The Happy End (The Drunk Room)

So I think...

Well, no.

The last time we both watched a game together in the flesh was at St Mirren Park in the tail end of last season.

We both came away from that genuinely fearing for the future safety of Aberdeen and it did seem at that point very likely that a relegation fight was looming.

Now, in the last couple of press conferences, Stephen Robinson has made a big thing in response to, again, what has been well reported as the negativity of Aberdeen fans on social media.

But he was saying, you know, if at that stage supporters had been given responsibility, basically safety from the relegation playoffs and then what is now six wins out of seven that we would have been snapping their hands off.

Is that something that you would have been happy with considering where the team had been six months ago or is it a little bit more complicated than that?

Well, inevitably it is a bit more complicated than that, yes, but you're right to say that at that point, at the tail end of last season, it did look probably more likely than not that Aberdeen would finish 11th and more likely than not that the result of that would be to lose a relegation playoff against one of the teams that that would have been trying to come up from the championship.

In that respect, that was the job that Robinson was initially given to do.

And he was successful in doing that, albeit that there was There were certainly elements of good fortune in some of those games, particularly with Grant Hanley getting sent off in the game against Hibs and Kilmarnock repeatedly hitting the crossbar in the game that we played against them.

So they kind of limped over the line, but did what needed to be done.

However, it is also true to say that Steven Robinson was not brought in as a caretaker or as a Warnock style firefighter.

He was given, I think, a three and a half year contract to come to the club and build something.

With that in mind, what happened at the tail end of last season actually isn't really relevant anymore, and even less so given the massive turnover in personnel that has happened since then.

So we can now effectively say that it is a completely blank page.

It is totally a new beginning for Robinson.

and he really ought not to be harking back to what happened at the tail end of last season.

Yes, that was a qualified success, the job that he was given in that short period was achieved successfully, but that has no bearing on what is currently happening.

What he should be judged on in the new season is what should be achievable with the squad that has been amassed and more pertinently with the resource that has been spent to gather that squad.

So it doesn't really matter what happened last season in that regard.

he should now be being judged on whether he is succeeding with the budget that he has to play with in 26-27.

And on that, I think the jury is still out.

Yes, he can point to the fact that the team has indeed won six out of seven games, but I think to some extent you can discount at least three of the matches in the group stage of the League Cup, which were against very low-level opposition teams, The team didn't perform particularly well in those games.

They did enough to beat those teams, but they weren't terribly impressive.

So he shouldn't, I don't think, be hanging his hat on the numbers in that regard.