Let's hope it won't be too big a hurdle for McArdle

There's something appealing about a relatively unknown player signing up with the Dons. In the case of "Big Rory", only the most anoraky members of the Red Army are likely to have heard of him at all as the chances of anybody in the northeast following Rochdale are mighty slim (well, there's probably at least one, because of Gracie Fields if nothing else). He won't be unknown to the manager, of course, because he'll have been scouted by Craig Robertson and one or other of the management team before a signing move was made.
Now we have to wait out the summer to see Rory take the field for Aberdeen and to discover what he's all about. He came over well on his Red TV interview, and the fact that he believes he'll thrive playing in front of bigger crowds is encouraging. Hope he can, hope he'll be a man who will roll up the sleeves and get stuck in and hope that he settles into Pittodrie and makes a positive impact in the dressing room, along with the other new signings yet to come.
Four our part, if he keeps his part of the fitba contract, the Dons' fans will be happy to keep their and welcome him into the special place that is AFC.

A Pilgrim Pops up to Pontificate

So it is the season to be Jim Cummings, we haven't heard from him in a while and once we do, has he actually got anything to say? Is this the same Jim Cummings who was going to turn AFC around when he climbed into the boardroom with promises of an immediate investment - half a million wasn't it? Very laudable for a man with only about 20,000 shares, but he only stuck around six months before undermining his own position and bailing out again.
After that, somewhere along the line, oor Jim picked up enough shares to give him a 13% stake in the Pittodrie Club, but did the P&J ask him where he got them or what he actually paid for them? Did they ask him if his buying so many shares helped AFC in any shape or form?
There are plenty of other points arising from the interview, not least over the questions that the paper claims it put to the club, like whose questions were they in the first place? But let's focus in on the BIG idea - to run Aberdeen FC on the Barcelona model.
Certainly, Barca runs by way of a system where the fans get a vote on some things, but the truth is that nobody gets on their board who isn't a millionaire because they have to put up a huge amount of money to be there. That works fine with a mega supporter base because there will always be a small proportion of wealthy people who want to swan around at the top end of football. Unfortunately although there's potential for big numbers of supporters in the northeast, Aberdeen FC has not benefited from it since the 1950's when there was little else to do on a Saturday and they could get crowds up to 40,000.
Even when Fergie was running a team that was sweeping all before it, the average gate struggled to stay at high levels. Crowds were as big as they could be for games against the Old Firm or Dundee United, but often fell short for the matches against lesser opposition - a factor that played a big part in Fergie deciding to move on.
When people got the chance to put some money into the club in the mid nineties, only a couple of thousand did so and that hardly reflects a desire by most Aberdonians to invest in AFC. One of the excuses at the time was that people weren't prepared to "give money to the Donalds". Later there was a rights issue but many of the then shareholders didn't take it up. Maybe this was prudent, maybe it wasn't, but it further illustrates that trying to get supporters to put more than their ticket money into the football club could be a tall order.
The number of shareholder grew by something like 500 when the Supporters Trust ran a membership scheme where people joining were given a single share in the club. Come time to renew their membership of the Trust? Most of these people didn't stick with it.
And so it goes, there is just no evidence to suggest that supporters would really buy into a Barcelona type scheme. And if they would, are there really enough around to make it work.
Last but by no means least, how many football clubs are debt free, as we'd like the Dons to be? Look around Europe or simply south of the border and you'll see mountains of debt approaching the levels that got Greece into trouble. In Scotland many clubs are on the brink of an abyss. Now's not the time to be hammering Aberdeen FC, now's the time to be helping it and not by high profile pontificating.

Closed Season Reds

Well we can't call it blues, can we? Don't you just hate the closed season? It can't have got off to a worse start (a bit like our season gone by) with having to put up with the aftermath of the Arabs having won the Cup! Gads, they'll be on about it for years. The only good part of that story is that the trophy didn't go to either of the Old Farm, but this was next worst. It would have been good to see Derek Adams picking this one up with Ross County, he is a man the Red Army should monitor closely along with any other young but up and coming managers - you never know....
On to the summer then - We hear that the Dons' pre-season plans are taking shape with up to seven matches in process of being arranged ahead of the big kick-off in August. There'll be three games in Scotland before they go off to a training camp in England where they will play three teams in the vicinity. Then it'll be back to Pittodrie for a home match against English Premiership opposition. All names to be revealed very soon.

The transfer market is deadly dull just now, but players and managers are probably mostly on holiday so it will likely be a couple of weeks before we hear of much to our advantage. At least loads of the young Dons have been fixed up so there is some continuity of the promising brigade, some of whom we should see featuring a bit more next season. What they desperately need, though, is the experienced pros who will carry the club till the young lads are not so young and much more experienced. Bring it on.

Get it sorted Dingus

One full season down and already getting prepared for another one, Mark McGhee has not gathered the (red) army of admirers that he would have hoped for. Wherever he has managed in the past, the pattern seems to have been one of early success in his opening season followed by a backslip in form the next one. Here at Aberdeen we have suffered seeing a terrible first season for the gaffer and must hope that he is going to reverse the pattern of the past by soaring next time round.
One factor is certain, he laboured under the millstone of Jimmy Calderwood's legacy this season and had a real shock when he discovered how difficult things had become. Season 2010/2011, though, will not provide that explanation. The coming season will see a team radically restructured from this and that team will very definitely be Mark McGhee's. The microscope will be out as people monitor the new signings, hopefully not just the same old faces that have roamed the SPL in recent years, but some really new ones, shrewdly scouted and recruited, who will freshen things up.
In his favour, there are a lot of new kids breaking through via the youth development system and unlike Calderwood, he is not afraid to give them a chance. That policy needs to be followed with care for fear of burning out young talent, but if he can husband the process of giving these lads the experience that they need, it should be very productive. The best thing about youngsters coming through is their energy and enthusiasm which can add greatly to the entertainment available when they play.
What will the benchmarks of serious progress be? McGhee needs to get his team into the upper reaches of the league quickly and keep it there, competing at the very least for a European place and striving for the highest possible finish. The other big one is progress in the cups, the fans crave a trip to Hampden and that achievement would go down a treat. All of those embarrassing results of the past few years must be cast aside. Not only would it uplift the Red Army, but it would do tremendous good to the club's coffers which have clearly been under severe pressure thanks to the economic slump and the drop-off in gates because of the state of our team in particular and the SPL in general.
Should Mr McGhee get his planning and preparation right and assemble the kind of team that he knows we need, he can not only help resurrect the Dons, but breathe some life back into a moribund SPL. This is a tall order, but if you get anywhere near delivering it, despite all the difficulties in the way, you will gain a tremendous level of admiration amongst the Aberdeen support and restore the huge reputation that you rightly earned as a player.

Yup, call us biased, but we like it

Well the red one anyhow, the black and white is somehow reminiscent of Dundee United from the sixties and that is really not something we want to recall. The red and white, though, now that is a cool design - both modern but with a tip of the hat back to the seventies round collar that graced the shirt that won us the Cup when Eddie Turnbull was boss and Joe Harper was still a boy.
The changes in strips have become more and more frequent with the passing decades, but this is hardly surprising when you consider how much players (and managers) wages have soared in the past twenty years. Clubs need to find income from as many sources as possible and provided that it is available for the start of the summer, there's nothing better than sporting a brand new Aberdeen top on some far flung shore.
Thankfully the AFC output isn't as prolific as some of the English and a couple of the Scottish clubs. There comes a point where it is no longer making ends meet so much as raking in enough to overpay players so as to snuff out any threat of competition from elsewhere. Oh yeah, and to satisfy the "global brand" that some of them think they have.
Don't ask about shorts or socks, this Blog isn't in the market for discussing such fripperies. Must get round to having a go at footwear sometime, there are people that really need to be knocked into line on colour selections.

Get on with it!

Thank goodness season 2009/10 is over at last. What a miserable experience it has been for supporters, manager, staff, players - everybody (except the west coast press who have loved it). Now we have to go on standby to see what happens in the transfer market.
The usual form with players nowadays is that they will wait till five to midnight on the last day of the transfer window to see where their best offer is coming from. Most of them are too dumb to realise, even if they cared, that their playing the market that way does serious damage to clubs and the game in general. Fans don't want to buy season tickets until they know who is coming to their club, or at least see one or two signings to set the ball rolling. The consequence is that cash flow gets screwed and clubs, already under pressure from their banks (mainly Lloyd's in Scotland) have to struggle to cope with the gap ans that could mean that they have to cut back on budgets and offer players even less in the way of wages and/or signing-on fees.
Waiting till the transfer deadline can also mean that players miss out on pre-season training and won't be properly prepared to play for whoever they do sign on with. Next consequence? Teams can start understrength, fans get pissed off early and don't go as much as they might have done, if at all. That leaves clubs wrestling with a worsening financial position that the players don't care about because they "never think about the financial side." This of course is a lie because football players are very wrapped up in how much they can squeeze from the game. The traditional response to this attitude is that nobody can blame the players for trying to earn as much as possible, but this is a smoke screen. Footballers already operate outwith the normal realms of employment in a little fantasy world of their own where they take responsibility for nothing. It almost puts them on a par with bankers except that they are damaging the football industry rather than the global economy.
Aberdeen seem to suffer from players attitudes more than some other clubs because the are "so far away" from the central belt or for players from south of the border they are in the back of beyond, so hard to get to. Again this is nonsense as Aberdeen is served by a busy international airport and whilst the A90 could be better it will still get you into the central belt in a couple of hours. Of course, if players were really committing themselves to doing a job for Aberdeen FC they would be coming to live in the northeast within easy reach of their place of work instead of their favourite supermarket or night club in Weegieland.
The same applies to managers and coaches. Sure they might have a nice house somewhere else and their families might well be settled wherever that is, but if they are true professionals and truly want to do a good job for Aberdeen, then they should be setting players the example and setting up home in the City.

Getting the Act Together

The last two games and results have been as hard to bear as any we have suffered this season. There are different reasons for that but the underlying reasons are the same. Saturday against Hamilton with their half busload of supporters was just about the worst game on record - it certainly felt that way at the time, with the players failing to turn up individually or as a team. Against Kilmarnock, they looked miles better in the first half but the same old defensive failings hit us hard in the second and as in so many games this season, once the team hit a little adversity they were incapable of fighting back.
They didn't really crumble in either game, the first because they hadn't gelled in the first place and in the second they just couldn't find the nous to do anything about the setbacks.
The entire support is alive with theories of why it has all gone wrong this season, many of which will be close to the mark and many that will be utter tosh. This blog has a view and doubtless it won't be shared by everybody, but it is going into the ether anyhow:
First -The team and squad that was shaped by Jimmy Calderwood was okay up to a point, it was able to grind out enough results to get us into the top six (usually late in the season so that home crowds were falling away which cost the club valuable income). The football, though, was mostly very, very boring. Of course there were games that were exceptions and they can be acknowledged and remembered with some pleasure, but there were not loads of them.
Second - Because that same squad was plodding along without ever being in danger of relegation or of challenging for more than a European place, the players slipped into a massive comfort zone. They had an easy life with the certainty of a steady training regime with few extra sessions and loads of opportunity for a comprehensive social life that now they find hard to break away from. In other words they had it easy.
Third - Because of the above, the players were stagnating, never a good thing in a football club with ambitions to do so much better.
Fourth - When Mark McGhee took over he had completely different ideas about training, quality of football and ambition. He saw that there had to be a massive repair job done and set about doing it as quickly as possible. The trouble was that many of the players, enough to upset the plans for change, could not and would not adapt to a more demanding regime. That underlines the lack of true professionalism in their heads. People can draw their own conclusions about which players were the worst offenders, but we have to trust the manager to weed them out and bring in men who will conform to the work ethic that will be demanded of them.

Football careers are short but very well paid. If a player wants to get the best out of his time in the game he should be prepared to train and practice hard and to a large extent abandon a social life outside of his team-mates. Within the group they need to socialise to a degree for team building reasons, but other than that a quiet night out with the wife or girlfriend should be enough. We don't need to see players dancing on tables at Private Eyes of a night-time or whooping it up at city centre night clubs. There will be plenty time for all that when they stop playing, but if they are at all serious about having a successful career at the top levels of football they should be prepared to do whatever is necessary to achieve the ambition.

This message is especially important for all the young Dons who are now pushing towards first team places. They have grown up with the club so should, in theory, have much a much stronger feeling for it than guys who are brought in for a couple of seasons on their way elsewhere. These youngsters need to be developing a strong work ethic, learning respect and discipline. If they don't show the necessary dedication at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, most of them won't make it in the game. The world of football does not owe them a living, they need to earn it and they will earn it best by mastering their trade and playing the kind of football that people want to see. Not much to ask - is it?

Dear Mark

Thirty years ago today a large part of the Easter Road pitch was beginning a journey up the road to the northeast of our great country to be lovingly planted in pots or gardens hither and yon. The cause of that migration was the team that you played in that very day, a team that owed much of its success and certainly the success to come, to lion-hearted youngsters who had been developed at Pittodrie either from youth or after being signed at a young age from other clubs. The other string to the bow was a posse of experienced players who cared about their club and helped the younger lads to become the players that they were.
Like that pitch, many of the thousands of Dons fans who were there that day are no longer with us. Some have gone to the terracing in the sky and some have stopped coming to Pittodrie because they cannot bear to watch the performances that the current players have been serving up. There are players at the club just now who clearly don’t give a shit about it, but they were Jimmy Calderwood’s mistakes and most of them won’t be with us next season.
Nobody expects you to win a championship these days, although it would be nice to at least be having a go. That doesn’t mean that it is not possible, but it would take a long time to build a side to do it, a side based on our own kids and some choice signings that you might bring in to do the on field coaching and mentoring that is desperately needed.
You come across as a very passionate man; it must frustrate the hell out of you that so many of your players are not showing even a fraction of that passion. You will certainly know how frustrated the supporters are with what they have had to watch for much of this season. You must know that what we all want to see first and foremost is a team that is out there really trying to do something worthwhile for Aberdeen FC and for the fans.
We have been reading how you have a comprehensive list of players on your radar who you believe will make a difference. Please, please, please try to bring in the right kind of guys; men who care about their jobs, about the game and who can grow to care about Aberdeen if they don’t already. If the supporters see that happening, see honest endeavour week after week, then they will respond and help you see the job through. We all know that you are faced with a mammoth rebuilding task, so few will expect world beaters right away, but hey - create the right environment and maybe some of these bright upcoming kids in the youth system will save you that search in a couple of years’ time.

Dear Stewart,

See above and then consider this: You are evidently the only man around the northeast able to help Mark with his task. You are right to preach that our club should function within its own means, as should all other clubs in senior football. But we are in an exceptional time. The team urgently needs to be reinforced with some good, strong characters that will carry it through the rebuilding process until we have enough quality youngsters flowing into the squad to make signing much less necessary and who might well bring in much needed revenue in transfer fees. You need to help the manager now so that he can produce a team that will build the excitement of the northeast public and take us all on the journey to the new stadium. It doesn’t need to be megabucks, just enough to secure an extra player or two who will make all the difference without breaking the wage structure. Don’t let our club fall for the sake of the price of a new house.

Ghost Football

The Aberdeen team that played at Pittodrie yesterday was a mere shadow of a football team, a spectre that was barely there in spirit, let alone body. The way that they lost goals to Hamilton, they might as well have been chasing shadows too for all the effect that they had.
There were honourable exceptions, as you might expect, not least Duff and Young who battled away, and the three subs who came on looked like the had the energy to contribute something but it needs a whole team to be up for it to achieve anything. Collectively the team was rank, with one of the worst offenders being Mulgrew, who somehow avoided stick whilst Mark Kerr - who never hid, was always involved and always made himself available for a pass, was mercilessly hounded.
Yes, Kerr misplaced passes through the game, something he really shouldn't do and needs to work on wherever he plays next season, but he did not deserve the barracking that he got for much of the second half. What player is going to improve his performance if he gets pelters from his own fans?
Kerr is the most prominent example this season, but loads of our players have been subjected to baying from a fair few people in the crowd. What makes people think that they will get players to play better or to care for the club and the shirt if they are under the cosh of abuse all the time? Do people think that the manager and coaches can't see it when a player is screwing up or under performing? Do they not think that these might be the best ones to do something constructive about it? Aren't they the ones paid to sort it?
Here's a wee story about a hugely successful Dons' player of the past who got the negative treatment: Back in November 1970 Davy Robb said: "I've always gone on the field to give 100% effort - but the crowds have never given me the same measure of support. It doesn't worry me now, but we often speak in the dressing-room about how the spectators tend to single me out for criticism." Lucky for us that the Brush didn't let it get him down, because he went on to give tremendous service to the Dons, scoring 96 goals in the process including the winner in the 1976 League Cup Final. Imagine if he had decided to ply his trade elsewhere because of the duffers who gave him stick.
This has been a lousy season with some lousy performances flecked with great football here and there and of course we don't want to go through that again, but surely there is more chance of a stronger team if people get behind them. Criticise by all means, constructively though - why try to tear apart that which you love? Maybe the boo brigade on the terraces were ghosts too, ghosts like to boo.