Slim

Will be interesting to see if the payment for the consultation will be made by the club or Cormack himself. Having seen the output of some of Deloitte’s management consulting recommendations in other companies I’m not too confident we’ll see anything groundbreaking.

Russell was the striker coach for England. I believe his role with us is Assistant Manager. I recall Glass mentioning he's the one who designs all of our set piece routines.

COVID Passports then, will be required to attend football matches. A bit annoying as I've just moved back to Aberdeen and was looking forward to getting a season ticket. Currently there's no way to register overseas vaccines on the NHS app so I'm going to be locked out of Pittodrie from 1st October.

So beat Israel at home, Faroes and Moldova away and we're in the play offs. Should be do-able....

Walsall get their first win of the season, climbing off the bottom of English League 2 after dropping Ash Taylor. Strange he can look fairly competent for us but stinks the place out in the English bottom tier, same happened last time he left us IIRC.

Record also mentions we've been sniffing about the Breidablik left back. Don't remember anyone from those games particularly standing out, think it's the boy with the big mop of blonde hair. I think we're pretty well covered there anyway.

They’re a good team but I’m not having this narrative that came about around the time their 2nd goal went in that they’re the footballing equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters. They’re about the level of the Rijeka team we beat or the Maribor team we narrowly lost to. The difference is that we didn’t seem to have any effective plan to give them any trouble in defence or how to contain their attacking threat. We looked completely unprepared tonight.

75 minutes to make the 2nd sub, while 3-0 down. Obviously no Plan B tonight. Or Plan A from the looks of it.

Had to put the commentary on mute, they are talking this mob up to be a reincarnation of Ajax '95 and plucky wee Aberdeen are lucky to just be sharing a pitch with them. We're far too one dimensional going forward and all this tippy tappy stuff along our defensive line is a waste of time in this match. Get the ball up the pitch and push up to win the 2nd ball and see what breaks our way.

We're just chasing shadows here.

Fucking knew this was Stewarty Milne's plan all along, 30 years he's been planning to sell Pittodrie to move to a new stadium and then sell the new stadium to build hooses on the land ?

Hernandez didn't get off the bench in Atlanta's last game. Looks like he only got a run of games because their first choice RB was injured.

These are the pots based I think in favourites to go through, we would be in Pot 3:

Can new signings play in the 2nd leg, or do they need to be registered before the 1st leg? Wasn't much on the bench to come on to make an impact other than McLennan. Although McGinn is usually quite good in those circumstances, keeping the ball in tight spots and passing his way out of trouble and probably experienced in playing those kind of games with Northern Ireland. 2nd leg will be tricky, they look like they could be quite dangerous on the counter attack.

We could have done with some fresh legs on the pitch for these past 15 minutes or so. Ramirez and Ojo look fucked.

That's that then. We don't look like scoring tonight.

If the pitch is so bad, I hope we see less of the dodgy passbacks to the goalkeeper we have been seeing lately, our luck may run out.

Not sure it's egg on face for Cormack, it was always going to be a bit of a long shot and at least it alerts Hibs to the fact that we think they are beneath us. Even Boyle has shied away from saying he's not interested. The net result is that Hibs have increased their wage bill. The problem Cormack has now that it has set a level of expectation regarding our next signing. If the "Plan B" is some Atlanta reject or an unknown loanee, then he might be rubbing yolk from his eyes.

I’m sure I read somewhere that he has a contract release clause around £800k.

It's not a good comparison though, the games against Hacken and Anders Breivik XI are qualifiers, if we beat Qarabag that's when we actually qualify and see who we get grouped against. The excitement comes from getting closer and closer to the group stage as the quality of opposition slightly increases round by round. In this round we could have been drawn against Tottenham, instead it should have been Austria Vienna had they not lost to the Icelandic mob. Last season we got Sporting Lisbon. I'd rather go through a few rounds of unknown teams before the glamour ties than be knocked out before the domestic season starts.

Qarabag finished 2nd in their league behind Neftchi Baku who were beaten 3-0 last night and 5-2 on aggregate by HJK Helsinki. It doesn't look like their domestic league has started yet so good chance we're fitter too. All their foreign players seem to be journeymen in their late 20's without any major clubs on their CV's. Despite their fairly high UEFA coefficient ranking, they appear to be very beatable on paper.

Jack McKenzie is fucking ace.

Is it just me who panics every time the ball is passed back to Lewis? We’re going to get caught out by this at some point.

Looks like a trip to Azerbaijan awaits the winners of our game. Huns have avoided a trip to Kazakhstan to play Kairat.