Aberdeen fought hard to hold PAOK to a 2-2 draw on their home pitch this evening and afterwards, Barry Robson heaped praise on the character and determination shown by his players.

“I am so proud of the players tonight and throughout the group stages so far. It’s a new squad, we’ve not had much time together, but the players have performed in every game. You have to have courage and determination and fight if you want to be an Aberdeen player and they’ve shown that in all these games.

“We were 2-0 up to PAOK at home, Eintracht Frankfurt was as good a performance as you’ll see against a team like that, Häcken and Helsinki we should have had more from those games, so that’s been frustrating, that we haven’t got what we deserved. Everybody that’s watched our games knows we’ve gone toe to toe with these teams.

“We’re disappointed that we can’t progress further in the competition. We put Bojan on, we put Ester on and we tried to go for it in the last few minutes to try and find the win. People have to understand the quality we are coming up against. PAOK beat Olympiakos the other day, they have beaten Eintracht Frankfurt here. They call us ‘little Aberdeen’ but we came here and gave them a bloody nose. I want the players to get credit for that because they’ve done it against a top team while we’re in the middle of a very hard schedule.

“We love playing in Europe and everybody who knows me knows there’s no such thing as ‘the game doesn’t matter’. We want to gain more experience, get more points on the board in the group in two hard games coming up by performing well. The more you play in Europe, the better you get at it. I was lucky enough to find that out as a player and I can see the players have the taste for Europe, they’re fired up to have more of this.”

Duk started the evening off in style with his second goal in his last two appearances for the Dons and the manager was quick to praise his contribution.

“We know what we’ve got with Duk and he looked back to what we’ve seen from him last season. I believe in him more than anyone, he knows that. Form dips now and again, that happens to everybody in football, but even when he hasn’t been scoring, he’s still been contributing to the team. He’s going to be a big part of our season.”