Ask and you will receive. After a slowish start to the season, it all clicked together, the new signings were magic, McInnes had created a brand new exciting team for the season. And we were still in Europe. Happy days!

And so it came to pass (unlike the team) the European Game Day meme was tucked away for another year. At least.

I started messing around with pretend Excel, pretend analysis. As Emperor Hirohito once famously noted, it was all going well until the nuclear explosion.

Thankfully away from Aberdeen FC for a bit, Juventus posted this astoundingly tasteless meme (minus my red text). So I pirated their meme. Neoliberalism is destroying football, and the planet.

If only we Aberdeen supporters had a default happy place to go to when times were tough. Well did I mention the eBook on Gothenburg? A welcome respite from issues in the present. https://thedandydons.com/gothenburg-83-the-fans-stories/

Despite it all appearing very much pear-shaped down Pittodrie way, Big Sam just keeps on banging in the goals. At the time of writing, the Saminator (?) is on approximately 2000 goals for the season. And we’re still in October. The first part-cyborg footballer is a hit.

It takes a spectacularly strong mentality to score goals when a team is playing poorly. Just like it took an incredibly strong mentality to find his form while the supporters have written you off, and a particular element are actively trying to destroy you.

The announcement of the naming of the Cormack training facilities thang. Fair play if you pay for it, you can name it anything you want, and Cormack may be pulling a fast one. SAF is opening it, ‘surprise’ gotcha! But so many important people associated with Afc have nothing named after them. Particularly, this fella.

Can we please, please, please, please just retire the number 6 shirt. So while he is still with us, he can see one of the things (still holding out for Union Street becoming Willie Miller Street) that will be done to remember him, forever. After they’ve gone, it’s too late! I hope they all live to 120, but…

Also the Hall of Fame, really? Might it be an idea to put them ALL in that deserve it, that are over the age of 50. Then invite a few each year to the big dinner. Because it’s for them, not for us. And the three stands at Pittodrie named after nothing… and no Afc shirts available in the centre of Aberdeen. Cheers, Stewartie. You’re some guy.

And I-I-I will always… from the book, that took me a month, that’s free. That the P&J didn’t reply to three separate emails to three separate employees to see if they’d take a look. I was a P&J employee many years ago. I did mention that too. Thanks but no thanks, would have been Dandy.

There’s a time for criticism, there’s a time for anger, there’s a time for contemplation, and there’s a time for picking a side. There are things I’m not happy about, but still 100% team McInnes.

One of the most wonderful aspects of football, no matter how bad things can be, there is a little light somewhere, a piece of magic, something special. There is a lot to come this season.

Douglas Ross, Conservative MP for Moray. He has as much skills as a linesman, as he has empathy.

So here’s to us kicking on after the international break. Which interestingly enough, with Scotland bouf, and clearly it not being Steve Clarke that’s the problem, should be some anxious people at the SFA and SPFL. It’s ALL their fault. Sack the lot of them.

Here’s tae fitba, beer and Aberdeen! Stand Free.

If ye wanna browse the t-shirt shop. Or the poster shop https://thedandydons.com/posters/.

To Hampden, in a potentially season defining, season saving, season making… it’s a big game. And without being over confident or puting any sort of a hex on things, (touches wood, burns effigy, kills first born) Neil Lennon is not Brendan Rodgers. It’s still Rodgers team, they are still very good, they are still massive favourites, they are still playing at home…

Whatever happens it has been a season of transition. The stability of Hayes, McGinn, Rooney, that carried us through so much of the McInnes era, needed to be replaced. We’ve been unlucky with injuries to GMS, on the other hand we were very lucky to have so few with Jonny Hayes considering the kicking he took in games for us. He was the one who could dig us out of problems when others were off form.

On Sunday, oh to be able to tell them to stick their treble, treble up their arse.

Once a Don, always a Don…

So farewell and all the best Mark Reynolds. A very important part of a very good Afc era. Perhaps a little like Doug Rougvie, may have suffered from having academic aspirations. Where more purely football orientated players may have gotten more credit. When Ryan Jack got the captaincy and the central midfield position he never grew into, it was Reynolds who appeared from the outside a more natural and deserving captain after Russell Anderson retired.

When times are hard, and results aren’t going our way, in the words of Anthony Soprano, ‘What are you gonna do.’

In what has been a largely poor season, by recent standards, can’t help thinking something bigger is being built behind the scenes. When those training facilties are ready, and all that talent coming through…

Many years ago I worked in the then Skean Dhu Altens. My first full time job. On the breakfast menu was an ‘Aberdeen roll’. Which was a rowie/buttery. As no one knew what an Aberdeen roll was from the menu, you had to try and work out where the hotel guest was from to give them the answer. You appear to be local ‘rowie’, you appear to be of the North East ‘it’s a buttery’, you appear and sound like a US oilman. ‘It’s a north east speciality which…’ Invariably every feckin’ time you’d get it wrong. So after giving the long international explanation, you’d get someone with an American accent with an irritated look on their face asking ‘is it a rowie?’. Because they’d lived in Aberdeen for a feckin’ decade.

As Andy Considine might be reaching the end of his time at Aberdeen as a player, it reminds me of how sad his testimonial match was in terms of the size of the crowd. Can’t help thinking had it been now, he’d really get a crowd. Although opposition is important, and timing, his and Langfield’s testimonials had very poor turnouts. Which was a shame. There also haven’t been any testimonials since. Maybe there won’t be more.

For The Sun ‘journalist’ who said the Morelos banner was in Columbian. To be the idiot amongst a collection of knuckle dragging, racist Murdoch employees. The worst, of the worst.

On the back of Steve Clarke’s very honest and heartfelt melt down after abuse from The Rangers support, the Glasgow media goes into ‘tar everyone with the same brush’ mode. Traynor’s little bitches, every one of them.

We did it, we did it, we did it, we did it…

Too much? Yep.

Thanks to a BBC documentary Sweary Mary David Robertson re-appeared. This was my cartoon in the P&J when he left Aberdeen for Der Hun. Nicknamed Beano, I think Bob in the Northern Light diary started it, as to him not being that bright, while still playing for us. You had to have balls of steel playing for the Dons back then when TNL was on the go… Didn’t you Bobby Connor?

Big Jim. We don’t need a reason to celebrate Big Jim.

Back to the start, at the Skean Dhu Hotel, Jock Stein was staying in the hotel, the week before the tragic events of the game against Wales. Jock was known as Big Jock. I was still surprised at how tall Big Jock was. Clue was in the name. To be in the presence of such greatness, I had to say something to him. I was a hall porter. He was checking in. Can a carry your bag sir? He was carrying a dark blue Gola holdall, containing not that much.

He shot me a look. I had an unnerving desire to go run up and down some sand dunes.

The shop is now open, I have had a ridiculous amount of fun working on the designs for the posters and t-shirts, and now also the videos.

The t-shirts.
The posters.

Football eh. After the Motherwell game, I was apoplectic with rage. On the back of just how much I enjoyed the whole The Rangers match performance, after the St Johnstone performance I am as chilled as Zen.

Oh and I missed the St Johnstone match, as had shit loads to do as I had guests coming for dinner. It was horrible, and they won’t get invited back, making whatever Stevie May did or didn’t do, pretty irrelevant.

I’m not sure my point really. Have some memes.

‘Champagne’ Charlie.

The tache. I went too far didn’t I. That face is difficult to get out of your head. He reminds me of Ronnie Barker’s character in open all hours.

Back in the far off days of last Thursday, this is how we all felt.

Just how many times ye gonna remix this meme fella.

We went to Hampden, twice.

I did this meme a while back remixing it for the Hampden semi-final. I realised after posting it, the disgrace of Hampden remaining The National Stadium, and not the obvious solution of Murrayfield is one part Old Firm corruption (they must always have an advantage) and also, it’s the Glasgow fucking ‘journalists’. They want it in their city, so they don’t have far to travel.

Wankers.

“Glasgow is a football city”. Aye right. That’s why there’s 50,000 at every Partick Thistle match. Glasgow is a sectarian city.

It’s still early days, but not getting to that final was very expensive for The Rangers. And for Stevie G. It’s difficult to know if he is a manager, if he’s got that spark, that not many of them have. He has done well in Europe, but it’s his post match interviews. Very revealing. A man in a hurry. A man making mistakes. A man who might not be fun to be around. A man not stupid, but might not be that smart either. He is already repeating himself, showing a possible limit to his talents and intellect. The longer time goes, the less inside knowledge on Liverpool’s reserve players. His main skill so far is a fast depreciating asset. Only time will tell.

I wrote a poem.

Dark times. Divide and rule, the oldest trick in the book for establishment 1%ers to keep control. Football is exactly where they will plant their puppets, to try and build on an unhappy populace pissed off with society. The banks caused the crash in 2008. Austerity has not paid back any of the debt. It is ideological, they are monsters who hate the poor and the disabled, and are driving the planet to destruction. It’s the billionaires stealing all your money you should have a problem with, not people with a different skin tone.

Harder to reach an audience on Facebook now. Still did about 600 likes on a 13000 reach. On Twitter another 600 likes, reached 50,000.

And that’s yer lot.