Cosgrove may miss home leg of Europa tie

DEREK McINNES admitted striker Sam Cosgrove is “touch and go” to be fit for Aberdeen’s crucial European encounter against Rijeka at Pittodrie on Thursday night.

Cosgrove missed yesterday’s 1-0 loss to St Mirren in Paisley with a hamstring tightness and will undergo a scan today to assess his chances of featuring against the Croatians.

Aberdeen need to score at least twice if they are to have any chance of progressing to the Europa League playoff round and McInnes will give Cosgrove, who has scored eight goals this season, every chance of featuring.

He said: “Sam has a tightness in his hamstring. He reported it [on Saturday] and we tried to give him every chance of playing but he just felt it was becoming more of an issue and we decided not to bring him with us and stay back and get treatment in Aberdeen.

“He’ll get scanned [on Monday] and I think he is touch and go for Thursday. Clearly, any team would miss someone in Sam’s form. I hope he’s going to be okay for Thursday, but at this stage, it’s not clear yet.”

Aberdeen laboured without him as they fell to back-to-back defeats but felt they should have been awarded a penalty when Ryan Flynn blocked Ryan Hedges cross with his arm in the second half.

“It was a penalty with last year’s rules and it’s even more of a penalty with the new rules that we were told about at the referees’ meeting two weeks ago,” added McInnes. “[Referee] Steven McLean gave me his take on it. It’s obviously different than mine and also different to what we were told at that meeting.”

His opposite number Jim Goodwin conceded his team had been fortunate. “I haven’t seen it back but I’m led to believe it was a penalty. If that’s the case then we got the rub of the green, which is great. Derek will be disappointed if that was the case but I would have backed Vaclav Hladky to save it anyway.”

The only goal of the game arrived from new signing Ilkay Durmus after 13 minutes and Goodwin praised his players for their performance.

“To a man we were excellent,” said the Irishman. “Not one player had a below-par performance today.”