Why Barry Robson was so angry after Aberdeen's match against Celtic

Barry Robson tries to rally his Aberdeen team during the 5-0 defeat by Celtic.

Few teams can live with Celtic at present and the visitors were always going to find it hard on an afternoon when the home team were presented with the Premiership trophy and their fans were in the mood to party even before kick off. The hosts responded by scoring five times without reply but Aberdeen already had the comfort of knowing they had secured third spot in the Premiership after Wednesday’s 3-0 win over St Mirren. But he made it clear such a drop-off in performance would not be tolerated next season.

“I am angry,” said Robson. “I think it looks like it was a game too far for us today. I think we’ve really squeezed what we could out of the group and after all the emotions of Wednesday night we got more tired and tired as the game went on. Obviously, we had boys pulling up, cramp, hamstrings... Ross McCrorie had to come off. All these things. But it’s still a reminder to the players that I’ll not accept that. I’m not accepting that. For as good as they’ve been, and the praise they’ve had, next season we need to be better than that.”

Robson has already started planning for next season, when Aberdeen will return to European competition – at what stage and in what competition has yet to be confirmed. Another target is drawing nearer Celtic and Rangers. “We’re going to try our best in every department and be as good as we can possibly be,” said Robson. “We know the differences in finance between teams in the league. I’ve played for teams challenging the Old Firm and I’ve played for the Old Firm myself, so I know how difficult it is. But we need to be as good an Aberdeen team as we can be, which we’ve done, and also perform well in Europe. We need Celtic to do us a turn at Hampden next week (against Inverness Caledonian Thistle). That today wasn’t our fight. Our fight was getting to third. But we want to make it a fight (next season).”