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Saturday 20th April 2024:  kick-off 12.30pm

Scottish Cup Semi-Final - Aberdeen v Celtic

🔴⚪️ Come on you Reds! ⚪🔴

Dons V Celtic


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What a game and what a result!

 

First half - wasn't quite sure what JC was doing with Duff starting. Seemed to do alright though.  :thumbsup: Thought that Celtic huffed and puffed whilst creating very little actually. Was shite with Brown scoring 30 seconds after McDonalds good header! Pleased to go in 2-1 up and unlucky for it not to be 3-1 up with Caldwells clearance of the line. Thought Foster was atrocious in the first half.

 

Second half - Celtic started very well and the Dons couldn't get out of their own half. When McDonalds header went in, I thought the Sellick would go onto to win but we seemed to go for it again. Didn't want to settle for a point. Kerr tackle looked fairly hefty from where I was standing and was suprised not to see a red card out. Confusion with Diamonds first but that 2 goal cushion made it fairly comfortable.

 

Also, McManus & Caldwells inability to go up for headers without putting their arms all over Miller really shown through for me.

 

Would be between Diamond and Kerr for man of the match with mention going to Seve, McDonald and Duff too.

 

Mon the Dons!  :AFC2:

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4 fucking two against the tattie munching vermin. Its times like these I hate living away from Aberdeen. Bet the town is jumping tonight. Stuart Duff is a god and clearly benifited from all the advice we gave him in Holland pre season.

 

Duff beer for me, duff beer for you, I'll have a duff, you'll have one too!

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Graham Spiers wrote:

 

Celtic cut down by Aberdeen's Zander Diamond

Aberdeen 4 Celtic 2

Aberdeen's Zander Diamond

Graham Spiers

 

This was the stuff of raw, riveting football at Pittodrie. With Celtic’s lead now cut to just two points above Rangers in the Clydesdale Bank Premier League, this stunning second-half mugging of Gordon Strachan’s side by Aberdeen yesterday gives the title race a dramatic new lease of life.

 

This was Aberdeen’s first win at home over Celtic since December 2001 and it came, following quite a bit of mayhem, thanks to Charlie Mulgrew’s wicked delivery of free kicks deep in the second half, causing Celtic to crumble. On each occasion, within two minutes of each other, Mulgrew’s deliveries found Celtic’s defence wanting, allowing Zander Diamond to stretch twice to plunder Aberdeen’s third and fourth goals.

 

At 2-2, amazingly, the second half had been all Celtic’s, and when Scott McDonald scored the visitors’ second after 73 minutes, the distinct hunch was that Celtic would go on to throttle their opponents. Around Pittodrie, even among the Aberdeen fans, this was the feeling, given Celtic’s rich fortune at this arena in recent years. Yet Aberdeen, utterly heroically, had other ideas.

 

So much for some of the abuse of Jimmy Calderwood. A section of Aberdeen’s fans have used disparaging language for this manager, among them “clueless†and “a tactical buffoonâ€, especially throughout a stormy autumn when his side was struggling. Well, these same fans will peer at their papers today and see their side sitting third in the Clydesdale Bank Premier League. It seems not bad going for an incompetent.

 

Celtic are not used to having four goals put past them like this. Rangers beat them 4-2 at Celtic Park in August, but that game apart, not since Strachan’s first, calamitous week in charge of the club, when Artmedia Bratislava and then Motherwell blasted nine past them, have Celtic suffered like this.

 

Mark Brown, a late deputy in goal for the injured Artur Boruc, must have found it a traumatic experience. Brown looked relatively innocent at Aberdeen’s two first-half goals but, like the rest of his defence, he seemed jittery and uncertain at Diamond’s later strikes. For Celtic, this game had a sudden and jolting change in direction with 15 minutes to go.

 

The champions suffered the loss of Boruc before kick-off, the Pole being ruled out with a groin strain. In the interests of clarity, it is worth pointing out that this injury actually occurred on the field of play during the warm-up, and not in any Glasgow city centre fleshpot on Saturday night.

 

Heaven knows what more Boruc would have brought to this match.

 

There was chaos and incident aplenty without any of his loopy contributions. Brown also looked calm and assured until the dizzy chaos of late in the second half.

 

Aberdeen stunned Celtic with two first-half goals, and had the nerve to continue to take the game to them, even when Gary McDonald’s opener after 24 minutes was levelled by Scott Brown within 60 seconds. At that stage you could be forgiven for thinking that this would turn into another Celtic rout in the northeast.

 

Duff, a much-maligned journeyman of the Scottish game, proved particularly useful to Aberdeen on the left flank. It was his cross after 24 minutes that seemed to bemuse the Celtic defence, allowing McDonald to jump and send a looping header beyond Brown and in at the far post. The home fans were euphoric at the breakthrough, so much so that many of them missed Scott Brown’s equaliser just seconds later.

 

McGeady was the architect, as he was of much of Celtic’s effort in this match. Squirrelling into the left-hand corner of Aberdeen’s penalty area with the ball, twisting and deceiving opponents as he did so, the winger crossed low for Brown to stab the ball past Jamie Langfield from seven yards. The goalkeeper might have stopped the effort but it found the back of the net.

 

Aberdeen had already been denied a good penalty claim when Brown lunged at McDonald inside Celtic’s area, and the home side had quite a blatant ambition about them. Darren Mackie’s goal after 18 minutes had rightly been ruled offside, but it was an indicator of the home side’s ideas. Thus, having been pulled back so cruelly swiftly by Brown, Aberdeen raced up the park and reclaimed the lead after half an hour.

 

Duff was the executor, meeting Mark Kerr’s cross from the right behind a posse of Celtic defenders and drilling the ball low past Brown. Celtic tried to claim that Duff was offside but, having arrived on their blind side, the Aberdeen player was played on by at least three Celtic shirts.

 

Celtic began to pound Aberdeen, and the truth of it was, you almost forgot Aberdeen were in the match for the first 30 minutes of the second half. McGeady and Barry Robson, especially, began to pour down the Celtic left, and it seemed Aberdeen were only asking for trouble. And they duly suffered a second equaliser after 73 minutes when Robson shuffled and dunted over a cross, which McDonald deftly headed past Langfield from six yards.

 

It was the cue for a stunning Aberdeen fightback, with Diamond scoring two goals in two minutes as Aberdeen killed Celtic with swerving free kicks into their box. First, after 76 minutes, Mulgrew’s delivery from the left allowed Diamond to steal ahead of Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink and head home at the far post. Then, two minutes later, a similar Mulgrew free kick from the other flank again flummoxed Celtic, this time leaving Brown badly exposed at his far post as Diamond sealed Aberdeen’s victory.

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/scotland/article5542814.ece

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From the Mailonline about the third goal...

 

Television replays were later accompanied by a claim that McDonald was poised to award Aberdeen a penalty before giving the goal. An alternative version has it that the referee saw his assistant Willie Dishington’s flag and blew for a Celtic free-kick when, in fact, the linesman was signalling a legitimate goal.

 

Either way, the goal was allowed to stand, to the consternation of the away dugout. ‘We had a look at it and there is certainly not a penalty there,’ added Strachan.

 

9u7t4p.jpg

 

So you can't see Hesselink pulling back Mackie by the neck of his shirt?

 

Such a bad loser.

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He is not only a bad loser, I don't think he is a particularly nice guy. I don't know that he just comes across really badly and when he refuses to accept what's in front of his face then it just compounds my already dim view of the cunt.

 

I watched Team of the Decade last night, and the way he projected himself then (around 1990) is so different to how he is now. He actually seemed alright then, so why change? Full of his own self importance, suffers from small man syndrome I reckon.

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Gordon Strachan as a footballer, top man

Gordon Strachan as a manager projecting himself in the media, total tosser. There was a time when his pre/post match interviews were funny, nowadays just comes across as an arsehole

 

Coincides with him moving Ra Shellick-barrawaybu. They probably said "we'll hire you. But you've got to get rid of the sense of humour. It's not the way we do things around here. We prefer to be more .... how can I put this .... paranoid. Can you do paranoid, Gordon?"

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