Aberdeen take on the Pars tonight in what is said to be an experiment to attract crowds to football. Not sure that it will be attractive for away fans to travel to Pittodrie on a Friday but there you go. The Dons have not had the best of starts to the season and are second bottom of the league. This does not make them a bad side according to midfielder Chris Clark. He feels there is enough quality in the Dons squad to recover and move away from the wrong end of the table. Earlier this week, former manager Jimmy Calderwood, who was sacked in May 2009, questioned whether the players brought to Pittodrie in recent seasons are as good as the experienced players who have left. Clark returned to the club this summer after three and a half seasons at Plymouth and is confident his team-mates are good enough to get Aberdeen out of trouble.
Clark said: "A lot has changed. The management has changed, almost the entire squad has changed, maybe only four or five players have stayed. We have got a very young squad as well. I think, especially with the young players, there is a lot of quality all the way through. It's not fair to compare players past and present. You can go back to 1983 if you want to. We know we have got good players, the management know we have got a good squad. We just need to put a good run together and get ourselves back up the table."
Two of under-pressure Craig Brown's summer signings, Youl Mawene and Kari Arnason, have been particularly critical of the team's output in recent weeks but Clark believes such frustration can be eradicated by some good results. He said: "I think the confidence is there. It's just frustration really - over the past few weeks people have been expressing it in different ways and obviously the results haven't been there for us. There have been positive signs in our performances, I think that's why the frustration has been building up. We have got a lot of belief we can do a lot better than we have. We can't go panicking, we can't worry about things too much. Obviously everyone has their thoughts about their game and everyone probably has their own thoughts about what's going wrong. But everyone has to pull together - it's times like this you really have to dig deep and show a great work ethic."
With so much to do with football affected by confidence - even this early in the season - a win would be welcome with games against Dundee United, Celtic and Rangers to follow after the international break. Clark said: "It's obviously a big one for everyone at the club, going into a two-week break, so it's important we come away with a good result. I don't think the performance is the biggest aspect, just getting the three points is important."