BobbyBiscuit

Deloumeaux was signed from Motherwell - granted, that is still in Europe but there is the language barrier and the inevitable quarantine situation to consider... But your point is something which has annoyed me about DM in the transfer market. We look to England and Scotland and England is a bloated market where value for money is very hard to come by. I don't believe we have a scouting network in Europe anymore, think cost was the driving factor in that.

He's clearly better than Taylor, that's just silly to suggest otherwise. Anderson does not make the same sort of mistakes as Taylor, and certainly not on a recurring basis as Taylor. Anderson may not be a footballer in the purest sense, but to suggest Taylor is just because he tries the occasional Hollywood ball is a tad generous. Agree about Heikkinen, but not about Shinnie as a midfielder. He's too frantic in there - he certainly doesn't do a bad job, far from it - but look at how composed Heikkinen was in there, he was able to read the game much better from that position than Shinnie. I think Shinnie got a lot of plaudits because he's not as pedestrian as Jack, and is willing to put his foot in, unlike McLean, but the sum of this was a lot of yellow cards, a lot of huffing and puffing but not a lot of end product.

He wins just about every ball in the air (unlike Reynolds). Thinking about it now he's probably too old now anyway so it's a moot point.

DM 'expects' to get offers from down south for Taylor. Get him out the door, wouldn't be averse to Reynolds following and recalling Scott McKenna from Ayr, but he's just had his loan extended to 18 January. Morris is definitely out in January, what an absolute waste of time he has been. A really poor player and surprise surprise, a really poor signing to boot. Said it a year ago, but we should have gone for Steven Anderson from St Johnstone - the experienced, no nonsense centre half we've needed since our own Anderson had to retire. Murray Davidson - I would have gone for him 4 or 5 years ago but I think that ship has sailed now and as Ten Caat says, he's very injury prone too. I'd also keep Pawlett for now. He gives an option of that burst of pace from a deep lying area which we absolutely need and miss far too often. Would imagine Miles Storey will be out, Maddison likely to be recalled... will we recruit better this January compared to last? I'm not sure I trust him to sort it out properly I'm sorry to say.

Not if it's a draw. One changes, the other doesn't.

We can't continue with Taylor in defence. Has to be Logan O'Connor Considine Shinnie. Anything else is putting us in a position of weakness from the start. The last two matches alone show this, as if the rest of the season hadn't already.

Too subtle for me there Al I'm not sure why he thought some skank in Carluke would know who he is when his own manager doesn't seem to...

Only since the middle of Nov though Al, where was he before that? I find it perplexing we've not seen him this season. Something else must have happened.

Storie story in the down-market papers this morning over an argument he had with a woman in a pub. Sounds like he was acting the fanny, but all-in-all, bit of a non-story. However, he hasn't appeared in the squad since it happened so I would be surprised if he was thrown in tomorrow night seeing as we've seen all of 30 seconds of him this season.

Yip!!

Would he? Birmingham City and Aston Villa fans may tell you a different story to that. They'd probably agree on the non-exciting fitba though.

And another thing... choosing to get into a fight with the cunts when we're 2-0 down is too little too late. Fight them from the start and see where it takes us. Spineless bastards. The players came over and applauded the fans, the only one I could take seriously was Joe Lewis. Great commitment to the cause and made a marvellous save at 2-0.

Horrible day. What a day to try a 3 at the back - and as the graphic earlier in the thread showed - trying a back 3 and choosing not to pick the one mainstay in that area of the park all season. As soon as I saw the line up I said that O'Connor was carrying the can for the cup final disaster in DM's eyes. If DM wants to try a 3 at the back, O'Connor had to be the middle man, simple as that. An off form and out of confidence Reynolds should never have been the choice. Taylor is just abysmal. Never a footballer in a million years. The set up meant Logan was drifting too far in-field at times and sometimes too far forward and Wallace nearly scored as a result of the huge gap he left. Considine gave away so many daft free kicks today and they scored from the first, the softest foul of the day and 100% avoidable. They take a quick-ish free kick and we're sleeping. The whole episode was us not doing the basics properly. Massive problem for us today was Johnny Hayes - seemed to be drifting around the front positions as usual, but then he was receiving the ball on the half way line with his back to goal. That is not, and never will be Johnny's game. Could understand it if we gave him support, he laid it off and then spun his man for the return but that never looked like happening today. The midfield was better than last week in that we actually made a couple of tackles, but on the ball we are too ponderous. Jack drove us on a couple of times today and that's great to see but he has to do that more and still has to offer us more in general. Stockley's header .... dear fuck. That goes in I think we go on to win it as it was a fairly even match between two pretty bad sides at that point. Not sure if it's true, but one of our group today got a text from someone watching the Red TV international feed which said in DMs post match presser he said that if it was Rooney with that header it was a goal. No idea if this is accurate - anyone confirm? If true, that's a monumental fuck up from our manager on a few fronts. A really sad indictment of McInnes though is his lack of a plan B, as we all know. Stockley off for Rooney. Nothing changes. What did he think was going to come of that? But his masterplan, the one that works ALL the time, 2-0 down away from home, let's put Ash Taylor up front for the last two minutes. Has that ever worked? A lot of talk in the Dons end today that McGinn and DM have had a huge falling out - relationship totally broken down. Again, don't know how true it is but there was certainly a fair bit of chat about it. A pretty horrible seven days for Dons fans. This month is 30 years since my first Dons game. I'm struggling to remember such a disappointing week in that time.

I don't remember the McGhee thing, but he did get ripped into Calderwood after the Dunfermline cup game at Pittodrie and he didn't miss the mark then either. Spoke with a lot of passion for the Dons too, he's a good guy Charlie.

what he says is pretty much bang on. But where he says I would take that as a criticism of McInnes, i.e. he's misread his players, not instilled that mentality etc.

I was quite surprised we signed him and even more surprised when up at Pittodrie for the Hearts game I saw more 'STOREY 39' shirts than any other player. He roasted us up in Inverness in the first league game we lost last season, but the remainder of his season was rather subdued iirc. With us signing Storey, Stockley and Burns, added to the 3 Irish men we have, there should really be no excuse for playing players out of position or when they're not on form etc, but McInnes just hasn't used them like that at all.

On Saturday, if we don't press this lot from the front then I would really have to question what DM is doing. They play the ball short pretty much all the time, and they're not very good at it.

Aberdeen not bottling cup finals :'(

Awful decision not to give Hertz a pen from Craig Thomson. Blatant as blatant can be.

For his size, Stockley isn't great in the air, 'far better' is pushing it somewhat. Are we really going to see Storey chucked into things now? I think Storey's time has passed, featured at the start of the season, got the goal v Thistle, seen very little of him since. I reckon he's out the door sharpish a la Calvin Zola and Gregg Wylde in terms of coming in and the manager realising pretty quickly that it's just not going to work out.

Overall I blame McInnes for Sunday, as should DM himself. McLean's performances in the previous two matches were much improved, but let's face it, they were a very long time coming in terms of this season. Two decent performances in 4 months of football is not a very good return, as you say, pish for a while. He probably shouldn't have played against the two Thistles, as he should have been dropped way before then. But yes, that is McInnes's fault - he has his favourites and KM is undoubtedly one of them. McLean should have done more at the first goal. He may not be the only one to blame, but his decision/mistake was so typical of him it is hard not to be wound up by it. We've seen it so often from him, maybe not directly leading to a goal, for it then to cost us in a cup final is quite hard to take, along with the general insipidness of the display overall.

This is the problem though, he makes the wrong choice in terms of tackling (or not to, in most cases) far too often. He's far too easy to play against.

A striker like Rooney is never going to contribute a great deal if he isn't getting chances. If Rooney was missing chances every game it would be concerning from his point of view. But at the moment, he isn't getting those chances at all and that's of greater concern I would say. Maybe he isn't making the same runs he used to or his team mates are not spotting him etc. A bit of time out of the team may well do him good, freshen him up, get a bit of bite back. But the fact remains, he is the best striker at the club and we know he can do it in this league. The team don't seem to be as fluid as they were at times last season, I think this is the bigger issue. Sort that out and everything else will click into place.

It was the most passive performance I've ever seen from the Dons in a cup final and that's what hurts the most. The two we lost in 2000, we were never going to win as we were so abject at the time. The defeats in 87,88, 92 and 93 were really sore but our team fought every inch of the way. We were light years off that yesterday.

He wasn't the worst player for us, that is true. But that single moment was a snapshot of his biggest problem - he's a massive shitebag. And that single moment put us one down in the biggest match McLean has ever played in for us and our biggest match in over two years. McLean has nice technique, I think we all know he can play the game but we don't see it often enough, and when he's not on form he can't even get stuck in for us because his lack of a backbone forbids it. People can say that DM should have sorted out the midfield enforcer role and that is very true, but even if we had Cooper and Simpson in midfield with McLean, I'd still expect Kenny to put a foot in when required - it's one of the basic necessities of a midfielder, in fact, it's just a basic necessity of a professional footballer. I want McLean to be a success here, but I don't think he has enough about him to achieve it.