Nick Devlin identifies what Aberdeen must do to beat Celtic this weekend after Parkhead lesson

Celtic will take on Aberdeen in the semi finals of the Scottish League Cup at Hampden Park at the weekend - and Aberdeen defender Nicky Devlin has urged his teammates to ‘improve’ ahead of the outing.

When the two teams last met, they played out a 2-2 draw at Celtic Park. Devlin was disappointed with the result, noting how ‘poor’ the Dons were in the first half.

He is not underestimating the gravity of the task ahead of Aberdeen - Devlin says that they must put in a ‘90 minute’ or ‘120 minute’ performance against the Celtic and will need to be switched on for the entirety of the encounter.

Prior to their game at the weekend, Devlin said in a press conference: “We’ll go to Hampden and try and get a result again. We obviously showed in the last week against Celtic that we can score against them. We have to bring that second half performance from the very start.

“We probably let them get too much of a foothold in the game in the first half. They scored a couple of goals. So we know we need to keep it a wee bit tighter at the back.

“So if we can manage to put a full 90 minutes together... which, to be honest, I think if we want to go through on Saturday, we probably will have to put in a 90 minute performance, or 120. I don’t think we can probably be as poor in the first half as we were at Parkhead. There’s still loads the manager wants us to improve on.

“The gaffer wants me to find myself in the box more. I’ve scored four now but it should be seven or eight. To be fair, I have missed chances. It’s something the coaching staff have worked on with me, to make sure I find myself in areas where I can score. Luckily enough on Wednesday the ball fell to me a couple of times.”

So far this season, Devlin has been in inspired form for the Dons - he has played in 16 games across all competitions in 2024/25, scoring four goals along the way [via Transfermarkt].

On their win over Rangers in midweek, Devlin said: “In a lot of the games we’ve been good in spells. Even [against Rangers] we were really good in the first half and then for the second half we weren’t so good.

“You can see the crowd and the atmosphere. It was obviously a big game, but yeah, it was nice to win in the end. We probably have to react better to the penalty miss. These things happen. Then in the second half, I thought Rangers did really well and made it difficult for us. I don’t want to say we were hanging on but we were penned in at times for large spells and couldn’t get up the pitch.

“With the character of the team, we found our way in. I spoke at a fans’ event a few weeks ago about the best atmosphere here and I think the support at home is incredible.”