Craig Brown dedicated his side's Friday night special win over Dunfermline to the Aberdeen fans. 8,000 fans turned out for the experimental game which the Dons won 4-0. That is double the number which watched the Dons get binned out of the League Cup to Second Division part-timers East Fife in their last home fixture. Scott Vernon grabbed a hat-trick and Fraser Fyvie was also on the scoresheet as the Dons ran out comfortable winners.
Brown said: "To come out and find over 8,000 fans chanting before we started and supporting the team positively was wonderful. I can't thank them enough. I hear people dedicating wins to people and you can do no more than dedicate that win to the fans as the Aberdeen support, in my experience, is quite incredible. How many other clubs with our league position as well as going through some of the results we have had would have got the support that we got?"
The Aberdeen manager feels the Dons merited more points than they got from their opening 10 fixtures. He added: "We have performed well in a good number of games and not got the results we deserved. I have been saying that and people have been saying that I have not been telling the truth. I think what I have been saying has been vindicated by what happened against Dunfermline. There has never been any despondency about this football club. The dressing room has always been bright and there is a good camaraderie in there."
Dunfermline boss Jim McIntyre is desperate for his players to rediscover the form that saw them go unbeaten in their opening four SPL games. He went: "The bottom line is we just never performed against Aberdeen. We need to get back to the standard we set in the early part of the season but to do that we need to do the dirty side of the game better. We are not doing that at the minute. We are giving away far too many opportunities and it's killing us. The players have shown that they can compete at this level but they need to get back to that standard quickly. If you keep losing the amount of goals we are losing it can drain the confidence."