Jimmy Thelin has stressed Aberdeen need to be consistent with their identity, otherwise he won’t be able to build anything at the club.
The Dons failed to win their last two league games as St Mirren handed them a shock first loss of the Premiership season before letting two leads slip away against Hibs on Tuesday.
Ahead of facing Hearts at the weekend, Thelin wants his Aberdeen players to show more stability as they enter into a very busy festive period of games.
The Swede wants Aberdeen to stick to his brand of football as much as possible and that means being brave in how they attack and defend.
Thelin’s Aberdeen identity warning
He told the press on Friday: “We’re still going, our performance is like this, so we need to try to be more stable.
“It’s going to be like that because we know if we don’t get the identity as clear as we want and just try to survive game by game, we’ll never build anything. It’s going to be difficult in the long term to achieve something year by year.
“We have to be brave and sometimes there are going to be setbacks, but we need to push and try to grow in some areas.
“How we build up the game, how we attack the opponent, how we defend and try to stay in this moment a bit longer.
“Even if sometimes it’s really compact with games, as it’s an intense period of the season in this period it’s so important to have a clear identity, really, really clear.
“Sometimes maybe the mental capacity, the workload can be lower but it’s natural because it’s so compact with games. Then you have to be stable in this period to achieve something in the long term.
“Still we have some work to do there, and that’s normal because it’s still the first season together, and we have to keep moving.”
Thelin relishing Hearts ‘challenge’
It’s well-documented that Aberdeen have endured a torrid run of form at Tynecastle over recent years. In fact, they haven’t won a single game there since May 2017 when Derek McInnes was manager.
Ending that winless streak is what Thelin is focusing on. He said: “Yeah, I like the challenge and what’s happened in the past has happened in the past.
“We need to focus right now, take the challenge and try to make a really strong performance and try to fight for the points.”