Motherwell boss Stuart Kettlewell says Aberdeen will be shown every respect – but his side go into the Premiership clash on real form.
Showing Aberdeen respect will not go down well with some of our fans, but i thing that’s the way to go at the moment
Motherwell’s last game was a famous 2-1 win over Rangers at Ibrox – their first league victory there in 27 years – while the Dons progressed to the Scottish Cup semi-finals, but then lost to Dundee in the Premiership.
After winning back-to-back games and defeating Livingston 3-1, Motherwell is now four points behind sixth-placed Dundee in the table. Meanwhile, the Dons are only three points ahead of Ross County in the play-off spot.
According to Kettlewell, Motherwell’s performance has them fired up and they enter the Fir Park match with confidence.
“I believe that our last four games have been against Livingston and the top three,” he stated. We’ve used a fairly similar approach to each of those four games.
“I must state unequivocally that we have players who are performing exceptionally well and playing at a high level.
“I’ll bring up Liam Kelly, who has had mixed reviews throughout the season, but I believe he has made the most saves of any goalie in the league in the last four games.
“For me, that’s a really impressive achievement during that span of play. Blair Spittal has played the most crucial passes in the last four games, and we’ve played the top three in between.
“With them and plenty others, we want to try and keep that form going.
You get a lot of flak when you’re having a rough patch, but we consider our recent performance levels to be good, and even on the occasions when we felt we performed fairly well, we have suffered one or two losses.
However, we would argue that we would have preferred to play a game over the weekend after two wins.
However, we’ve made an effort to maintain as much momentum as we can in the training sessions and to keep improving at the kind of play we want to play.
“For the past 10, 11, or however many days it has been, all we have really been doing is trying to keep getting better.
“We’ve utilised it as a small window of time to see if we can push those levels up for guys who have returned from injuries and some guys who didn’t get much playing time.
It hasn’t been a holiday for us in the slightest because our goal is to have the boys peak towards the end of the season.
“It needs to be a game we eagerly anticipate, played at home in front of our own supporters, in respectable form, and there’s still a lot of the season still to go.
“You’re not just there to make up the numbers; we’re trying to take as much as we can from how they’re playing and what they’re trying to do,” I said after watching them play Dundee.
“We must attempt to learn as much as we can from Peter Leven’s arrival and temporary takeover of his second game, while also acting and playing as best we can.”
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