The Hulk

Leven appears to be trying to get the players to control the play a bit more rather than going aimlessly long. The defence has tightened up. This bit has come at the cost of less creativity from midfield, a slower build-up. The tempo is slower but it gets the players to get their foot on the ball more. Problem with our midfield is that it is largely dysfunctional due to the people in it. Barron offers very little in an offensive sense at a time where we need people to grab a game by the scruff of the neck. Shinnie does what Shinnie does. Clarkson wants to be creative but he has limited options to play through; with Duk wanting to only play for the first 1/3 of the game and McGrath not a natural winger, the decision-making on and off the ball from the wide areas is poor. So I think Leven is succeeding to at least implement a consistent system of play by utilising the unbalanced squad as best he can to grind out results. It might be time for people to admit that this whole "we've got the players" isn't really true. We need better players in every single position. We severely lack a box to box midfielder who can influence the game. That for me would be the start of a successful re-build. If Thelin comes in and implements his preferred style we'll probably need two of them.

The clubs are paying for the VAR setup and clearly not getting value. The only way this gets improved is for all clubs, or at least a sizeable majority, to come together and reach a consensus. In my view VARs should be given a time limit of say 30 seconds to find a clear & obvious error at goals & by extension it is the time it takes for play to resume. Could alternatively say that play always resumes after a “goal” and then only be pulled back if necessary/VAR finds something. VAR could be refined to only be used to check for offsides and clear & obvious infringements in a penalty area, or for off the ball violent conduct incidents. Everything outside the box the ref is completely in control of. Accept some mistakes will be made/things missed. I also think in this day & age there must be wearables that can be developed a la hawkeye that can detect an offside player.

I was involved in a match recently with an almost identical situation. My team was defending and an attacker receiving a diagonal ball was a good 2-3yds offside. The ref didn’t give it. It didn’t lead to anything so all was good. At the end of the match the ref came up to me & explained that the latest interpretation of the offside rule suggests that if the defender nearest the offside player made an attempt to play the ball (as they did in my example), it’s not offside. I found this peculiar but I was pleased the ref gave an explanation. So using that example, even if Angus was offside (I don’t think he was), if the Livi player nearest him makes a motion as if trying to play the ball (looks like he made the slightest attempt), then Angus can’t be offside. Any ref-minded folk able to confirm this?

Tina Turnip’s biggest hit.

Clean sheet; 2 goals conceded in open play from Leven’s 5 games. Have faith; this guy could be the second coming of George Graham. 😃 In all seriousness, maybe, just maybe, Leven is recognising with our defensive frailties that we’re just needing more discipline and we have to dig deep with this squad to grind things out. With that we’re sacrificing bodies up the pitch to try & keep shape. Just an educated observation. For me, we get the win next week and then throw a couple of the kids in for the rest of the league season, let the boys Carroll and Boyd loose, also the left back Hamilton.

As you know, I coach in girls/womens football and can say that this is true. The national governing body in grassroots girls football makes the ADJFA look like MENSA. I could tell lots of tales about how dim-witted they are but I'd be here all day. I've come to a certain conclusion recently about why that is as well and while I won't put it down in black and white, it wouldn't look out of place in this thread... It comes from a good place though; the problem is that they need to be patient. The womens football we see now is based on a limited participation pool. The numbers in girls football has been growing by about 30% each of the last 5 years. What I see is better adults beginning to get involved in coaching and in turn making the players better. It's a cyclical process and my opinion is that when the girls of say between 2010-2013 dob start to get into the adult game in 4-8 yrs time the womens game in this country will improve massively. Goalkeepers are a problem because there's just so few that actually want to be goalies, so again a limited participation pool. The national team is regressing because we had a very good crop of players 4-5yrs ago and haven't supplemented the squad with better players; all the while the national team manager is trying to coach them like a club, which just isn't working. He hasn't been sacked because the decision makers in girls & womens football are too soft (see my second paragraph). So while it isn't the great spectacle we would all like it to be (I think the English Women's Super League is a good standard; I spent an evening flicking between Man Utd v Arsenal and Dundee v Morton and the women's game was far better to watch), I think when it professionalises itself (bear in mind there are only three full time clubs in Scotland) it'll be a more level playing field and a better overall standard.

@aberdeen1970 that’s correct, hence the “if not, why not” in my post. The people in charge at Aberdeen have good intentions but they don’t know what they’re doing. If they did, they wouldn’t need an external report to tell them that they need a technical director. Let’s also remember they sacked two analysts in December, and Jordan Miles left because his work wasn’t being taken seriously.

What @RDS is saying is pretty muchon the money. Virtually every EPL & Championship team is doing things this way as are half the teams in our league. It’s all about being able to measure performance. It isn’t only about scouting & recruiting from other clubs; it’s also about benchmarking and improving your current squad too; eg “why is this player not performing to the levels we expect based on the data? And if not, why not?” Are the coaches working properly, why aren’t they improving the players, and ultimately the player trading model, and wage bill. What we traditionally called “scouts” are now more & more called analysts. The “if not, why not” line is very relevant to what AFC is(n’t) doing properly.

Interesting for me that we’ve only conceded 2 goals in open play (3 overall) from 4 games during Leven’s spells, either side of spells when we struggled to keep out less than 2 a game. Riding our luck at times but we appear more solid at the back.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the report will have highlighted the fact that decisions should be made by people qualified to make them, and that there is a lack of qualified people in the club. This also comes from a place of me being of the opinion that if there was already a sporting director in the club worthy of the name that a report wouldn’t even have needed to have been commissioned. So for your final sentence to be true, we all know it’s a test of the ego. Burrows should be front & centre as CEO and not Cormack, but he has hitherto been unable to help himself. He cares too much what people think of him. The day he lost me was when he got that photo with a big cheeser in front of the boy’s grave. No class. He wants to be loved. For me he should be preparing to transfer or sell part or all of his shareholding at the end of the season.

Yeah, people would rather ignore the reality and deal in gossip, it’s like the mannie version of these gossip magazines. One thing’s for sure though, AFC are taking far too long and handling it badly, and from the experience I’m personally aware of, it is not surprising in the slightest. It’s now become a bad club, when so many past players and staff would have told you it was a good club. There is one common factor there and this is why I can’t bring myself to recognise all the so-called good stuff that has been done on the non-football operation. It’s like hitching a massive fuck-off caravan on a car that you refuse to service. “The car is falling to bits but aye look at the caravan”.

I think folk are a bit insatiable about this, they don’t really understand how this whole thing works. There’s so many bits to the process of recruiting coaching staff that there can be a “rejection” at any part of the process that might not be an outright rejection of the “the job’s yours/no I don’t want it”. A couple of posters in here will know very clearly how this works due to a personal experience someone “close to me” had, which I alluded to in a post a couple weeks ago. So I’m prepared to believe that rather than outright rejections, as in actually offered the job, candidates are simply withdrawing from the process because certain staff at Aberdeen Football Club are just really quite poor at their jobs, and disrespecting the thought process and “baggage” that every single candidate has which affects their own decision-making.

Not sure about this one; his Vietnamese agent was asked about his availability, Nga Kenh Minh.

Good post. It's very difficult not to equate Miller the footballer with Miller the person. I'm trying to say that Miller the person, a Glaswegian, knows and understands the north-east mentality because he has lived and experienced it. Professional athletes need all to be winners because that's what it's all about. And here's the thing; I don't think we have accepted mediocrity and I don't think we ever will. We get this "know your place" crap rammed down our throats all the time from the west coast footballing majority. Rangers fans have unrealistic expectations. They have to win every game and sack their manager when they finish second. Celtic fans have unrealistic expectations. They are giving Rodgers pelters even when they're still top of the league. Do we ever see anything written about Rangers or Celtic fans having unrealistic expectations? I can't remember ever seeing this. People have different thresholds of what they find acceptable but in my view the general level for expectation at Aberdeen is perfectly fine. We want to be competitive at the right end of the league, take a scalp as often as possible, challenge for cups, and ideally be in Europe every year. For a median league position since 1970 of 4.36 (good post above), we are entitled to expect to be top 4 and by being a top 4 team we should be in semi finals and finals and getting a win now and again. That is not unrealistic by any measure.

FTH