Confident Jim Goodwin is convinced his Aberdeen side are capable of hurting wounded Rangers when the rivals square off on Saturday.
Gio van Bronckhorst will take his side to the Granite City in desperate need of a morale-boosting in the wake of a consecutive 4-0 shellackings at the hands of Celtic and Ajax. Goodwin is acutely aware the visitors could roar back to form but he is full of belief he has the squad to cause Rangers issues and leapfrog them in the table doing so.
Van Bronckhorst's side are five points behind rivals Celtic and head north to face a team who have scored an impressive 11 times in three Premiership matches on home turf. And Goodwin is backing his side to put it on the last season's Europa League finalists before their Champions League crunch with Napoli. Speaking to Sky Sports and with the game heading for a sellout, the Aberdeen boss said: "You can look at it both ways. Rangers obviously won't be in a great place at the moment after the last two heavy defeats.
"We would be hoping that would be coming up the road lacking a bit of confidence but I've been in this game long enough, especially when are you playing against one of the big teams. The reaction that they tend to get after a night like last night is normally a positive one, so we have to be expecting that.
"We really want to go and get after Rangers from the first whistle, try and get them on the back foot and gain some momentum in the game ourselves and hopefully get an early goal.
"I think we've got a team capable of hurting Rangers, I think we've shown that in recent weeks. In our first game of the season at Parkhead, we gave a very good account of ourselves, we lost the game 2-0 in the end, but we gained plenty of plaudits and pundits from the opposition praised us for the way we approached the game."
READ NEXT
