Assistant manager Lee Sharp spoke to the press after the Dons’ defeat at Tannadice today in the cinch Premiership.

“We’re all extremely disappointed with the result and with the performance, myself, the manager, the staff and players. I thought it was a very cagey game until they scored and in fact, we’d had the best chance of the game when Bojan missed his opportunity early on. These things happen, he’s scored a lot of goals for us this season, they won’t all go in.

“But the two goals that they scored before half-time, defensively we were poor and that’s disappointing. But then second half, we made a few substitutions, we changed the shape slightly and I thought for maybe 20 minutes, we were getting ourselves back in the game and in with a chance. We looked a threat, we had a bit of creativity and a bit of a spark about us. But then their third goal pretty much sealed the game for them.

“As I said, the first two goals were poor from our point of view. We’ll sit down and analyse them and work on that to see where we can improve and tighten things up. We’ll look ahead from there to Hearts and the way we want to play that game next Sunday.

“I wouldn’t say that the manager being in the stand has had any real impact on the game, I wouldn’t use that as an excuse. All our work is done Monday to Friday, the players knew their jobs and responsibilities coming into the game, and then we just run through the game plan again before the game. Obviously Jim is disappointed that he can’t be on the touchline to get his messages across, but he was on the phone throughout the game and we were putting that across to the players.

“The players are very disappointed, they were sitting in the dressing room pretty dejected after the game, especially because we’d had so many fans come down the road and we didn’t give them what they deserved out of the day. The fans have really backed the players this season and they love that, so when you get beaten like this, you feel like you’ve let them down and that’s not a nice feeling.”