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Cinderella is going to the ball. We have acquired tickets for the home support in a part of the ground close to the away support, so will be giving it large to the sheep shagging bastards (Ovci Sujajici Bastardi) in there

Biggest island of the small isles,but only about 40 inhabitants who mostly live in Kinloch the harbour village.The rest of the island probably too rough or exposed id say.Fantastic mountains.Not huge,but challenging and great views.A few cyclable tracks go to various sides of the island.Definitely going back next year to hill climb,too soggy this year.And aye theres about 1000 deer on the island.Nae good when youre trying to kip during rutting season,lol Mother and baby dolphin on the way over.Minke whale juming out the water near the mainland

Aberdeen never gives youth a chance, I fear for Jess's development

We're slowly getting closer to finding out what our strongest line-up is. Problem is, with Tobers injured and two games a week, we won't necessarily see it very often. For now, Knoester-Milne-Dorrington at the back is secure enough, Gyamfi and Devlin as the wing backs. Karlsson finally showing he's not the new Okkels, and Lazetic and Nisbet both massive upgrades on Yengi. I wonder if there's a way to get Karlsson-Nisbet-Lazetic all playing together. Biggest surprise has been Milanovic not quite cutting it yet. The midfield is still a nice problem to have due to the number of options. I like Clarkson, I always think we're better with Shinnie in it, but Armstrong has been far better than I thought he would be considering his lack of game time before coming here. Interesting that Clarkson has at times played further forward and out wide, because he's not the dynamic box-to-box Armstrong and Shinnie are - if only they were both five years younger (but if they were, they wouldn't be at Aberdeen). Clarkson is the new Jamie McGrath in that we know he's good but aren't sure where he fits in, especially in this new three-man defence formation. Aouchiche is another conundrum, and for all his critics I think Keskinen is one of the hardest workers in the team. Okay, maybe we aren't any closer knowing our best XI after all.

To the cocks in the Red Shed that think it is acceptable to boo one of our own players on to the pitch, get the fuck out of my club

Agreed. No-one is pretending it ain't shit at the moment but as far as I'm concerned this is the time to hold our nerve and stand tall behind Thelin. There is more than enough evidence from his time at Aberdeen and how things went in his first two seasons at Elfsborg to warrant giving him the two seasons we were told we needed to give him by those in Sweden when we appointed him.

Whenever Jimmy goes - hopefully in 5+ years after managing to pull off the unlikely and turn this thing around but even if it's next week - the new manager simply cannot be appointed until the technical director position is filled.

I was at peace with him going until I realised that both Ambrose and Yengi were staying.

I'm pretty nervous about it 2bh Al. A win would be massive and really gives us impetus going into the Athens game but they have a great record against us. A draw wouldn't be awful but a defeat would have a back to square one feel to it. Their form has been a bit more patchy than usual though and as long as we stick to 3 at the back I can see us coping with their physical front line pretty well. If we show up going forward like we did against Dundee in the first half we have a great chance.

Pretty sure it's Graham Potter's if he wants it, which from his comments yesterday he very much does. (He lives in Sweden having started his managerial career there). Thelin still has at least two, probably three, and potentially even four or five, more trophies in him at Aberdeen first.

JJ Bull's best work

Hun

I think the more pressing question is how bad is Kowalski’s hangover this morning.

Not to be pendatic, but I believe it's Ryan Judas Fraser.

I've rewatched Karlssons second a few times I must admit. Love the twinkle toes

I'd have shagged prime McGhee, but he'd let himself go by the time he returned as manager. Is that the sort of thing you're after? What about Robson's body, with Willie Miller's face?

What just happened. Ball went in the netty thing at the end of our park and people are dancing?

You're right. It gets harder and harder for players to shoulder charge since they had to slice off their unnatural arms a few years back.

A run of matches? He’s had three windows with significant squad change, and over 20 new players. Add nisbet Armstrong and karlsson, key players, plus lazetic and gyamfi who were injured, these guys have hardly been with us a month. I think giving him to Xmas is fair before we can fealty make comment, but I also think he’s here three years minimum and has been given assurances. Pretty sure we’re not sacking another manager without him being given the chance to completely overhaul the squad, and try to develop a full new group over time.

Really fair assessment Al. For the last few seasons we have collapsed in the autumn and winter then changed our manager. Then we get all excited about the prospect of a new guy coming in and clearing out the players we don't like and who are pish. It was a never ending rollercoaster of emotion. So when Thelin csme along and everyone overwhelmingly thought he was a great appointment I genuinely did think we would get some stability. Absolutely gutted it is working out this way and also keep thinking please turn it around as I cannot stand us having another new face in February next year!! Hopefully 2 away league games will suit us better!!

Yes, Aberdeen did it in 2026.

It's the beard. Lack of appropriate facial hair has cost our club dearly.

Agreed, and I think everyone here thinks devlin is a better option than Jensen. The latter is certainly a good squad player to have with his position flexibility, but especially with tobers injured and the return of a back 3, I feel there’s plenty of devlin game time ahead which we all appreciate. Both will be on the field a lot together too. i also think second factor is Armstrong. I believe he’s better than we all expected, and with devlin Armstrong Milne and shinnie is our starting 11, I do think that Scottish core gives a work ethic mentality strength and identity that we were lacking.

I doubt Armstrong is on his radar 2bh given the wealth of cm's we have.

You might get to fifty percent of the roasters though, or the folk that sit next to them, who might tell them to shut it. I think the "three year project" line has helped Thelin until now, and if we can say that we're implementing a strategy to give X number of minutes to young players, then the fans will at least know the justification for playing a youth team player that might not otherwise be afforded game time.

I don't think we need to worry about a Hearts title win. They've played seven games and in three of them have needed a last minute winner. That says a lot of teams are capable of causing them problems and their run isn't sustainable. They were terrible against Hibs, and they've a tough run of fixtures now with four of their next seven games away from home (one being at Pittodrie) and Celtic visiting Tynecastle. Will be a couple of defeats in there at least.

Bad enough seeing him at Tynecastle

I've got to confess, it has been so long, I'm addicted to watching these highlights. Great to have a spring in the step on a Monday morning for a change

Well that was 4 going on 7/8. As you say Dundee were shockingly bad - we don't really look confortable playing out from the back but they were shitting all the time. Agree with your comment about blooding young players...Lobban is a RB and should have been on the bench and given a 15 minute runout.

Its a disappointing start,..but with our groomers??

Was thinking the same when I read that. Maybe we’ll check in on tlg after the weekend

Posting stuff like that, you better hope they don't have access to this site

I think it was a very important night for JT (despite the loss) in terms of restoring a little faith that he knows what he's doing amongst the more sceptical. At times tonight not only did we look like a football team (and wasn't that nice to see) but one that was actually quite decent. As long as we follow this up with a win against the fun (please let them be fun) then, fingers crossed, we will hopefully see the start of a second season renaissance for Jimmy Thelin after the international break.

That’s the problem with the data-driven football decisions, there’s no statistic for “yass min” which means you end up with Jensen starting more games than Devlin. Nicky was immense tonight.

I may be wrong (occasionally I am) but I don't seem to remember reading anything about him being injury prone prior to signing for us. A real shame as I think there is clearly a player in there. Wish him a speedy recovery and hope he can get back on track with an injury free run of games for us.

Is that all one sentence in morphine-land?

Yeah, cracks which were there long before Thelin arrived, and that no-one expected Thelin to fix in one season. That he won a cup regardless of that was pretty good management. Okay we're just ignoring Celtic's fortunate goal, that Celtic had shown what they were capable of at Hampden when they blew St Johnstone away in the semis, they hadn't lost a Scottish Cup game at Hampden under Rodgers, that mere months before that game that same Celtic team went very close to knocking Bayern Munich out of the Champions League, that after our goal we actually had four very good chances to win the game before penalties, and are just describing a very good defensive performance as "barely got a kick" because it doesn't suit the agenda? We beat a treble chasing Celtic team at Hampden. That we didn't dominate the game doesn't make it any less of an achievement. Since you know so much about last season, can you post how many times Celtic:- a) conceded at home in the Premiership b) dropped points at home in the Premiership? It won't take you long, it's a short list. I wasn't celebrating it. You asked for reasons why I didn't agree Thelin was "inept". Going and achieving things very few managers did last season, or even in previous seasons, is a strong argument against that. We also were not the only team to lose heavily to them last season. Is going out of the Europa League seemed a failure? We lost to the Romanian champions, who last week won away from home against the Dutch Cup winners. Are we just finding every single negative we can think of here, while dismissing any positives? I didn't actually say that. Perhaps a better example of being mental would be seeing and replying to things that aren't actually there...

The Scottish Cup win. The eleven league games without defeat and sitting top of the table, having beaten Rangers, and coming back from 2-0 down to draw at Parkhead. Surely though you didn't need me to remind you of that? Or are we just saying everything good he did was a fluke? I'd say calling a guy who took a team that finished seventh in the previous season to the brink of third place is clearly not inept. He's made mistakes, by fuck is he getting punished for them, but this is where we'll see what he's really made of.

I totally agree. The most frustrating thing is that we could have said this about all of our managers since McInnes left. I just don't get all the "the manager has been backed" crap to be honest, it doesn't make any sense. Backing doesn't come in the form of money, it comes in the form of time (well, both, but I think you get what I mean!). If we're having to overhaul our squad every year, then it's inconceivable that we should also be replacing the manager every year too. Every manager is going to have a season where at least half of the recruits aren't up to it. If that's on top of having a limited squad already, then time can be the only solution. I think our back line mostly had the workings of a decent set of options, with two players in each role that would work (when we inexplicably decided to bring back Dorrington and not ship out Molloy - do one or the other), left back aside. In the midfield, we were going into this season on a hiding to nothing, with Clarkson probably the only player going through a period of improvement, and several players going into regression, or just maybe not being good enough at all (perhaps Palaversa and Polvara). Similarly, the forward line really only had Keskinen as a young player that you might think would kick on. What we're seeing, then, is absolutely inevitable. If you factor in the 50% of signings that turn out to be gash, and the near zero players in the building that would mitigate that, we were always going to be a poorer side than last year without a huge slice of luck. To date, it seems that we haven't got that luck. How much of that do you apportion to the manager? Well, it seems like a huge portion, because it appears that we've handed Thelin the keys to the club in lieu of us making the right hires, whilst simultaneously forcing him to play entertaining football and have a single "identity", which we saw failing in Robson, Goodwin and Glass in prior years. So he'll get the full blame, and the sack, inevitably. But who is actually at fault here? It's no coincidence that every manager since McInnes (and even McInnes with his 3-4-3 in the final season) has adopted a "style", which they've persevered with to near the bitter end (Robson still playing like Ramadani was there, months after he'd left? Goodwin playing Ramadani as a holding midfielder for months despite him being terrible at it? Glass passing his way into trouble in an attempt to entertain?), changing it up in the final few games when the writing was on the wall. This is being forced upon managers by the "strategy". They must adopt a playing style, and must implement it up until the point they get sacked because it doesn't actually work. No room for pragmatism. No room for adapting to the actual players in the building. All the while, getting no backing from an experienced tecnical/football director, who can question their decisions, make sure the correct balance of player is coming through the door, and act as a buffer between manager and chairman to ensure that we divert to pragmatism when things don't go to plan in the transfer window. We'll never manage to spend our way to success. Our budget is nowhere near high enough to implement a style, because if we get two or three signings wrong, we're down to a level of budget of a Motherwell or St Mirren if they get things right. We have to allow the manager time to be pragmatic, and see if he can adopt that and get himself out of the hole that the club has allowed him to dig for himself.

If you read the bottle, one of the symptoms is seeing Irish defenders on benches, who aren't actually there.

He's just easy to get the run on. Over five yards, he's just too slow for this league. In open play, that's usually okay, because he's got good awareness and positioning, which buys him the yards. On the ball, he's got good feet and drops the shoulder well, which means he doesn't usually get caught either (no more than anyone else). It's just these standing starts he struggles with. Whilst he's got size, he's not a centre half size, and in a one-on-one there's usually only one winner. The answer is fairly straightforward though, the coaching staff just need to make sure he's not marking anyone that is good at attacking corners. There are a limited number in each side, and we have players that are quicker than Nilsen that will cause more hassle to put the attacker off (not necessarily winning the headers). Nilsen almost never wins a header in either box, but he does sometimes get a good block in, it just isn't consistent enough. It's a coaching issue in my opinion, it should be obvious the regularity with which he loses his man. It's easy for pundits to say "he's got to be stronger" or similar, but if we're continually blaming the player then it becomes a coaching issue where they recognise his weakness and ensure he's marking the correct "type" of player. As far as I can tell, the guy that scores lots from corners was being marked by the guy who lets people score from corners.

Almost same team that finished the United game, with a few changes. If Clarkson fit, him in for Nilsen, simply because he's a better player. If not, I would give the nod to Palaversa, more just because I don't think Nilsen's histrionics are helpful. Karlsson central (where he looked okay at Tannadice), another chance for Milanovic, Lazetic (if fit) to see if he can be more involved than Nisbet. The good news is there are options here for Thelin and so many other things to try before we give up.

I like the Clarkson/Palaversa combo. I hope Clarkson was injured and he wasn’t just dropped from the whole squad for tonight. I would stick Armstrong in the number 10 role. Anyway just win the next game or fuck off Jimmy.

I'm prepared to give the system more time, I think I can see what he's trying to do and if he can get it to work I think we will be rosy. Gegenpress is all about the transitions, well to my lehman eye anyway, and coaching the players to be in the right place on those moments as second nature seems to be the trick to getting it to work. If you need to think about it you're already playing catch up. That takes time to coach but there are some encouraging signs, defensively we look far better than we did for large parts last season. Basically, if we are sticking with Thelin we need to trust the process. The upside is though we have a lot of games coming up and that's exactly what this team needs. My hope is once we get a win and few goals we will start being a bit more relaxed in the final third and the ample attacking talent that we have can show us what they can actually do. Time will tell.

Defo stay. I don't actually think he's in any danger at the moment anyway as my feeling is Cormack is committed to the project. He will know this exact scenario happened at Elfsborg and have far better data on the full in's and outs of this period, indeed a sticky spell like this was probably expected from the off. All the chat from Sweden when we hired him was "you need to give this guy 2 years before you see what one of his teams is really all about" and, when you consider the investment we have made with him, I think it would be crazy not to see it out. FWIW I think we will come good under Thelin and I'm happy to give him the season. For me the team at the moment is like an engine running with little to no oil, particularly when we get to the final third. Confidence is clearly becoming an issue now as well to compound things but that would go away if we could just fucking start scoring.

I don't like blaming any individual, but things have gone to shit ever since you unpinned the cup final thread. You took away the feel good factor and now we look devoid of confidence.