Scottish Premiership leaders Hearts’ stuttering form continued as they suffered their first league defeat of the season, Topi Keskinen’s goal giving Aberdeen a surprise victory at Pittodrie.<\/p>\n
Since beating Celtic, Derek McInnes’ side have dropped points in three of their four games and the Tynecastle side’s nascent title charge seems to have lost some of its propulsion. <\/p>\n
Their nine-point lead is now down to four over Celtic, having played a game more.<\/p>\n
While it was Hearts who had the better chances, all of them were spurned and instead it was Keskinen who clinically finished into the bottom corner in the 39th minute against the run of play.<\/p>\n
Both sides were without their star men – Aberdeen missing Jesper Karlsson and Hearts without Lawrence Shankland – and it initially affected the hosts’ far more.<\/p>\n
They struggled to create, while Hearts passed up opportunities when Frankie Kent headed straight at the keeper from a few yards out, and Harry Milne hit the crossbar from close range.<\/p>\n
When Aberdeen got their only clear-cut chance, they took it. Kent struggled to clear a ball forward which allowed Keskinen the chance to lash past Alexander Schwolow.<\/p>\n
Hearts continued to have moments in the second-half. Tomas Magnusson placed a header straight at Dimitar Mitov, and Claudio Braga was denied by the goalkeeper when he looked certain to score.<\/p>\n
There was no way to goal though, meaning Hearts haven’t won in 13 visits to Pittodrie, dating back to 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scottish Premiership leaders Hearts’ stuttering form continued as they suffered their first league defeat of the season, Topi…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277728,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-279339","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}