No doubt there have been plenty of pieces published this weekend warning Aberdeen’s new manager about the unattainable standards to which he will be held by a support unsustainably spoiled by history.
Few, if any, will actually have been written by anyone who has ever been part of that support, or whose professional standing relies upon their representing it accurately.
Allow me to redress the balance, by making this obvious point. Were it the prevailing sentiment that the levels reached under Alex Ferguson are those which should be achievable by the squads to grace Pittodrie in modern or intervening times, there would not be a statue standing outside its gates today.
If Ferguson’s footsteps were supposed to be walked in by his successors, those with which he gambolled across Easter Road at the start of his extraordinary journey to Europe’s highest peak would not have been so special as to have been cast in bronze for posterity.
The pleasure of welcoming such a towering figure back to a club which he clearly still holds in great fondness was almost as great as the honour of having received eight and a half years of his phenomenal service. But it did not serve to turn the clock back: if anything, only to highlight how late it had become.
Contemporary Aberdeen managers are measured only against the yardstick of their immediate predecessors, and on the returns generated on the expenditure outlaid relative to their direct competitors.
They will not all succeed even on that basis, of course. But when they fail, they do so based on reasonable performance targets, not because of the lazy notion that the fans of their team are living in a decade through which many of them were not even born.
You are a peerless legend, Fergie. Thanks for everything. But it’s Jim’s team now.
