Slim

On the flip side, Hibs are coming up needing to strengthen in a few areas and have money to spend and Hearts are also needing to replace half a team and also have money to spend. With not too dissimilar wage budgets, better training facilities and with Edinburgh being more attractive as a place to live for most people with no ties to the north east, we may struggle if we're competing in the same market for players that are proven up here but surplus to requirements for their English teams.

Was he not referring to the stories that McLeish has been on the bottle for the last couple of years? Any time I've seen him on TV lately he's looked like a wreck.

Eric Black was unfairly implicated in that bribery thing. If I remember correctly Southampton did a comprehensive investigation and found no wrongdoing so unsuspended him.

I'd rather he stayed injury free and played every minute of every game as they once again finish in our shadow in every single competition they play in. That way he'll have no excuses to hide behind for being an ordinary component of an ordinary team and will be obvious to all why the big move to England that he was expecting never came close to happening.

He played in most of their games, but the vast, vast majority of appearances came off the bench, 15 minutes here and there.

Taking McGinn off was the right thing to do. Sending O'Connor on wasn't. We needed to maintain width, they were playing McGregor as a makeshift left back and the only time we pressured him was when Hayes stole the ball from him for the horror show miss with McLean. Rooney ended up covering that area of the pitch where he's completely ineffective. We lost our counter attacking ability there and then. I may be alone but I think McLean is more to blame than Hayes for the miss. He should have halted his run to give himself a bigger angle to receive the ball and give Hayes a static target to pass the ball to. Hayes was expecting him to stop running but he kept going. Either way, McLean should be responsible for pointing where he wanted the ball to be played.

They'd be signing our 3rd best central midfielder (after Shinnie and McLean). I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Having said that, I'd rather we got McLean tied up to a long term contract before the new season kicks off considering we paid a hefty (for us) sum for him.

Interesting that the story on the BBC site makes it sound like McInnes is having an unprovoked rant at Rangers.

According to the BBC gossip column we've turned down the extra 1500 tickets and Celtic will now get a bigger allocation. Not sure I understand the logic there.

The Sigma thrashing was more a result of playing Stuart Duff and Derek Young in central defence.

Looks a bit, I dunno, "thin"? Would look much better with a white collar.

Mackay-Steven is shite, if he's our replacement for McGinn we'll be several points worse off over the course of the season. Absolutely zero determination.

I noticed Danny Rogers has been on the bench for Falkirk for the last couple of weeks, anyone know if he's been dropped or if they're just giving their own player a run out? I don't think the rest of them particularly shone at Championship level (except maybe Daniel Harvie?), I'd be surprised if any of them were kept on. Joe Nuttall couldn't even get off the bench for Dumbarton.

Fuck off Partick

Round about the time they went into liquidation, I remember there being talk about there being a stipulation that a club needed to have x years of audited financial statements in order to obtain a license to play in UEFA competitions. Is my memory playing tricks or is there such a rule?

Considine's a fucking idiot.

We need to get McGinn on for Taylor ASAP.

Well that substitution was a fucking masterstroke, now we need to score a goal with a team filled with shite defenders.

There won't be that much traffic, noise and disruption then.

Slightly amusing that after interviewing a bunch of "traditional" Rangers men like Barry Ferguson, Alex Rae and John Brown for the Scottish assistant manager role, the new manager has gone and hired Jonatan Johansson instead.

Probably but it's a stupid one considering our starting 11 is one of the easiest to predict in British football. Most teams in the league know exactly how we'll line up and what our tactics will be, it doesn't usually mean they can stop us though. The only way we don't win tomorrow is if we show them too much respect and try to manage the game. If we get wired right into them and get a couple of early goals, they'll utterly collapse.

Assuming the council would play ball, and AFC would be willing to increase their budget for land purchase, the current AECC site would be ideal. Shouldn't be much issue with the roads, especially when traffic can head north towards the AWPR. Plenty of public transport already in place (including a Park and Ride service on site). There's a couple of hotels right next door, we could even take over the existing office building and viewing tower if the council wanted their upkeep off their hands, plenty of room in there for hospitality facilities, museum, corporate offices, etc. There's not many residents nearby to complain, and the site is already used for large-scale events so it would be hard to take any noise complaints seriously. If the stadium could be build within the footprint of the existing exhibition halls, there would be masses of parking spaces surrounding the stadium, one would assume we could use them if they're already there. And renting out the car park for Elton John concerts or Monster Truck shows could generate some revenue without destroying the pitch. There may even be a possibility for a formal arrangement with the Gordon Barracks to build training facilities considering we've been using their land for training for years. I see 2 full size pitches there on Google Earth. You could convert the exhibition hall that's next to the hotel into indoor training facilities. Not as fancy as the facilities at Kingsford, but should be much lower cost considering the bulk of the facilities are already in place.

Bridge of Don, then Dubai for 6 years, Houston for 1 year, back to Aberdeen for 6 months and arrived in Abu Dhabi yesterday.

Not much enthusiasm from me on this one. He's 28, it's not like he's got lots of years of improvement ahead of him and he's rarely looked better than average for ICT any time I've seen them play. He wouldn't be good enough to get a start in our current squad, so if he's being signed as a first choice midfielder for next season, it doesn't bode too well. Our rivals will be strengthening their squads, we need to too. Naturally I hope I'm wrong and will give him every chance, etc, etc.

I would suspect AFC's transport plan has been left deliberately vague because the plan is to force the council and Firstbus to get together to sort out any traffic issues at the tax-payer's expense. I'm sure the club have no intention whatsoever of footing the bill to build (for example, a dedicated bus lane between Kingswells P&R and the stadium) or subsidising the provision of buses from Firstbus.