Game of throw-ins

People talk about consistency, but while I agree more of that would be a good thing it isn't the main problem for me. It's that games are turning on events that are outside the players' control. We badly need to re-introduce the concept that a hand ball needs to be deliberate to be a foul. I've no problem with a penalty being awarded if a player sticks out his arms to "make himself big" and the ball hits his hand, but there needs to be an element of intentionality. I can see no other way of doing that than going back to letting referees decide whether in their opinion the player intentionally handled the ball or intentionally put his arms in a position that increased the chance of his team getting an advantage from the ball striking a hand or arm. Guidance about arms in "artificial positions" creates more problems than it solves. I know this means more reliance on referees' subjectivity, something that will always send a shiver up the spine of Scottish football fans who don't support one of two clubs, but it has to be better than what we have now.

I agree up to a point, but I'd like to know whose idea it was for the players to go to applaud the fans after a very poor performance and result. They did the same against St Johnstone at home. I get the reasoning behind it, shows the fans the players still care, but the inevitable outcome is the players get abused and humiliated, which must do their confidence no good and lessen their affection for the club's support. However well intentioned its a crass idea. Let's get back to trooping off the park with your tail between your legs after a bad result and letting management deal with the supporters' frustration.

There's a strong correlation between a manager having got to the point where he's routinely criticising his players in public and his team being in a freefall that can only be stopped by getting rid of him. It's generally the most obvious sign that the wheels have come off. You can theorise that these remarks don't or shouldn't matter and maybe they're indicative of the problem rather than the cause of it, but in my view we're well past the point where action needs to be taken. I'm not sure that a different manager would save us from relegation, but I think he'd have a better chance than Warnock.

If you really think that I have a bridge you might be interested in.

Just as embarrassing are claims I keep seeing from Celtic fans that the dice is loaded against them in the Champions League because the powers that be just want the big clubs to be successful. Excerpts from a Celtic fans' board during last night's match: I hate this competition, now. It’s so skewed towards ensuring the elite reach the latter stages, it’s barely competitive any more. Seems every year we get the "wee team" treatment. Yeah, [the referees] want to keep their job i..so will always rule in favour of the teams with the most money Marks for self awareness, as usual, a solid 0/10.

I don't think it's as mysterious as you think. Most managers are not at lesser clubs in 6 years time, they are out of the game. Both Rangers and Sunderland were high-risk basket cases at the time McInnes was offered those jobs. Both looked very much like "work miracles or get sacked early and put a massive dent in your CV" offers. With Milne in charge at Aberdeen he would have felt he had as much job security as any football manager. He couldn't have anticipated the arrival of Cormack with his naive conviction that you could play gung-ho football and be successful on our budget and that only McInnes's negativity was standing in the way. Since then we've had two managers who didn't last until the end of what should have been their first full season. My own prediction, which I fervently hope will turn out to be wrong, is that Robson will be the third in a row. No doubt McInnes hoped a 3rd offer would come in from a club that was bigger than Aberdeen but not in as deep doo-doo as Rangers or Sunderland at the time of their offers. He could have got lucrative contracts with Rangers or Sunderland and laughed all the way to the bank if he was sacked, but he put the longevity of his careeer ahead of money. When he looks back over the past few seasons I think he'll curse the advent of Cormack, and he'll curse the fact that the success rate of his signings, always a bit of a lottery, dropped in his last couple of seasons. I doubt that he thinks he made bad decisions about Rangers or Sunderland on the basis of what he knew at the time.

When he was interim in the period between Glass and Goodwin, Robson gave an interview before one of the matches that suggested a pragmatic approach. I can't remember the exact words but the gist of it was that you needed to set up a team to get results which wasn't always about playing nice football. I remember thinking at the time that it was a surprisingly honest and/or brave and/or stupid thing to say if he had serious hopes of getting the job.

You do understand that a coward's continual fawning over his bully isn't proof of their excellent relationship?

This is a (more than slight) concern for me. I don't like interim appointments that drag on for more than around 3 weeks. Unless your interim manager does terribly, a bandwagon inevitably starts up to make the appointment permanent, even though nothing on his CV would have justified his appointment at the time he took over as caretaker. Getting rid of a failing manager almost always leads to a temporary improvement in form. Many interims have been given the job permanently on that basis, and while I haven't performed a statistical analysis, my clear impression is that it's usually been a very bad idea. I've nothing against Robson personally, but doing ok or even quite well in a handful of games is far too flimsy a basis for making an appointment as important as this one.

Those examples are different though. People who use "wicked" to mean wonderful are not being ignorant. They know what the word ordinarily means, but are deliberately using it to mean something else. People who use disinterested to mean uninterested on the other hand are just people who are unaware that the words have different meanings. They haven't thought I'm going to be a bit of a rebel and go for the unorthodox here. They just don't know the difference.

I'm entirely familiar with the history of the usage. Whatever the dictionaries say, no educated person would use the word in the second meaning given here.

You entirely miss my point. "Disinterested" doesn't mean the same as uninterested and is not a synonym for apathetic.

From the Oxford Dictionary: Apathy: noun. Lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern.

I don't know any more than anyone else, but my first thought was that he'd presumably be in breach of his contract if he didn't turn up for pre-season training. He may just be here to protect his contractual rights until some sort of termination agreement is reached.

Sadly almost all our "respectable" seasons in the past 25 years have come under two managers, Calderwood and McInnes. Take those two guys out of the equation and our record is utterly dire. One top 4 finish I believe, although I haven't checked. All we've done is revert to standards achieved by more typical Aberdeen managers.

The idea that Christie nearly came here isn't just a rumour, it's been confirmed several times since by McInnes and Christie himself in interviews. He was in a form slump before he left here, something many speculated was caused by career uncertainty. He didn't look like a player who'd be getting a game for Celtic, in fact he arguably wasn't justifying selection at Aberdeen. I remember I happened to be sitting next to a guy scouting for one of the bigger English championship clubs at one match, he was looking at more than one player but we had a chat and talked about Christie. He said his take on Christie was was that he was a gifted player who was known to be in a form slump, so although he was one of the more interesting players on view he hadn't expected to see much from him - and he didn't.

Re "developing" players for Celtic (or Rangers). I always thought this fear is exaggerated. In the first place, we can all agree that there's no point in a loan player coming here unless he's going to improve the squad. Irrespective where he's come from. So let's take hypothetical player A. He's signed for Celtic, but he's not ready for their team and they want to loan him out. He's the calibre of player who will improve our squad and we couldn't afford to bring here as our own player. The two options are: 1. He comes here. He makes a contribution to AFC and goes back to Celtic with more game time and a better player. 2. We decide we're not willing to develop a player for Celtic so he goes to a different club, let's say Hibs. He makes a contribution to them and goes back to Celtic with more game time and a better player. As far as I can see the only real difference between 1 and 2 is that we miss out on the contribution he would have made if he'd been here and Hibs get it instead. Celtic don't lose out. We lose out.

I was scratching my head at that comment though. I think our fans will be happy if we sign a centre back who's a decent upgrade on who's here, but I'm struggling to imagine who we could possibly sign that would come under the heading "exciting".

Must be a good chance Goodwin sees this guy as a replacement for Ferguson rather than players already departed. If so I'll be most pleasantly surprised if he's an upgrade.

We've been irritatingly unlucky with McKenna. Unusually we didn't bite the arm off the first club to make us a good offer, and took a gamble the player and his value would go up. I thought that was the right decision at the time, so I can't criticise the club for it. He then lost a bit of form and value, by which time he was impatient to move on and we were left with little option but to sell for quite a lot less than his value had once been. He's since bounced back and now probably worth double what we originally rejected. That's going to feed into decisions about guys like Ramsey and Barron because we've been given a stark lesson that hanging on to a promising youngster in the hope his value goes up is a risky business.

FFS get a life.

Not what that photograph suggests. Bates has his hands forward and may even be touching the player but it's not a non-contract sport and there's no evidence he actually applied any force. His hands are nowhere near where they would need to be causing that arching of the back. The arching looks like it's caused by the player trying to reach the ball with his hand. More to the point, the referee was well placed to if there was a push and didn't see one. The decision was made by a linesman who was very badly placed to see any push. This also broke the well established principle that officials don't change their minds about penalties based on players' appeals. If you didn't see it when it happened you can't rely on what you thought you might have seen once a player has put new suggestions in your mind. The linesman was a credulous fool who started imagining he'd seen what he couldn't have seen based on pressure from cynical players. That the linesman hared into the stand as soon as the final whistle blew, skipping the normal end of match courtesies, and the referee apologised to Goodwin tells you all you need to know. This was as shockingly incompetent a piece of officiating as I've seen in Scottish football, and that's no small claim because standards are often abysmal.

I'm not sure I would call Bett lazy, but he was an odd character. Usually you won't make it as a pro footballer without a lot of drive. Bett was one of the exceptions that proved the rule. Very gifted but played professional football because it was the easiest way for him to make a good living. You always thought he could take it or leave it. If he'd had the drive he wouldn't have been playing for us - could have played at the top level in Italy or Spain. He just wasn't that bothered.

I hope so. Willie Garner did say on Red TV that he'd spoken to Goodwin before the Dundee game and he claimed he fully expected Ramirez to be here next season. Maybe all that means is that Goodwin's observing protocol until negotiations for the termination of his contract are completed. But it did leave me less certain that he wouldn't be back. I liked Ramirez in the first half of the season, but his head obviously hasn't been in the right place since the wheels started to come off for Glass. I'm willing to believe there might be some reasonable explanation for letting him go but we can't be relying on someone so unreliable as our expensive main striker.