Our players felt losing 1-0 to Old Firm wasn’t the worst. That mentality had to change...

FROM the horrifying discovery that his team didn’t believe they could win a game against an Old Firm opponent, Derek McInnes ensured that never again would Aberdeen be sent out in his name lumbered by such a glaring limitation.

The weeding out of the weaknesses and planting the seeds of trust began the moment his players trooped into the dressing room after Virgil van Dijk’s last-minute goal dealt the Dons a 2-1 defeat on November 9, 2014.

‘I had to and wanted to make sure that any time we played against them that we had 11 players on the pitch at any given time who expected to win,’ said McInnes.

The fact that 10 of the 14 participants from that afternoon remain at the club, including Barry Robson in a coaching role, is an endorsement of the Aberdeen manager’s work within the camp since he identified the fault.

David Goodwillie, Scott Brown, Willo Flood and Jeffrey Monakana moved on for a variety of reasons but the rest of the group remains in place and contributed to two deserved wins and a share of the points available from the head-toheads with Celtic last season.

For the return of the hate-filled fixture against Rangers, he now truly knows all his players possess the skills to handle the occasion. On account of the fixes made to the mindset at Pittodrie, it is one each Aberdeen player anticipates can end in victory. Home fans may mock that it is a different Rangers they meet today.

Instead, McInnes knows that this is a most dissimilar Aberdeen to the one the Glasgow giants last faced in January 2012.

McInnes explained: ‘Don’t forget, a lot of these players have been scarred from playing against Rangers and Celtic. They’ve taken sore ones, been on the end of heavy scorelines. When you play Rangers or Celtic — and it’s been Celtic in our case here — it was always synonymous with a bad result, or not feeling very good about themselves at the end of it.

‘There were times when, maybe in my first year, there were still too many in the dressing room who felt losing 1-0 to Celtic wasn’t the worst result. Then on the day van Dijk scored, I had a feeling there were a couple in the team, too many players on the pitch, who still thought 1-1 was a good day’s work. That it was OK. And I thought Celtic had more players on the pitch who thought 1-1 was a disaster.

‘So we had to try and change that. Some aren’t here now. And some have gained confidence from winning against Celtic and being part of a team that wins more regularly. I made reference to the players at the time that, when you’ve got opportunities to beat the Old Firm, you’ve got to try and take them.

‘Winning games against them has helped. There’s a confidence that we can take them on and a maturity about our own work. They are still huge favourites — both teams are when they play us — but I think we still fancy our chances to take them on over 90 minutes.

‘We’ve grown as a team, the European experience, the expectation to commit to a real title fight, the winning runs and the demands of playing big games. The team has a maturity and gained a lot of experience.

‘I can sit here and be confident that we can go and compete because I’ve every confidence in the players.

‘There are certain games that can give you that feelgood factor and a confidence more than others. There’s no doubt a win against the Old Firm does that. We’ve felt it in the past when beating Celtic, it gave the club a right bounce going into the rest of the campaign.’

The SFA should be delighted to note that McInnes is ignorant of betting matters because Rangers are certainly not regarded as huge favourites today. What a change for Mark Reynolds, one of the players bearing more of the scars to which McInnes refers than most.

Since he sat for the entire game on the Motherwell bench in January 2006 and watched a Peter Lovenkrands goal beat his team, the defender has gone on to feature in 16 matches against Rangers without once sampling the shock of victory.

This is new territory for Reynolds and he is convinced that can be attributed more to the status and strength of Aberdeen than question marks over a Rangers group struggling to live up to their billing on return to the top flight. Reynolds said: ‘I’d always been in a changing room where the Rangers team was a lot stronger and you faced them as the underdog. At Motherwell, you went into it thinking: “I hope we can do well, I hope we can hold our own”.

‘For this fixture, we are a very strong Aberdeen team and a different changing room. In this changing room, we feel as if even against Celtic who are champions, we can go and, on our day if we play well, then we can get a result.

‘It’s the same going into this game on Sunday. We know what we have got in the dressing room and if that turns up and plays well — and we do what we want to do — then we’ve more than enough to win the game.’

This is the first time Reynolds will experience the heat of a Rangers visit to Pittodrie, his only outing in Aberdeen colours coming in a 1-1 draw at Ibrox when a Maurice Edu equaliser cancelled out Kari Arnason’s opener in 2012.

Of the other 15 with Motherwell, Kenny Miller proved himself a nuisance to Reynolds on several occasions. In his third spell at Rangers, Miller lines up against Reynolds posing a threat that the defender believes he is better equipped to cope with.

‘When Kenny Miller was in his prime, I was still a young boy and it was kind of man against boy sometimes,’ admits Reynolds.

‘That was the experience I had against him. I’m a grown man now with a lot more experience, played 300-odd games. It’s going to be good to play against him again, the two of us are more evenly matched.

‘Kenny was an international striker who’s having a great career. He’s always been a top striker. I’d still rate him as one of the best in Scotland, so he’s a difficult opponent and certainly someone you need to keep quiet. Hopefully I can.’

With Miller one of the few familiar to Reynolds in Rangers blue, the 29-year-old struggles to get a handle on where Mark Warburton’s side might finish in the table this season. They were rated as far likelier title contenders than Aberdeen before a ball was kicked yet begin the day locked on nine points and adrift of the champions.

Reynolds, the subject of a rejected £750,000 Rangers bid to Motherwell in 2008 when Walter Smith was Ibrox boss, said: ‘Who knows how they’re going to do over the season? They are a relatively new team getting put together in terms of the players they’ve recruited. It takes a time for that to gel. We have the advantage that most of us have been here a good few seasons and we know each other’s game.

‘Three points last Sunday kind of settled nerves because people were starting to worry and saying it wasn’t as good a start. Not like last season when we won eight on the spin. For our aspirations for the season we need to start winning more games than not, need to start going on runs like we did last season.

‘This is a big game for us to get three points and get on that kind of run. The fans are putting a lot on this. I’m sure with a full house it’ll be a great atmosphere. The main thing for us is to feed off all that. You always want to answer up to the crowd, to know you’re in it with them.’

I’d to make sure we had 11 players on pitch who expected to win