Motherwell boss Jens Berthel Askou wants to lift spirit after defeat to St Mirren at Hampden

Motherwell manager Jens Berthel Askou steered away from a group video analysis of their defeat by St Mirren as he focused on helping his players shaking off their Hampden heartache.

Askou had only experienced two defeats in Scotland, each by one goal, before suffering a 4-1 loss to St Mirren in the Premier Sports Cup semi-finals.

And he is determined to ensure Well bounce back quickly from the knockout blow when they take on Aberdeen in the William Hill Premiership on Sunday.

The Dane said: “Traditionally there’s a lot of expectations that, when you don’t perform how you’re expected to or how you want to, there’s a perception that you have to be filled with shame, anger, disappointment, frustration.

“And some people just cling on to these emotions, some have more difficulty in letting these emotions go than others.

“I thought it was important on Monday to tell them that it’s okay to spend the day getting it out of the system.

“And then there will always be some players and hopefully staff members who are better at trying to make room for more constructive emotions going forward.

“They have to lead the way and allow room for a joke and a smile, praise to a team-mate who does something good in training, to try and lift the mood and the spirit because you have to move on.

“If you carry these these emotions with you for too long then there’s a risk it affects the quality and the productiveness of the next couple of days and we don’t have time to waste in training sessions.

“I didn’t show any clips from the game – we used that more individually in terms of how can we develop and then we used it as a lead-in to training the next couple of days.

“It’s not like we haven’t dealt with the game and the experience we had, but we did it in a little different way. We didn’t rip into something that we were trying to heal.”

Motherwell will still be without Stephen O’Donnell at Pittodrie while Aston Oxborough has been ruled out until mid-January with a hand fracture.