Aberdeen fan view: Jimmy Thelin’s Dons routinely sucked, but brilliant Scottish Cup hoovered up won’t be forgotten

Jimmy Thelin’s Aberdeen tenure was full of contradictions.

Lurching seamlessly between invincible and indefensible. A two-bob side of multi-million pound talents. Black or white with no shades of grey, until the blinding gleam of silver shot arrestingly through the gloom.

His was a team which routinely sucked, only to find the most brilliant of jewels collected as bycatch among the detritus of its hoover bag.

In keeping, Thelin’s departure has been similarly multi-faceted. There is almost universal sadness that it should have come to this, yet unanimous acceptance that it needed to.

That first emotion is partly down to Thelin’s humble, likeable personality, and partly to the one great success which he oversaw.

In delivering the Scottish Cup to Aberdeen, Thelin provided a generation of Dons fans with a moment of elation they had never experienced before, and for that he will forever hold a cherished place in club history.

But history is what he inevitably had to become, thanks to everything else that came before and after that wild Hampden anomaly.

For more than a year, whatever Aberdeen side Thelin selected has been stupefyingly impractical.

There was rarely even the merest sign that they knew what they were actually hoping to achieve, and any wins they did muster – such as the brief but baffling period this autumn when results suddenly began to far outstrip performance – seemed more by accident than design.

Given the money spent on it, that was simply an unacceptable return on the Thelin project, though one which may have been indulged a little longer had there been any hint of progress.

In reality the reverse is true: after months of studying his squad from every angle to try and make the pieces fit, reinstalling a once-discarded formation and seeing it fail to register a shot on Falkirk’s goal was the final, sorrowful confirmation that all hope was lost.

Was Thelin Aberdeen end written from the start?

On reflection, despite justifiable initial enthusiasm, perhaps the end was written from the start.

The achievements which brought Thelin to Dave Cormack’s attention were founded on savage counterattacking against over-committed opponents: a scenario not often available to Aberdeen sides in this league. The right man to turn 18.6% possession into a trophy, but not for the challenges presented in the other 51 weeks of the year.

So the plug needed to be pulled on Thelin’s pool before January saw even more funds poured into it.

Reimagining the squad every season of Cormack’s reign to match the violent ideological swings in the dugout has already been an exorbitantly expensive process; the next demolition and rebuild will be costliest of the lot.

But by starting it now, at least it avoids the purchase of ultimately redundant fixes for an already condemned structure.

Thanks for the memories, Jimmy; they were not in vain. There will always be a warm welcome waiting for you at Pittodrie.

[Source: Press and Journal]