bloo_toon_red

Haha, exactly! LOLoperative insurance cup!

If managing Aberdeen FC was a game of Bullseye, then McGhee is definitely the non-dart player.

What a stupid, stupid idea. We really shouldn't be surprised at all. The enormous financial gap between the SPL and the first division is what is strangling the game. The fear factor of relegation at a time when most SPL teams are financially on the brink will actually be increased if two teams are to be relegated. The current set-up is in crisis mode, and no amount of hare-brained pandering to the Old Firm with splits etc will change that. This can be eradicated by bringing all the full-time teams in Scotland into one division, and let the part-time teams play in regional leagues below, their days in the sun against the big teams coming via the cups. Not SPL1/SPL2, just SPL with 16/18/20/22 teams. Bring in all of the clubs who could reasonably fill a 6,000 stadium on occasion (as the current stadia criteria dictates). No promotion or relegation to the SPL while teams can concentrate on getting the grass roots sorted, without the spectre of financial meltdown over their shoulder. Neil Doncaster - meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

Not to worry lads, when Pawlett and Vujadinovic come back at xmas we'll have a full squad to choose from and we can write this off as a period of transition. Can't you see that the whole of last season was a period of transitional transition, and only now we are in the real period of transition. With failure to win in 6 eminently winnable SPL matches, transition has never felt so good.

I think it could be suicide to drop them both. He's already chopped and changed his mind with the goalkeepers and to comletely change arguably the most important unit of the team would show weak management. Personally speaking, Ifil and Considine played reasonably well together at the beginning of last season so I'd go with the two of them, perhaps with Jack or the young lad Robertson at left-back. It's the perfect opportunity for McGhee to prove he'll give young players a chance when the time comes.

Aw fuck, I wrote her a letter last week over my anguish that none of you cunts care for Aberdeen FC anymore.

The Black Keys - Brothers. Not as good as good as Attack and Release, but it's still dirty, yeah!

So what's the alternative? It doesn't look like the SPL member clubs would ever vote to let them go. So do we need a change in the constitution of the SPL, or do we change the competition to make it more competitive? Is it conceivable to abolish the league system as we know it, which has become dull, in favour of a Champions League style play-off system? Plucked right out of the air - two leagues of 8 or 10, play each other home and away (once), top two in each league move forward to semi-final and final to contest who are Champions. It's unconventional, but potentially pretty exciting. Could the system be changed so that the league retains all gate receipts and that the prize pot is then shared out at the end of the season depending on placings? It all gets a little bit MLS, but maybe they're onto something.

Let's get one thing straight here - this thread isn't about me trying to bring about change via a revolution or whatever, I'm trying to gauge if everyone has all given up on AFC, if there is a real desire for us to get back to the top, or if we have all decided that there are so many other things that we want to spend our time and money on that we don't care anymore, and if that apathy is going to continue to spread to the next generation and the generation after that. That's what the original post was, and it was to stimulate debate and stir something up, not to "start a revolution" as some of you appear to now be misunderstanding. From the general responses here, it seems that everyone appears to be generally satisfied to accept lower standards, and that those who don't, have already walked away. It's as if the ones who can't accept the fall in standards, the people who the club probably need more than the happy clappers, have given up on AFC and possibly also Milne's inability to change things. You are most probably right. When is this Henry McLeish review finally published and what are we expecting?

So you don't believe that attempting to hurt the board could conceivably bring about change? Do we as a support want change, or are we happy to continue to exist in our current state? If we do, aren't we just accepting falling standards?

This board has proven it is incapable of generating more support, so in effect are you advocating more of the same? Surely some fresh ideas are needed.

To start off with, use our voices and our pockets, there are plenty of ways to get the message across. Return of season tickets, walk-out protests, match boycotts, no club shop purchases, press campaigns, anti-Milne demonstrations, basically a boycott of all things AFC. No season ticket purchases next season. Like I say though, if there is no desire for it, then fine. But surely we are agreed there is something endemic within the club that is rotten and we're resigned to a continued era of misery and failure. And I'll have my answer to my original question.

Neither would I. I'm trying to stir up a bit of passion and debate among what seems to have become a very dull message board, where everyone just seems to go along with concensus and agree with each other.

Well I hope that people do take offence because maybe they'll be forced to realise that they do care enough to do something about it rather than moan on a messageboard and expect someone else to do the dirty work. If not, fair enough, then I'll realise I support a team with supporters that collectively have no passion.

The truth hurts

I'm not forgetting nor ignoring anything. I am asking the question if anybody cares enough to do something about it, so can we have less of the word twisting and patronising eh? Any meaningful campaign against Milne needs to be relentless, not just a couple of guys shouting on Pittodrie Street, but eventually of course the numbers would need to reach a point where a real message is delivered. In the stadium, out the stadium, in the press, in the public domain. We need to make his position completely untenable. Or are we as a support simply just destined to be perennial moaners but have no real desire to strike at the heart of the club and get things changed? That would be extremely sad, and our club will continue to die a slow painful death while we have thousands of bottlers following our team.

No offence has been taken, because you seem to have proven my final point about a lack of desire to change anything. Everyone seems happy to moan about it but nobody is really that interested in changing it. I'm talking about the fans solidly uniting against Milne and making it clear in no uncertain terms that we want him out. Nothing to do with money or having wealthy backers: These things happen one step at a time, you can't just skip to the end game. Milne I am sure realises he is unpopular, but just not how deep seated it really is. He needs to be made to realise.

Our hands are only tied insofar as Milne has us all over a barrel with his underwriting of the mountain of debt, which he has allowed to accumulate under his miserable tenure as chairman of Aberdeen FC. We as a club are now going through the leanest spell in our post-war history. We can no longer lay claim to be the so-called third force and our board has made one bad managerial appointment after another. The debt mountain that Milne created meant that following our one season of relative financial success under his stewardship (07-08), no funds were re-invested in the playing staff. The success unsurprisingly was not compounded and the players signed in 2008 were all effectively sub-standard as a result. Following a period of relative stability under the management of JC, Milne now appears to have extremely low standards for the club. It is now no longer a case of "well we could get rid of him but who'd take over?", I think the time has come for us to force him out. I just don't think the fans have the bottle to do it. We've become apathetic slaves to his regime. Time to wake up everyone.

It's not just about spending money, it's about doing what is right to win back the AFC support, as mentioned in the original post. If we are not going to be finishing 3rd in the league, we need to know that the players we sign are going to add value. It was disclosed that we received a transfer fee of £600,000 for Lee Miller. As far as I know we didn't pay any transfer fees this summer, probably a couple of big signing-on fees instead. But it would be good to be trying to sign players that we could conceivably move on for a big fee later. Yoann Folly could be that player, but in my opinion there was one that got away this summer. One player that came up for grabs this summer was Scott Arfield, who eventually went on to Huddersfield for £300,000. Now perhaps he had his heart set on a wage rise and a move to the third tier of English football, but wouldn't it have been great to think that we were at least making an effort to sign a player who is one of the most talented young players in the country? Wouldn't it be great to think that our board was trying to be creative in this regard? Arfield, with the right coaching and mentoring could very easily have become a £1m+ player and a full international. Hibs paid an undisclosed six-figure fee for Anthony Stokes, only because they knew they would get that money back for him. Stokes and de Graaf are the only two players Hibs have paid a transfer fee for in years. Hibs fans knew they were getting a good, exciting player in Stokes and it perpetuated the feel-good factor there, something we have been lacking for a long time, arguably since we signed Aluko. At this juncture, AFC is not going to be competitive and we have to resign ourselves to being a selling club. So while we try to come to terms with that, let's try and deliver some excitement on the way. Who is the current poster-boy of AFC? Aluko? Hartley? I want us to have eleven poster boys in our team every week.

How do we get the excitement factor back then? 1) on the pitch? 2) get things sorted at board level? 3) what happens to the SPL and general set-up? 1) Only really going to be sorted with radical shake-up of the entire club. The youth policy is a good start, it also needs a manager who has the correct attitude, players who have the necessary character to fight for AFC and a board structure that is wholly oriented towards success and not mediocrity for the sake of balancing the books. Our club has become so absolutely risk averse that they seem to adopt the policy "plan for the worst and hope for the best". To save the club from extinction, that's fine, but football for most is a form of escapism from the everyday mundane, a hobby/pastime, but it's as if our club is run by the tory government. 2) I think we (all of Scottish clubs) need to go to a German system of ownership, fans need to obtain greater control over their clubs and get the boardroom cronies in their place - Milne can continue to use AFC as a vehicle to further his own business interests if he likes, but he'd then be answerable to us and not the other way around. 3) I think we need to radically shake-up the SPL, and I'm not talking about simple league reconstruction, I think there needs to be something completely new. A move to summer football for a start and a compulsory changeover to 4th generation surfaces (that is the grass/artificial weave which is being used more widespread as the new pitch at Wembley), a play-off/group stage/knock-out aspect to the league set-up, no more having to play every team 4 times over a league season, league cup to be abolished in favour of an U-23 competition/league.

When I was a lad, a tiny wee lad, I remember the anticipation and excitement of getting my first Dons strip - xmas 1988 and I remember the celophane wrapping, the static coming off the shirt as I took it out of the plastic, and the never-wanting-to-wear-anything-else-ever-again feeling. I remember my granny taking me down to the old club shop in the basement of Crombie Sports in Bridge Street and being awe-struck at the red and white paraphernalia on offer. As a boy it would make you feel ten feet tall going out to play with your pals in your team's new strip. Every other summer from there on in I would have saved my money to buy the next new strip, home and away, maybe the odd track suit, schoolbag, windcheater chucked in as well. Has our football club lost its lustre, or maybe more pertinently, have the people who run it lost sight of the reasons why they do it? The club of course has to ride the financial storm but is years and years of abject misery on the pitch how we pay for keeping our club's head above the water? We always hear of "unrealistic expectations" but nothing could be more inaccurate. Almost every other club in the SPL has had more relative domestic success than us over the last ten years through cup wins, cup final appearances. It is little wonder that our fans are typecast as being miserable when we have little to cheer about and then we are told we have to "live within our means" all the time, whilst watching the likes of those big-spenders Falkirk and Dunfermline reach cup finals? Football isn't played on financial accounts and balance sheets. Good football clubs employ good football managers who in turn know how to get the best out of their players, regardless of how much these players cost or are paid. If we as fans felt that our players were giving their best every week then there would be no real problem. Time after time, our managers fail to get the best out of the players. The excitement seems to have come more from not knowing from one week to the next if we are going to lose at home to Hamilton or beat Celtic at Parkhead, rather than any level of consistency or expectancy. Stewart Milne has presided over these lean years employing one dud manager after another. The best appointment of his, Jimmy Calderwood, did of course reach the end of his shelf life, if that shelf life is judged on requiring a new man to take us to another level. I think we wanted to be able to look on McGhee's appointment with the view that "Calderwood had taken us as far as he can", and that McGhee could move us forward and give us back some excitement. It hasn't happened, and despite him having signed a handful of decent players this summer, I don't think it is going to happen either. I do think we have the nucleus of a good squad with the likes of Aluko, Fyvie, Paton, Folly, Hartley, Considine, Pawlett and a few others, but McGhee doesn't fill me with excitement or anticipation that he is going to be the man to whip us all into a frenzy and take us forward. I know we are not Barcelona and we are not necessarily a hugely attractive proposition to any aspiring football manager, I know we also can't afford to keep sacking managers on a whim, but if there is anything that can fire up our support it is a sign that those in charge care about what is happening. If they take their eyes of the debt and the fucking new stadium for one minute, they will see a once proud club that formerly showed their wares in the most civilised of good company now flashing their knickers down on Regent Quay and getting no takers. I don't believe that McGhee has been set a high enough target. Nobody seems to care enough to do what is necessary - speculate to accumulate if only for one transfer window and give the manager a remit to make top 6 and the cup final or die. Set the target and achieve it. Fail and face the consequences. The heart of the issue is that football teams exist to compete, and ours just doesn't. I am worried, really worried about where our club is going. I am worried that if and when I get round to getting my boy his first Aberdeen strip, if he'll be as excited as I was, or just plain embarrassed.

Manager lives and dies by results. We haven't had anything that I'd regard as a "good result" this season. We've dropped points in games we should be looking to take points from (Kilmarnock, ICT) and we haven't taken anything from "tough" games to prove we're anything other than an average SPL team (Dundee Utd, Rangers). We haven't improved as a team under the new manager and you only need to look down the road at John Hughes getting sacked to see how far our standards have slipped in comparison to others. In other words Hughes' record is unacceptable yet McGhee's is fine!? Hibs are financially secure but their playing staff budget is no better than ours and their board is generally patient with their managers.

"go to" versus "play for" Mulgrew got found out pretty quickly. Diamond would probably be pretty happy to "go to" Celtic for example, and on present form I would be delighted for him to "play for" them.

When Diamond came back into the team for 07-08 following Anderson's departure (remember, Considine was preferred to him for most of season 06-07), he showed fleeting glimpses of the promise he had shown before. By and large, he had a decent, if unspectacular season. Considine was the more composed of the two that season, but Diamond's swashbuckling style earned him the plaudits, rightly or wrongly. Similarly (to an extent) at the beginning of last season, Considine paired with Ifil was a pretty successful partnership until Considine's injury. The watershed for me came with the QoS semi-final where Diamond had a shocker and his performances the next season (08-09) were pretty ropey. He seemed to get away with it though with a team on the decline. I personally wouldn't be sorry to see him go. For the simple reason that he wont sign for a better team than us. If he signs for, let's for arguments sake say, Hibs or Dundee Utd, would our strikers really be fearful of coming up against him? I would view him as a bit of a bombscare merchant and would be pretty confident of our chances of tearing him a new one.

The defender once labelled as a future Scotland stalwart has stagnated. Even at the tender age of 24, his 200 appearances for the Dons mark him out as an "experienced" player. Why can't he just screw the nut and concentrate on becoming a better defender? Maybe he never was one in the first place and that his defensive colleagues bailed him out on numerous occasions. What is the future, if any, for Zander Diamond at AFC?