John Souttar has called on Rangers to make amends for their “unacceptable” Pittodrie performance by stunning Celtic at Hampden.
The Ibrox side were hoping for a confidence booster ahead of next Sunday’s Scottish Cup semi shootout. Instead they saw their fragile reserves of belief dented again as Barry Robson ramped-up Reds put on a stirring show to win 2-0 in front of a delirious Dons support. Souttar admits his side weren’t good enough - and accepted they’re now under pressure to respond against Ange Postecoglou’s treble-chasers.
He said: “It was a tough 90 minutes for us. We have got beat 2-0 at the end of the day and can say all we want but we left with no points and that’s unacceptable. We’ll need to look back and see what went wrong. Obviously the first goal they scored was a freak goal but with the second one I think we can do better. It just can’t happen, we can’t get beat 2-0. We need to make it better. We now have got to lift ourselves massively. It’s a big game on Sunday, a massive game, so we need to pick ourselves up and not feel sorry for ourselves. We need to get ready for Sunday and get through to the final.”
Aberdeen got a huge stroke of luck when on-loan Celtic defender Liam Scales’ mishit cross soared over Allan McGregor for the Dons opener. But it came after a woefully under-hit James Tavernier pass to Alfredo Morelos and the mistakes continued for the hosts’ second as Borna Barisic failed to track Bojan Miovski’s run before he nodded a firm header past the Gers No.1.
“It just makes it extremely difficult when you lose goals like we did at Pittodrie,” admitted Souttar. "We saw it at the start of the season but managed to come back late on. That’s something you don’t want to have to do as a defender, you want to keep clean sheets. So to concede goals like we did is extremely frustrating.”
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