EVERY Aberdeen fan who rejoiced and dared to dream as Jimmy Thelin’s side were on their unexpected, improbable, record-obliterating 13 game winning run at the start of the season was well aware it wouldn’t last forever.
Each Dons diehard who celebrated when their heroes beat Rangers 2-1 at Pittodrie back at the end of October and remained level on points with Celtic at the top of the William Hill Premiership appreciated deep down they would fall behind the defending champions at some stage.
Yet, none of them ever expected Graeme Shinnie and his team mates to suffer such a spectacular slump in form as the one they are experiencing now when they were sweeping aside all before them during the opening weeks, the opening months even, of the 2024/25 campaign.
Aberdeen have, following their 2-0 loss to Motherwell at Fir Park in the league on Sunday, prevailed in just one of their last 12 outings and have allowed both Rangers and Dundee United, two of their bitterest rivals, to leapfrog them in the table.
Thelin, the Swedish coach who was brought in from Elfsborg following a painstaking recruitment process last season, is under intense pressure to halt the slide with difficult encounters with Hearts at home and Rangers away looming.
So what exactly has gone wrong? Have opposing teams figured out how to stop his side? How can he ensure they get back to winning ways? Do they need to have a clear out and strengthen during the January transfer window?
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Steve Tosh, the former Aberdeen player who now works as an occasional co-commentator for Reds TV, believes it is the players, not the manager, who need to take responsibility.
“If somebody had said to Jimmy Thelin, to Dave Cormack, to the Aberdeen fans, back at the start of the season, that on January 6 they would be sitting in fourth place with 34 points they would have taken it,” he said.
“But the run they are on now is certainly a worry, a major concern. Let's be honest, it's not a minor blip any longer. You can see that Jimmy's searching for answers now. But the manager can't be one to take the blame. For me, the players have got to take a long, hard look at themselves.
“I hear all the talk about formations and tactics, but sometimes as a player you’ve got to go over and above. If the manager doesn't want you to take somebody on, sometimes you've got to take somebody on. If he doesn't want you to make a diagonal run, sometimes you've just got to make a diagonal run. It's got to come from the players.
“Some of the decision making recently has been baffling. Even yesterday, when Slobodan Rubezic got sent off. Let's be honest, there wasn't much in it, but Tony Watt has played him for a fool and he's fallen for it. There's something like that happening in each game. It's costing Aberdeen and it needs to be stopped. But there's nothing the manager can do about that.
“Maybe Graham Shinnie's got to run an extra mile within a game. Maybe Dante Polvara's got to make a defence-splitting pass. Maybe Leighton Clarkson needs to try something different. I just think some of them need to put their heads above the parapets more than they have been.”
“You must have a Plan A,” he said. “But you need to have a Plan B because there's no guarantee that Plan A is going to work every time. You've always got to be able to say, ‘Well, that isn’t working, we've got to look for something else’. That does go back to the manager.
“How do I say this in the nicest way possible without it getting misconstrued? I think his Plan B at the moment is changing players in the same formation. I think Jimmy believes that he's got a team that's a 4-2-3-1. Very rarely have I seen him doing anything different.
“Let's be honest, the vast majority of managers are the same. You don’t see Brendan Rodgers, for instance, playing Adam Idah up front with Kyogo Furuhashi in a 4-4-2 very often. Listen, it's easy for me to say. Jimmy that sees them every day in training. Maybe he doesn't believe he's got the players to play a 4-4-2 or a 4-1-4-1 or whatever
“But I just think that during a disappointing run, when you're playing against certain teams, particularly when you're at Pittodrie, you could mix it up and play with a formation that the opposition weren't working on all week.”
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Gary Scott of the ABZ Football Podcast has been pleased to see Aberdeen move to bring in Danish winger Jeppe Okkels on loan from Preston North End – but he would like several new recruits to arrive during the January transfer window and believes that getting in centre-backs and a new striker must be the priority.
“I think the great start perhaps gave everybody an unrealistic view of the competencies and quality within the squad,” said Scott. “We maybe expected a little bit more movement in the summer and players who had underachieved to be moved on. But Thelin was able to get a tune out of guys fans didn’t think had a future at the club. Maybe there's been a natural regression.
“But I think that the Premier Sports Cup semi-final defeat to Celtic (Aberdeen were thrashed 6-0 at Hampden in November) knocked confidence more than people thought it did. Throwing away the win against Hibs at Easter Road in the Premiership in the manner they did a few weeks later maybe damaged confidence too. There have been a few games like that.
“Injuries haven’t helped either. Pape Gueye was really coming onto a game before he was sidelined and Vicente Besuilen, Jack Milne, Dimitar Mitov, Gavin Molloy and Ester Sokler are all out now as well.
“Ideally, I would like to see some new players come in. Particularly defenders. Defensively, we're just an absolute shambles. Rubezic has flattered to deceive and [Angus] McDonald was hooked at half-time yesterday because his performance wasn't good enough. At the start of the window I thought we needed at least two centre-halves, but now I think we probably need three at the very least.
“When we were on the good run we were never defensively secure, but we were getting away with it because we were outscoring teams. Or maybe Mitov would pull off a great save or [Nicky] Devlin would put in a tremendous block. That's not quite happening at this moment in time.”
“There's probably a lot of sliding doors moments like that during the bad run we're on. We're having periods in games where we're doing well, but we're not capitalizing on them. I still think Thelin is learning about his squad, about the characters and their mentality. He's building for long term.”
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Beth Wallace, the disc jockey and radio presenter who covers her beloved Aberdeen for the Big Saturday Football Show that airs on Forth 1, Northsound Radio and Tay FM every weekend, agrees and remains optimistic that fortunes under Thelin will change in future.
“Defensively we've been poor in recent weeks,” she said. “We've probably been defensively poor all season, but because we had such a good start to the season, it maybe went under the radar. A couple of centre-backs are really needed in January.
“There is still good play in there, but we're just lacking a bit of quality on the final ball. The decision-making isn't good enough right now. The performance against Motherwell actually wasn’t that terrible.”
Wallace added: “Do I think Jimmy can turn it around? Yeah, totally. When he came in we were told it would be a transitional period. We expected it to take time for the new style of play to bed in. Nobody expected the run that we went on at the start of the season.
“Obviously the drop-off has been significant. But I think we're kind of seeing that transitional period now. Even when we were doing well, there were inconsistencies. We didn't put in that 90 minute performance. I don't think we've been found out, I think we've maybe found out we’re not as strong as we thought we were.”
