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Saturday 30th  March 2024:  kick-off 3pm

Scottish Premiership - Aberdeen v Ross County

🔴⚪️ Stand Free! ⚪🔴

DollyLongstaffe

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  1. I think this is a high risk strategy if Cormack goes for it, but I would suspect he's a more of a risk taker than Milne. If we sign 3 or 4 players for say £1M and can sell two of them on for £3-4M a couple of years down the line we have a model that gives us a better standard of player and also some profits. But injuries, loss of form, failure to make the progress expected etc could all see the idea blow up in our faces. It's exciting but I'll hold my breath and see how it works out before I start cheering. It could transform the club for the better, but it could also damage us badly if it doesn't work. In its favour, the alternative is managed decline. There's an, IMO, crazy consensus among a lot of Aberdeen fans that the ceiling we keep hitting is down to the manager. It's not: it's down to the fact that the wages we are paying only allow us to bring in risky players that are more likely to fail than succeed, even at SPL level. Every SPL club outside the ugly sisters has the same problem, which is why Hibs and Hearts keep sacking their managers and don't get any better. This at least offers a different route. Let's pray it works.
  2. A lot of people getting very excited about this, but in my opinion it won't make a significant difference on the footballing side. Like every Aberdeen fan who can remember an era when we were able to be a much more ambitious club I'm bummed out by what we've turned into. But at least 90% of the problem, and probably much more than that, is changes in the financial structure of the game that have relentlessly pushed us down the relative pecking order. No chairman could have done much to prevent it. I'm not an apologist for Milne. I will never forgive him for the 11-1 voting decision, the only chance we've had in modern times to do something to at least make the domestic game more of a level playing field. His record of managerial appointments has been poor: personally I'm happy with McInnes, who I think makes a much better fist of trying to make bricks without straw than his critics realise, but we've had an awful lot of dross prior to that. But he has put significant amounts of his own money into the club (less than I thought he should have, but I don't remember the Donald's spending their own money on the club so let's give him some credit). And the club has been stable during a period when probably a majority of our rivals have not been. But unless the new people are going to pour in money they won't make a difference. Fans imagining that with a more forward thinking chairman we can make a real challenge are deluding themselves. Cormack has already contributed a decent amount, but in terms of closing the gap with the gruesome twosome it's chickenfeed. Fans and even the media talk about "investment" but no-one can "invest" to close that gap, because we just don't have the fan base. If we spent even a quarter of what Celtic spend we'd have no chance of generating the income we need to cover our costs. I think in our peak year under Fergie our gates topped 18,000, but generally we didn't draw much bigger crowds than we do now. And we won't replicate the Fergie years on a quarter of Celtic's budget. Realistically what we'd need to challenge is a mega rich owner willing to donate and write off colossal sums, tens of millions. And that's a pipe dream. Where it does potentially make a difference is the ground issue. I wonder if the harder they've looked at funding Kingsford the less viable it looks. After pretty much devoting most of his energies to making Kingsford happen I think it would be very difficult for Milne to say "I've changed my mind, it won't work". Maybe easier to bow out gracefully and let somebody else say they see things differently. I'd be very pleased if Cormack can find a way of making Pittodrie viable.
  3. I see The Times has inflated a non-story about Rangers allegedly being killed off by the taxman's incompetence today and the Scottish mainstream media have duly followed suit. The bill as calculated was too high and super Ally and others have chipped in with their views that had the real bill been known the club could have coped with it. Reasons why this is not a real story are many, but the first one that occurred to me is that it completely ignores how things happen in the real world. The taxman doesn't determine how much tax you pay, the law does. Where a tax payer is being uncooperative, failing to file returns, not replying to correspondence etc it isn't unusual for the taxman to issue a too high assessment. This isn't an attempt to collect that amount of tax, it's an attempt to get the taxpayer to furnish the information to prove that the assessment is too high. If Joe Bloggs gets an assessment that's too high, he might panic and think he might have to pay that amount. But a significant company with professional tax advisers? Not a chance. This happens all the time. They would appeal the assessment and counter with a justification for what they think the real bill should be. When advising a client on a scheme that contains some element of risk, tax advisers will certainly inform their client what the "worst case" scenario is - the amount that will become due if the scheme doesn't work. This will be based on the most pessimistic assumptions of how the law might work. This is what Rangers would have considered the maximum they needed to pay. The amount on the HMRC assessment would have been an irrelevance. It's absolutely disgraceful that the media are reporting this as though the taxman somehow killed Rangers off.
  4. Every cloud has a silver lining, and at least this might reduce the number of aggravating "why do we play Shinnie out of position, he's really a left back" posts on Dons forums. I'm sure given a run at left back he could re-establish himself as a decent one, but he's one of the best midfielders in the league and it's glaringly obvious that he's way more valuable there for us than he would be at left back.
  5. McLean's form before his transfer was good enough to get him in the Scotland squad and a club willing to pay a fee and offer him a weekly wage more than 3 times what we could afford to pay. It can't have been all that bad.
  6. Wonderful player though he became, as a teenager he was expected to be even better. Even the Weegia had him marked down as a future long-term Scotland captain by the time he was 16, when he was considered one of the few best in the world for his age. He was expected to develop into a 100 caps player. Of course plenty of youngsters don't quite fulfil that early promise but Cooper himself thought he was played too often when he was too young, and Fergie later admitted that he regretted pushing some of the Aberdeen kids too hard. You could argue that the likes of Black and Hewitt also failed to achieve the glittering careers their talent as youngsters promised. Maybe he was always destined to develop a percentage point or two less well than his peer group. It's fine margins at that level. But maybe being pushed physically before his body was ready deprived him of an entirely different level of success. Maybe Beckenbauer wasn't speaking shite. We'll always wonder.
  7. I'd have been broadly sympathetic to this argument last week. It would arguably be disrespectful/unprofessional to explicitly turn down an offer you haven't received. And I think, however much those of us who really detest Sevco may dislike it, he's entitled to wait and see what any offer looks like. He SHOULD be entitled to say "I'm not going to comment on speculation" and leave it at that. But it's now so clear that the speculation is damaging the club that pays his wages that the game has changed. Sometimes circumstances force you to pick an option that's not the one you want, but the lesser of two evils. He can let the speculation continue, damaging the club, or he can shut it down: I have no doubt a form of words could be found that made it clear he wouldn't be moving. It's unfair that he's forced into this position, but he's in it, and that means his choice it between allowing damage to the club to continue, or keeping his options open. If he chooses the latter and doesn't end up at Mordor for any reason his relationship with the club and fans here could be very badly damaged.
  8. According to some papers this morning (Scotsman or Herald, forget which) his contract specifically provided for compensation if he takes a club job but no compensation if he takes a job as manager of an international side. Seems a funny clause but what they are saying. So he might look more attractive to Scotland than Sevco.
  9. Delighted with the win. I wasn't at the game so can't say too much about the performance, but I'd hope that setting up with O'Connor sitting in front of the back four is a horses for courses option and not how we're going to be set up regularly in future. Too reminiscent of Calderwood's teams where our whole side was set up to protect our weak defence and we hoped to nick something at the other end. It was arguably moderately effective, but Christ it was terrible to watch.
  10. Really important result for us after Thursday. Maybe we needed the reminder that you have to earn the right to play bonny fitba by matching the opposition for work-rate and desire first. Anyway brilliant result and well chuffed.
  11. Hopefully this is a wake up call. We don't want a wild over-reaction to one bad result, but as others have said this feels like something that was coming. Better results than we deserved have been papering over the cracks in our performances. GMS, Stewart, May and Maynard all looked decent signings based on historic form, but every singe one of them also arrived here on the back of recent failures and/or injury issues. Confidence needed to be nurtured. You don't do that by chopping and changing the side every time out, picking players one week and dropping them the next for no obvious reason, experimenting with different formations. Deek has previous on this: every spell of good form under him has coincided with a settled line-up and game plan, every period of tinkering has coincided with a grim run of results. Get the message, Deek, ffs. The number of players showing poor form after this spell of tinkering is truly shocking. None of the new guys has really hit the ground running, with May as the half exception. Logan, Considine, Reynolds, McLean, Rooney and Shinnie have all been very poor by their own standards. I'm a McInnes fan, but I've been saying for years that it doesn't look like he knows how to manage a big squad. He's going to have to decide his best team and start playing them, and if that means writing off a couple of good-on-paper guys who are earning decent money then I think we will have to take that on the chin and remember a lesson learned the hard way.
  12. I always feel it's unlucky if you get drawn to play a team just after a change of manager. Managerial changes are very often followed by a significant, often short term, lift in performance and results. Hearts away is rarely an easy fixture and in the circs I think a draw is not a bad result. Like others though, I'm a bit worried by what I see in terms of a manager who doesn't seem to know what he wants from his players or how he wants to set up his team. McInnes seems to do best with a team that practically picks itself. Give him a load of options and he never seems to know whether to stick or twist. On paper we've more options this season than ever but none of the new guys really seem to have hit the ground running. Somebody mentioned Michael Stewart as a gifted analyst and I'm inclined to agree. What bothers me is that he's criticised our persistent tactical naivety a few times now and each time he's struck me as being right. I know it's an easier gig being smart into a microphone than it is putting yourself on the line as a manager: Deek can point to putting a successful a team on the park as opposed to just talking a good game. But it's concerning: if Stewart can see what we're doing wrong, so will some other managers. We can't complain about top of the league after 5 games, but the feelgood I'd expect from that isn't quite there.
  13. Wee look over at some Hun forums and now freshly showered and disinfected. It looks like on the whole they rated this boy quite highly, with a minority of dissenting voices. There seemend a pretty strong desire to take him back at the end of his loan contract and an assumption he might not be gettable. Worry might be that he doesn't have the physique to be a commanding centre-half, or the experience to be a leader at the back. Failure at Rotherham isn't encouraging either, but he wouldn't be the first to be decent at SPL level after struggling in England. Jury's out 'til we see him, but cautious optimism seems warranted.
  14. Best of luck to Stockley. Thought he was a good, honest pro who worked hard for the jersey when he got the chance. Also suspect there's a better player in there than the one we saw, but he didn't manage to show enough to deserve a regular place and it suits everybody for him to move on - win win.
  15. Anyone else suspect their short-list of no-hopers (and psycho Davies) was deliberately engineered and floated for 3-4 weeks so the announcement of Avril would look like a not-so-bad option? If Levein had been announced right after Cathro went they'd have been rioting and burning their season tickets. Now they're thinking at least it's not Hartley or Pressley or the guy that got gubbed by Motherwell on Saturday.
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