and regrouped. We'll have a lot of meetings on where we went wrong and where