It is Graeme Shinnie’s nature to chase every ball and seek every tackle as if his survival depended on it.
He would not be the effective operator he is if he played any other way.
But in the next fortnight of enforced inactivity, it might be worth a period of pragmatic reflection. Not all tackles are created equal.
Twice last April and already once this, Shinnie has been sent off for stoppage-time challenges in unthreatening areas of the pitch.
Add the damaging booking which he received for – admittedly with justification – advising the referee of an 89th-minute foul in the Scottish Cup quarter-final, and the Dons skipper will have missed a total of seven significant late-season matches for the want of discretion.
Shinnie would perhaps point to Paisley, and his meme-inviting primal screams, to support the theory that charging anything but full-speed to the final whistle invites calamity.
Maybe. But in cold actuarial terms, he has left his team to play without its captain in five matches at the tail end of a European chase, a cup semi-final, and a fixture in what has now become an unexpectedly tight relegation battle, in pursuit of protecting less than 15 minutes’ worth of results from non-existent peril. The risk has vastly outweighed the reward.
Doubtless it is not as straightforward as it appears to those of us who have never breenged into a 50/50 in Shinnie’s boots.
There is no aggression dial which can be manually throttled back, and if there were then the real danger would be in its overuse. To a degree, asking Shinnie not to tackle people is like asking the birds not to sing.
Sometimes, though, predators lurk, and a brief silence is necessary for self-preservation. With hawkish referees about, Shinnie must prioritise living to fight another day.