Game of throw-ins

I've been a huge critic of the way the club has been run since Cormack took charge, but I agree that this season we actually had a very decent squad, probably player for player the 3rd best in the league. With a little bit of tweaking and pragmatism we should easily have been top 4. Our problem was the expansive football remit Glass was given, which turned defending into an afterthought and made pragmatism a bad word. This was perfectly illustrated last week, when we had a lot of good to very good performances but could easily have conceded 2 or 3 goals to the worst side in the league, because we currently have no competent central defenders. Many will disagree but for me Ash Taylor is the perfect illustration of the problem. A very effective stopper at SPL level, dominates in the air, doesn't get bullied physically, plenty of drive, too daft to be nervy or crushed by a mistake, a goal threat at the other end - but a limited footballer and hate figure for the fans who think we're just the right managerial appointment away from stroking the ball about like Manchester City. He wouldn't have been expensive and we should at least have tried to keep him here as cover. But we had fancy ideas about the silky football we were going to play and Taylor didn't fit the bill. Don't get me wrong, in a lucky season we'd have options good enough to keep Taylor out of the side. McKenna, Reynolds and Devlin at their best were all significantly better players. All the same, our confidence that we could easily replace him with better on our wages always looked foolishly optimistic. I'm 100% convinced if we'd held onto Taylor we'd have been top 6 at a the very least.

Not everybody bought the idea that Qarabag were the best team we would play this season. I disagreed on the relevant thread at the time, the obvious point being that both of the OF were ranked significantly higher. Qarabag's performance may or may not have been the best against us at Pittodrie this season, but I always thought the rankings were much more persuasive evidence than a subjective response to a one-off performance against a naive Aberdeen side. In particular we never got the chance to find out how they would perform against a team who could actually defend.

I agree that a section of our fans have always wildly exaggerated what our expectations should be compared to "lesser" clubs, but being a striker at Aberdeen is still a different job. When the club is functioning well - as it was when Anderson was still here - we will spend a lot more of our time trying to break down teams who are defending in depth and rarely venturing forward. Especially at home. In those circumstances a striker with some physical presence and aerial threat becomes more valuable and a less physical striker who has some skills but can be easily crowded out physically less so. The question for our manager would always have been "is Anderson good enough to justify changing the way the team plays to play to his strengths". Basically, do we build a team around him. The answer was always "no" and based on the evidence I saw I would agree with it. That same question might have a different answer for Livingston. It's even harder for them to attract bigger/more physical strikers of good quality than it is for us. Teams will be more offensive against them and their strikers will get more space on the break. Anderson looks a much better fit for them than he does for us.

In fact even if we lose I'll still be reasonably happy at 5 o'clock on Saturday provided St Johnstone don't beat Livvi. Then I can start the process of putting this god-forsaken season out of mind.

The central defenders will be a real headache for Goodwin. I don't think they are bad players necessarily, but they have zero confidence and are in terrible form. They are both under contract, so does he gamble that he can get better performances from one or both or try to offload them (not easy based on their form this season). Getting that decision wrong could mean disaster. The problem for me is that they have been left far too exposed. Both new to the club and one another. An overly ambitious attempt to play expansive football under Glass. Full backs who are inexperienced, or not really full backs, and whose best attributes are not defensive. A keeper who, despite his MOTM performance yesterday, has had a very shaky season and a back-up keeper who still managed to be significantly worse. The injury to Considine who might have offered continuity and solidity. The change of manager and systems. Calderwood had IMO a much worse pairing in Diamond and Considine, but the whole team was practically set up to protect the defence and we got fourth place finishes. It was terrible to watch but more realistic than the naivety we've seen this season. Bates and Gallagher have been poor but they've been dealt an unfair hand.

Worst performance of a terrible season so far and we're very lucky to still be in this. Could have no complaints if Dundee were a couple of goals up. McKenzie and Ramsay look ok going forward, but as a defensive unit Ramsay, McKenzie, Gallagher and Bates are shockingly inept, two inexperienced guys and two guys who look utterly bereft of confidence. All I'm hoping for at this point is that we get a bit of luck. We don't deserve it on today's performance but we're due it the way the season's gone.

I'm definitely nervous. If we lose this one things will start to look very precarious. The mood around the club is a lot gloomier than it was even a week ago. We have players who've lost confidence, players who are pissed off, players who know they won't be here next season. We can't score and are leaking bad goals in every game. Whatever Glass's failings, my impression is that dressing room morale is in a much worse shape now under Goodwin. We've already lost and drawn with Dundee this season. Dundee are virtually relegated which gives them a free hit - we'll be the team feeling colossal pressure. Having said that we've got home advantage and better players than Dundee. My gut feeling is it will come down to who gets the breaks on the day. We're certainly due some, but that doesn't make us any likelier to get them.

It doesn't need to be explained, it's just based on the false assumption that if we hadn't appointed Glass we'd necessarily have appointed somebody good, or at least better. Look at the history of managerial appointments in the SPL. Most managers don't last very long. The reason is that the majority of appointments turn out to be failures, and fairly quickly at that. It's absolutely no surprise that Cormack's first appointment was a failure, and his second is already starting to look suspect. It was always the case that if we sacked McInnes there was a very high probability we'd replace him with someone substandard. His name just happened to be Glass.

And what's worse, we'd thoroughly deserve it. Because the noisy, entitled fantasists in our support finally got an entitled, fantasist chairman in their own image. Too much negative football! Top 4 not good enough! Eye bleeding! Boring one nils! Instead, we'll have expansive football! Gifted foreigners desperate to ply their trade in Scotland for 2 or 3 grand a week! A genuine title challenge! Ergo the, by a huge margin, most successful non-OF manager of the past 20 years was clearly not good enough. Tell you what, lets throw a huge wedge of DNA cash at him to get rid, and hire guys who've done sweet f**k all! Our relegation competitors have an absolutely massive advantage. They may not have the same money, but they actually live in the real world. It almost feels like cheating.

As I made clear in my post. Hearts, also run by football professionals, came to a different view. The evidence, I think, suggests our guys got it right.

The 'widen your recruitment net' idea has been pushed on our fans' forums for as long as I can remember. As if some glaringly obvious piece of good sense has been mysteriously ignored by the people in charge of the club. As opposed to the truth which is that football professionals, whose livelihood depends on getting this kind of thing right, think carefully and hard about the pros and cons and have come to a different view. Everyone knows that by going abroad you can source players who are better on paper for similar money. But they are not "that" much better - if they were we still couldn't afford them. And more importantly you increase your risk from cultural differences. They don't know Scotland, they don't know the Scottish game - they don't know what they are letting themselves in for etc. Under McInnes we decided that on balance that British players were a better bet. Interestingly, during his time in charge Hearts took the opposite view. Whereas we tended to play safe with British guys they were seduced by the idea that the stats showed you could get more for your money abroad. We easily outperformed Hearts during that period. While they often looked like a good collection of players on paper, we had better teams. We'll see how this plays out but it looks to me yet another example of Cormack thinking he knows better than the professionals when all he's come up with is another piece of fans'-forum level "insight". I'm not optimistic.

"Downing tools" misrespresents the problem. Players rarely go on the park thinking "I'm so pissed off I'm deliberately not going to bother". Anybody who's that obviously disillusioned probably doesn't get picked. And yet confidence, motivation and belief are massive. That's why teams in the zone go on great runs beating teams they've no right to beat, teams who are off the pace can't buy a win even against teams with obviously inferior players. We're talking about what can seem like fine margins between a player who genuinely thinks he's being a good professional putting in maximum effort for a manager he doesn't rate or like, for a club he thinks his time is up at, in front of fans he think don't think he's good enough, versus a guy who enjoys being at the club he's at, who feels a high level of camaraderie with his team mates, who likes and respects his manager, who feels a loyalty to the club and its fans. And the effect of those differences can be colossal

Well if you look at our average points per game under Glass and assume that had continued we'd have been comfortably safe. That's not an apology for Glass, who I think was out of his depth, and can't complain about his sacking; nor is it a defence of the under-threat players who have certainly been underperforming. But although performances under Glass were far from satisfactory it's our performances under Goodwin that have put us in the relegation frame. 6 points from a possible 21. To reiterate, I don't expect us to be relegated - 6 points more than 2nd bottom with a significantly better goal difference should be enough. But I do think there's a risk of it that wasn't there before Goodwin took charge and started alienating players. I have no problem with a big clear out by Goodwin, I just think he should have played his cards closer to his chest until we were safe. If we get to the end of the season and stay up, Goodwin is out of jail and starts with a clean slate. But if we do go into freefall and get relegated from here on in - and I don't think the risk is negligible - it will be Goodwin's recklessness that got us there.

Ojo played against Ross County. McGeouch played against Hibs. Considine was in the pool against Ross County. But that's restricting things to players where management has made its intentions to part with players public, itself unusual at this stage of the campaign. There is credible evidence that other players will be parted with. Lewis knows we're looking at goalkeepers. There are strong rumours that McLennan has been told he can find another club. It's an open secret that Ramirez is disaffected with the new regime and isn't expected to be here next season. All that is on top of the manager reducing the first team pool by dumping JET and Scott Brown, who would both almost certainly have featured under Glass. It's not just players who are being let go that are affected. It's hardly likely to boost squad morale to see team mates being given the heave-ho. I think Goodwin is playing a very risky game.

I wish I was as confident. With the cushion we have we should be safe, but Goodwin has adopted the very high risk strategy of making it clear to a number of the players we'll be depending on to keep us safe that he doesn't rate them. This will kill confidence and motivation. On top of that we have players who don't expect to be here next season anyway so won't be fearing the Championship no matter what happens. A complete crash and burn where we go through the final 5 games scarcely picking up any points looks to me by no means impossible. We could also be dependent on the same players in the play offs. I'm not saying we'll get relegated - without going through the permutations I imagine we don't need too many more points to be safe - but I do think there's a genuine risk. Ironically I'd be 100% sure we'd have stayed up if we hadn't sacked Glass - it's Goodwin's bull in a china shop act that's put us in danger.

I still think he'll probably get Killie over the line. If he does - and assuming we're not relegated - it'll be interesting to see how Killie do next season compared to us. He's starting with a weak squad and much less resources than Goodwin, but I don't have a huge amount of confidence we'll finish above them.

We're in a very worrying place. The goodish news is that I think the "expansive football" fantasy has been put to bed. Goodwin's interviews all point to him being a hard-line pragmatist and he wouldn't be saying the stuff he's saying if Cormack hadn't signed off on the change of approach. But it does provoke the obvious question, wtf has the past year been about? Couldn't Cormack have got to where he is now by thinking harder and respecting the opinions of football professionals instead of indulging this expensive, destructive and entirely predictably failed experiment? Or by realising that his job isn't to pander to the on-line fruitcakes, it's to know better than them? Because, even assuming we can avoid relegation, where we are now has the unmistakable whiff of shit creek. Goodwin thinks he's a pragmatist but from the way he's talking about recruitment I think he's seriously underestimated the difficulty of bringing quality players to this club. I predict he'll have a very different opinion in 2 or 3 months time. Basically he needs to recruit almost an entire team. Of the guys likely to be here next season I'd say only Barron, Besuijen and McCrorie look like reasonably solid positives, and two of them are inexperienced kids. Bates, Gallagher and MacKenzie are first team possibles but they will be weak links unless they have much more consistent seasons next time. Watkins is talented but fragile. Hayes is questionable at full back and I'm not sure he has another year in him. So we're probably going to have to sign 10 or more new faces. And no club at our level will get that many new signings right. If a successful signing is one that deservedly commands a first team place when fit, I'd guess our success rate is typically about 30%. If we get 50% Goodwin will have done very well. And I still doubt that would be enough to deliver anything better than mid-table. Even Goodwin does a good job - and that's a massive if - I think it'll take him 3 or 4 windows to to get us to the level we've taken for granted over the previous 8 seasons. By then Hearts, pumped up with European money that could have been ours, might be impossible to catch. It really has been the most monumental clusterfuck. And almost entirely self-inflicted.

There were huge mitigating factors though. - losing Wright - losing Cosgrove - losing Watkins - injuries to Hedges - Lewis, arguably our best player for several previous seasons, completely unexpectedly turning into an accident always waiting to happen. There were at least 4 games where we were looking much the better side until Lewis chucked one in and we lost. That was massive for our season. - The failure of Cormack to back his manager in January, after we'd pretty much lost all our entire creative and goal threat to injuries and transfers. Authority to look for replacements was withheld until the final day of the window, by which time we were reduced to desperately signing rubbish. This was deliberate sabotage by a chairman of a manager he wanted rid of because he wasn't enough of a yes man. We're still paying the price for his naivety and vanity. Following McInnes's demise the same chairman found money to back his protege Glass more extravagantly than any Aberdeen manager in decades. We know how that panned out. Despite all this, we still finished fourth and qualified for Europe last season. There's no good reason to think that following a summer recruitment where he was backed in the way Glass was McInnes wouldn't have been able to drastically improve the side that finished last season. At the start of last season, before his team was stripped of much of its quality by events outside his control, we were playing good football and getting good results.

Exactly. His "guaranteed" income would have worked out around £2K a week. We would all have assumed that Considine was on quite a bit more than that just now. But there must be a serious risk that he won't be able to make much of a contribution as a first team player at this stage in his career. In the circumstances a one year contract on £2K and a chance to move into coaching seems a very good offer. Lots of players would like to stay in the game after retirement but don't get the chance. It's not nothing.

Seek help.

I'm not jumping to conclusions. I always thought there was a pretty good chance this injury would finish him. His career was having a bit of an Indian summer, but he was never blessed with pace, already a veteran at the start of the season, now a year older and we can't have total confidence in his recovery. Goodwin will have his budget and he has to take a view about what Conso is worth to the squad. I'd expect his service to the club to be taken into account, and I'm sure it will have been - the club is aware that he's a popular player. But if they are too far apart and Goodwin thinks the money can be better spent elsewhere, his job is to say so.

I didn't see the game. Watched the highlights, read the reports. But my impression is that we played pretty well but shot ourselves in the foot. That's not a get out of jail free card, because it's the story of our season. If we'd won a normal share of the games that, on balance of play, we deserved to win, we'd be very comfortably fourth. It's in the nature of the game that you'll lose or draw games you should have won. But if you do it as regularly as us, you're doing something fundamental wrong. To have the same points as St Mirren at this stage in the season when our goal difference is better by 13 goals shows just how hopeless we've been at turning performances into points. McInnes's mantra was, no matter what, at the end of the day, your priority is to find a way of maximising your chances of a result. I thought Goodwin might be able to reinstall some of that grit, but it hasn't happened yet. My fear is that we totally dominate against Ross County on Saturday and lose or draw, because that's how we do.

It should also be remembered that we knew the risk had been removed before the season ended. So we didn't have the motivation of desperately trying to avoid relegation in our final games. If we had, it's at least possible results would have been different. and we could have avoided the play offs anyway.

Yep, I'm nobody's idea of "woke" but even I know that his "it's a man's game" bollocks is a total embarrassment in 2022.

Happy with that if true. A guy who angrily confronted Calderwood for not facilitating a move from Aberdeen to Rangers, where he had no realistic hope of being anything than emergency back-up, isn't someone I'm dying to see back at the club.