kelt

I saw the second half , only really saw him involved in two important incidents. First time was to fuck up his tackle on a Cork forward, letting both player and ball past him and ending up on his arse. Second time he mistimed his jump when the ball was crossed into the box (from a corner or free kick.. set piece anyway) and the ball dropped to the Cork player who then scored. Having said that, Sunderland were/are shite so his two balls ups probably went unnoticed.

In Volgograd's 'airport' bogs there was some kind of dead animal.... might have been a small dog or some kind of beaver. I didnae get close enough to check.

It would be impossible to say, since Aberdeen (in recent years) has had no clue as to how to develop youngsters. He could be tremendous, but given his poor choice of club to join during his early career (Aberdeen), there's no way of knowing.

Hahahahahaha. All they've done is print the exact same story as last year, only they've stuck the word 'Egypt' in there inna :-) So it's really a question of whether the EE's senior sports correspondent is lazier than he is stupid, or more stupid than he is lazy.

I dunno if there'd be a fee or what the wages would be like, but I've been impressed by the Real Salt Lake goalie, Nick Rimando. Actually just checked and he's got 3 caps for the US team, so scratch that. Maybe, since we've only got one first team keeper, and no-one seems to be real impressed with or confident in him, we should be taking in keepers on trial. And lots of them. How difficult would that be?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/d/dunfermline_athletic/3193007.stm

Good to know who we'll be playing now, even if I've never heard of any of the team except for the Portuguese side. And here is the official tournament website - http://www.itthad.com/toureng.php Would it not have been cheaper and more challenging to just play Huntly half a dozen times instead?

The standard of fitba in the US isnae bad, but the players there have one fairly big advantage over Scottish players. They're athletes who take the sport seriously. So while the likes of your semi-pro Aberdeens and Dundee Uniteds are starting to flag in the second half, your typical MLS side will keep the pace up. Speaking of MLS, I was watching some MLS game last week, and there's a black kid, 20 years old, fast as a fuckin' rocket and nae feart to take folk on and put in a cross. Aberdeen could do a lot worse than have him running up and doon the wing for 90 minutes. The hell's his name again? It's got an O in it.

Don't come home too soon, warns Jess NEIL FORSYTH A SCOTTISH international midfielder, taken to the English Premiership from his hometown club, before returning north prematurely in a cut-price deal. Barry Ferguson’s likely installation as Rangers’ returning prodigal may have sparked extended debate but it is a concept that former Aberdeen stalwart Eoin Jess knows well, having made a similar switch in 1997, less than two years after Ron Atkinson took him to Coventry City for £2million. "Yeah, there are similarities," admits Jess, currently nursing a thigh injury that has kept him out of the Nottingham Forest team since November. "I don’t know the situation but Blackburn have struggled this year and maybe Barry’s not used to that. He’s used to winning trophies and so on so it must be more difficult for him than it was for me to adapt. Only Barry can answer that, but Rangers are a massive club and you can understand why he’d miss it. "With me, it was different. The time I had at Coventry was fantastic. We were battling relegation but that meant it was a cup final every week at these fantastic places, Old Trafford, Anfield and so on. Then Ron went and Gordon [strachan] stepped up from assistant. He was honest with me and said he was happy to keep me but he couldn’t guarantee that I’d play. I think the club had also decided to sell me and I really needed to play every week." The result was Aberdeen coughing up £700,000 of the windfall they had received 17 months earlier to take Jess back to Pittodrie. The news was greeted with delight by Aberdeen fans, for whom Jess had been a treasured asset since a hefty contribution to the 1989 League Cup triumph over Rangers at the age of 18. However, Jess reveals that if there had been some improved office administration down Govan way, he could have been on the losing side in that match. "I signed for Rangers at 13 and was with them until I left school, training with John Spencer and guys like that. But they actually misplaced my forms, they sort of went missing and Rangers didn’t seem to know I existed. So I signed for Aberdeen and it was definitely the right decision, by the time that Spenny got a chance at Rangers I’d played umpteen games for Aberdeen." Jess hit the ground running at Pittodrie, adding a youthful vigour to a side that retained several members of the club’s golden age under Sir Alex Ferguson. "I was lucky to come into a team that was Alex McLeish, Willie Miller, Jim Bett, Charlie Nicholas, Hans Gillhaus and so on," he recalls. "They were great players and it was a fantastic learning curve. We were winning cups as well, which helped me progress as a player." News of Jess’s emergence spread and he was still in club digs when he received the offer of international recognition. Surprisingly, the call came not from then Scotland manager Andy Roxburgh but from Northern Ireland’s Billy Bingham. "Billy phoned me at the digs, he’d found out that my dad is from Northern Ireland," says Jess. "I went away and spoke to dad and [Aberdeen manager] Alex Smith, but it wasn’t a hard decision, it was always going to be Scotland. I know that Alex contacted Andy Roxburgh and that’s maybe why I got called up quite early." Jess, who would gain 18 caps, also had a significant role in one of the most heartbreaking days in Aberdeen’s history, when Smith took his team to Ibrox on the final day of the 1990-91 season needing just a point to win the league. Mark Hateley’s physical intimidation of rookie Aberdeen goalkeeper Michael Watt is a common talking point of Rangers’ victory but he was not the only Englishman bent on victory through fair means or foul. "Yeah, I got a nice challenge from Mr Hurlock," laughs Jess. "I used to have a few set-tos with Terry over those seasons and he certainly made sure there. I don’t know if it was a deliberate ploy, these things happen, but I had to go off at half-time which was devastating to be honest. It was such a big day for the team and the city but it shouldn’t be forgotten that we had been ten points behind them, we did ever so well to be top when we kicked off." That defeat was to prove the start of a decline for Aberdeen that has only this season showed any genuine sign of being abated. By 1996, after eight-and-a-half years of service, Jess had decided to move on but his loyalty to the club meant that he passed on the chance to become the first Scot to play in Italy since Joe Jordan. "My contract was up in the summer and I could have left on a Bosman, but I felt that Aberdeen deserved to get a fee," he says. "Sampdoria had made contact and they were keen on a Bosman. Certainly, that kind of thing would have been much better for me financially, but I felt morally bound to getting the club money so I told them in January my decision and a month later I went to Coventry." It was the end of a period of sterling service from Jess (his current six week lay-off is the longest injury spell of his career) and his departure was greeted with reluctant acceptance by appreciative Aberdeen fans. However, the manner of his leaving the second time around in 2001 was to prove very different. Jess had returned from Coventry to find the club’s fall from grace continuing, and his frustrations soon provoked an ill-advised media battle with the board. "It was a difficult few years for the team, the fans, everyone," says Jess. "We’d gone from being right up there to just struggling along and it was very hard for to take because we were so desperate to bring some success to Aberdeen. "Ebbe Skovdahl had come out and said that the club needed investment and about a week later I said the same, that I wanted to see ambition from the board before I talked about a new contract." Jess’s request was greeted with fury by the Aberdeen board, who were wrestling with a spiralling debt. "I never knew the financial situation," explains Jess. "They never told me, and they clearly hadn’t told the manager. "They made it clear that I wouldn’t be playing for Aberdeen again and that really hurt, that it should end like that. It came out in the press that I’d turned down £8,000 a week but that was total nonsense, I never even got offered a contract before they loaned me to Bradford." Jess experienced relegation from the Premiership with Bradford before ending the following season as top scorer to earn a move to Forest. The 34-year-old’s current injury, a change of manager and the club’s position at the foot of the Championship table have left him only hopeful of extending his stay beyond this summer and ending his playing days at the City Ground. Either way, he insists he has no regrets from a career that many suggest could have brought greater reward, including over that return journey in 1997. "Maybe it was the easy option and maybe I should have stayed and fought for my place but I’d always envisaged going back to Aberdeen in the end," he says. "It didn’t end up being great, but I still enjoyed it nonetheless. I don’t have any regrets, I always wanted to play in the Premiership and I did that. It maybe didn’t end fantastically but I loved my time at Aberdeen and I played for my country so, all in all, it’s not been too bad at all."

We managed to vanish about 20 million quid with feck all to show for it. We'll be lucky if a million quid gets us a funny hat and a T-shirt fae Blackpool.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/a/aberdeen/6681279.stm

A 31 year old Dutch Amateur? This is a joke, right?

Gutted by this piece of business. It's not a nice thought, granted, but I'm hoping the Sunderland fans don't take to him, the manager keeps him on the bench, he fails to make an impression on the EPL and we get him back for free/buttons in a year or two. Financially I think he's accepted an offer he couldn't refuse, but by the same token I have the feeling we got LESS than a million for him and we didn't even TRY to fight to keep him. Well, obviously we didn't, and that's what makes it even harder to take.

Sorry, but the debt is worse than it was in 2002, since we've announced losses every season for something like the last 10 years. When you lose money each season (including the 1 season we supposedly 'broke even, because that didn't include servicing the debt) your sum debt increases, not shrinks. So every year we get further into the red. The plan to arrest this is "sell the stadium". At which point we're debt free but homeless. So, our options are... 1/ We can't sell the stadium, and eventually our debts massively outstrip our assets or ability to repay said debts... at which point we go into administration.. or cease trading. 2/ We sell the stadium, at which point we are theoretically debt free and homeless. This means we either get a free stadium from somewhere (not going to happen), ground share with Inverness, or cease trading.

We did... we signed Jackie McNamara. Which is a good signing, but a bad sign in respect to the Anderson situation.

1 million quid for Russ is an absolute disgrace. If the club accepts it I'll probably reconsider my Redweb subscription for next season, so they can cut the profit margin on Russ to 999,970 If, on the other hand they want to come up with what he's actually worth, that being 2 million then so be it.

Well, I did :-) I was actually being very generous by saying there was a one in ten chance he'd sign for us. That was Optimistic Kelt. Cynical Kelt was thinking "No fucking chance whatsoever". It's always the same when these things drag out. If they wanted to sign they'd sign. Whenever it takes more than a couple of weeks from the time it's announced we're "about to sign _______" then you know it's not going to happen.

It should be finalised this week. P&J online should have the latest on it. should be finalised this week, eh? I'd put our chances of signing him at about one in ten then.

How many times over the years has Aberdeen played these fuckers off the park and ended up losing? The stage is set for another glorious defeat.

We'll lose, Hearts will win, Hearts will be in Europe, Hearts will be dumped out of Europe before the group stages.

A mega clear out of the players who've got us into third spot and still, potentially, Europe? And who are we going to bring in, given our budget of 0 pounds and 0 pence?

The two remaining kids should be taken into care and put up for adoption asap, before they're old enough to grow attached to the f*cking cretins that call themselves their parents. Then the parents should be dragged back to Britain and slung in jail for a good few years, just so they can mull over what a pair of useless f*cking cretins they are. And if the 3 year old is ever found alive, which I doubt, she should be given up for adoption too, because her natural parents are irresponsible f*cking cretins. It's really a shame I'm against the death penalty, because in the case of these two f*cking cretins I'd like to maybe punch them to death.

Rhetorical question, obviously. Good to see the place back online, and hopefully a little more reliable than it was under the boghopping Mick scum who used to host the site. Also good to see I'm not automatically banned like on some other forums that I won't name