Football’s greatest intangible asset: the game in hand.
As the Premiership season eased back into motion, that was a resource in which the busy Dons were rich.
Last night’s being the first of three league games in seven days, the arithmetic gave Aberdeen a chance to move back into the all-important top five.
Those chickens, of course, cannot be counted until they have hatched. As they have slithered down the table through the late autumn and winter, Aberdeen’s conspicuous shortage in the games played column has been – along with their progression in the League Cup and their competitiveness in Europe – a plea in mitigation.
But as that number rises to match their rivals’, if the points column fails to keep pace it will soon be fair to ask what has truly been achieved this season.
There is still something about this team that invokes a knot of dread in the stomach. Ninety minutes feels like a long time watching them.
Barry Robson spoke to RedTV after tonight's game at McDiarmid Park.#StandFree pic.twitter.com/puSyKE8ozg
— Aberdeen FC (@AberdeenFC) January 24, 2024
There is a clunkiness in their play and an unreliability in their aura. They find it implausibly difficult to fashion chances for a striker who will take as many as he can be given, yet however untroubled a match their defence is experiencing they rarely seem more than a minute away from total system shutdown.
Barry Robson has identified the lack of training time in the season’s first half as a problem in the drilling of his team, and with the fixtures continuing to come thick and fast for the rest of January – then seven more in the year’s shortest month – he isn’t going to get much more of it in the immediate future.
By the time he finally gets to gather them at Cormack Park to figure out what they should be doing, will it be too late?
