Aberdeen’s Mats Knoester grateful for recovery time ahead of Dundee United clash

Mats Knoester is looking forward to a break from midweek football before Aberdeen take on Dundee United at Pittodrie next Saturday.

Jimmy Thelin’s squad have had to cope with challenging Conference League and William Hill Premiership fixtures in between weekend games in recent weeks.

The Granite City men lost 3-0 to Sparta Prague last Thursday to finish second bottom of the 36-team Conference League table with just two points and on Sunday went down 3-1 at Celtic to lie sixth in the standings, one point behind Hibernian

Midfielder Benjamin Nygren opened the scoring in the 39th minute before 20-year-old Dons defender Dylan Lobban was shown a straight red card just before the break for fouling Hoops striker Daizen Maeda.

Aberdeen substitute Kenan Bilalovic equalised in the 74th minute, but late goals from Kieran Tierney and James Forrest sunk the Dons, who now have some time to prepare for the visit of United.

Knoester, the 27-year-old Dutch centre-back signed from Hungarian club Ferencvaros in February, said: “I think that’s definitely a good timing to get some more days for recovery.

“There’s been players that have played a lot.

“If I speak for myself, I can feel it as well. So it’s good to get a few more days.

“I think if you look all over Europe, apart from the really big teams with big budgets, it’s always difficult to manage Europe and the league.

“You can see that in the results, most of the times the teams are struggling on the Sunday, if they have to play on a Thursday.

“But I think that’s what we’ve shown well in the last weeks that on a Sunday, we still show up.

“So I think that’s definitely a positive thing.

“After surviving Celtic’s chances at the beginning of the second half, we started to believe more and more about getting a result, so a tough one to take to give it away at the end.”