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	30th October - Charlie Allan has raised a questionmark over the long term prospects for Ebbe Skovdahl at Pittodrie in today's Evening Express. In fact, the subject has become a much discussed topic lately, especially since the contract hasn't been renewed already. The facts are that Ebbe's record is about as bad as any Aberdeen manager has achieved and he is a highly paid and experienced manager who is working with his hands tied. If the club has ambition then they need to provide the manager with materials to demonstrate whether he can advance the team or not. Right now, despite summertime promises from Milne, we haven't seen the necessary new signings and as week succeeds week it is becoming increasingly obvious that we need them. The young players are doing their best, but they shouldn't be asked to play ninety minutes every match, they need to be nurtured to their full potential. That can't happen with the current squad. Ebbe says he has only recently been authorised to start searching for new players - seems strange but on the club's recent record, highly possible. At the same time, we are putting experienced players on the transfer list. It doesn't make any sense and TRF is mystified about what is going on. Apart, that is, from the certainty that the club is still managing to make huge losses and simply can't afford to sign anybody decent. Skovdahl has to demonstrate that he can use the wisdom of Solomon and create a footballing silk purse out of the pigs ear that has developed over the past few years. Dave Cormack can't turn the finances round over night so there is no alternative. Roll up them sleeves Ebbe, find your players much closer to home than the Scandinavian scrap heap or the European exodus - time is running out.
	28th October - Saturday's game against Saint Moron is a biggy for the Dandies. They really, really need to win it to stay in touch with the top half of the Premier, or indeed, ahead of the bottom couple of clubs. We have flirted with seventh spot for a few weeks now and that sounds quite safe out of twelve, but slipping to eighth last Sunday suddenly makes it look precarious and the young lads need all the help they can get. The options with the present squad aren't huge but if Anderson comes back, along with Stavrum, we'll at least have a bit more of a pack to shuffle. The cry has to remain the same though - get us more players - especially a big striker who can take on defences and get the ball knocked down for all our wee men. Come on Aberdeen!
24th October - Fans' champion Jim Cummings makes it to the Pittodrie Boardroom
The appointment of a new director at a football club doesn't usually pick up too much, if any, attention. The arrival in the Pittodrie boardroom of Jim Cummings is a whole new Willie Miler haircut. Cummings appointment is a milestone, not only for AFC but for the whole of Scottish Football. Here we have a man who is a popular choice amongst fans and shareholders alike. In fact, he wouldn't be on the boardroom now had it not been for the active campaigning by the AFC Shareholders Association ably backed up by the ISG. Pat on the back for members of both those MORE..
Non football - political comment on Aberdeenshire Cooncil. Specially drawn up by Gordon Reid to upset L. S. Pringle, Echt. special tip of the hat to the loon fae Keith fa thocht it up.
21st October - TRF 41 hit the streets today. If you missed out on a copy but would like one, please send £1 to TRF, P.O. Box 368, Aboyne AB34 5LZ and we'll fire one off to you pronto.	21st October - Tonight's Green Final has indulged in a scurrilous misrepresentation of a BBC radio Scotland interview with John Stephen. Chairman of the AFC Shareholders Association, Stephen had a broadcast conversation with Richard Gordon in which he spoke about the ability of organised fans' groups to positively influence football clubs to change for the better. He welcomed the appointment of Dave Cormack as chief executive and the imminent appointment to the board of Jim Cummings. He also spoke about the increasing influence of Martin Gilbert in the boardroom and that Stewart Milne would be better to step down - a move that would be good for Aberdeen for Milne and for his company. The Green Final has chosen to utterly ignore the bulk of the interview and pick out the remark about Milne. For some reason, probably related to advertising revenue, the Evening Express in recent weeks has become Stewart Milne's champion. The paper has failed its readers by dodging the issues surrounding Milne's tenure as Pittodrie chairman and has never asked him to answer the charges leveled against him. If they were to stick to the truth instead of running slanted stories, they might earn more respect and ultimately better sales.
21st October - Having failed to take anything from the Dundee game last week (except experience) the Dunfermline match today has taken on much bigger importance. We really need the points from this one folks. The fingertip hold on the coat-tails of the top six will be down to finger nail by 5 o'clock tonight if we can't come out on top v the Pars - and we are good enough. Maximum backing for the Redz please and lay off Jess - it won't help and it won't persuade him to stay if he gets the bird from his ain folk.
---------- Osmond ------- Cormack
19th October - Question: If you run a machine tools factory, would you get rid of your only lathe? No? So why are Aberdeen putting Eoin Jess on the transfer list? This is the most talented player on the Pittodrie books, with a huge amount of invaluable experience to share with the younger players. No doubt he has been demanding a good contract from the club to persuade him to stay at Pittodrie and he can't be blamed for that. The Club say they want him to stay and that they have made him a very good offer, but having lived through years of false promises and hollow words from Stewart Milne it could well be that the spin machine is on overtime. It'll be interesting to hear more of Jess' side of the story, but it is very hard to see how not keeping him with us is going to strengthen the playing squad. However hard the club may have tried to keep Jess, it simply wasn't hard enough. He won't be the first Aberdeen player to leave for the sake of a few quid.	17th October - It's a bit too early for TRF to pass an opinion on Dave Cormack's appointment, though it's a puzzling one since he seemed to have been rejected a while ago. Like all recruits at Pittodrie, let's hope he is the biz and give him a few months to see how he does. He is well qualified in business terms and seems to know how to turn a buck - should be helpful in getting the commercial activities sorted out. Will he replace Bennett's Bulletin with Cormack's Cracks? Will he run some of the present incompetents out of town on a rail? We'll see, but we really do want him to do well. There's no room for duffers in the Pittodrie organisation. That glowing testimony from Charlie Allan in the Evening Express should go with a pinch of salt though, Chas went to the squeal wi the boy.
Right lads, it'll take all three of us to sort out yon United for Change lot!	15th October - TRF can't let the departure of Jolly Jim McLean from Tannadice go unremarked. McLean was unarguably Dundee United's most successful manager and should be remembered by their fans for that. Fans of other clubs will remember the guy for building one of the most persistently boring and negative sides in Scottish football. It was little wonder that his team became known as 'the passbacks' thanks to their style of play - they weren't pretty or entertaining to watch. He also built a cynical streak into his teams that somehow went unremarked over the years but left a lot of wounded opponents in their wake. McLean also never held back in his efforts to influence referees for his side's benefit. One famous case of this was when he branded the Pittodrie crowd as being hooligans for being noisy (!) and trying to intimidate Dundee based referee Bob Valentine. Ha! Latterly, McLean has done untold damage to United and it came as no surprise that United For Change surfaced a couple of years back in an effort to restore the Arabs' status in the Premier League. United are now in a complete mess and their fans are going through the kind of hell we had to face last season. No sympathy though, they showed none to us and football is an unforgiving sport. Any bets on how long it'll be until Smiffy follows Jolly Jim out the door? That street demo yesterday must have been pretty nostalgic for him.
15th October - The Dundee match is covered in the 'Fixtures' section of this site, but there are a couple of extra points for discussion that are worth bring up here. First off there was the breaking of the minute's silence for Donald Dewar. The only noise that could be hears in that sixty seconds came from Dundee fans. To be fair, some of them tried to silence the noisy ones, but that may have made things worse. It is also true that most of the noise came from people still coming into the stadium, but that is no excuse. The silence was well publicised and McRuvie gave a clear announcement that it was beginning - an announcement that must have been heard outside. The press seem to have ignored the affront, but for the record, it was Dundee fans that spoilt the moment, no one else. As to the style of play that we were 'treated' to for ninety minutes by Dundee's neo-continental side, well it was very much a two sided coin. On the one hand it is obvious that they have assembled a team that can play very good football. On the other, they are a shower of cynical, cheating conmen. Can't admire that and let's hope that they don't get away with much more of it. Bonetti take note: Dundee fans have probably more cause than most in Scotland to complain about the footballing fate they have had to endure for years. Let them enjoy their resurgence, but don't tarnish it by carrying on with the kind of behaviour we'd expect from the huns.	13th October - Anybody noticed how quiet Wiggy's been lately? He's hardly been heard of since he was invited to resign a few weeks back. Strange, that, because he is supposed to be acting as Chief Executive just now and the last one we had was never far away from the papers. Remember Bennett's Bulletin every week on the official website? Don't see anything from the Wigster do we? In fact the official website is barely being kept up to date at all. Seems a waste of a resource that. Maybe Martin Gilbert could be persuaded to oust Milne and take the chair provided he gets a really strong Chief Exec in place. The business side of Pittodrie remains a MESS.
	When I picked up a copy of this book from the Dons' Shop on Saturday, before the match with the Jutes, I didn't hold out too much hope for it. Football player biographies are generally pretty disappointing, dull even, and usually avoid getting into the real meat of the subject's career. This one is a bit different. Leighton has made an effort to avoid the totally bland and give his side of the personal feuds that are inevitable in a long playing career. Having said that, it only took a morning to read the 175 pages, partly because so much of the subject matter is so familiar. The outstanding undercurrent of the whole book is the emnity he feels for Alex Ferguson, but it doesn't swamp the story. The main disappointment is that he fails to capture the passion of the great team of the eighties and the intensity of their jouasts with the Old Fiem and Dundee United. That is a shame because it is the kind of approach that would bring the book to life. Doubtless the book will sell well amongst Dons fans. I hope so, if for no other reason than he was a great player for us and his recognition of the fantastic backing the fans gave the Dons last season while they were going through the worst era of the Club's history.
We haven't had a gratuitous sheep joke on this site in ages so it is time that was put right.Hope this one sinks low enough for one and all (L. S. Pringle excepted).	12th October - Dundee and a busload of Argentineans on Saturday eh? Possibly Maradonna in the stand? Crickey! Where has all this financial power come from in Dundee and what on earth has attracted so many Latinos to the City of Discovery? It's hard to imagine why anybody would want to abandon la dolce vita for the Dundee slums but hey, they're there and the Jutes are rallying round. This will be a tough match for the Redz and they'll need to keep their cool if all these wily old pros start trying it on. Should be good though, it's a long time since Dundee brought enough fans to help generate a decent atmosphere. Hope their bus and moped don't break down on the way up the road.
11th October - The name of one time Pittodrie coach Neil Cooper has been popping up in the press quite a bit lately with a theme along the lines of him having been hard done by when he was fired a couple of years back. That, of course, is a matter of opinion, but he surely has to take a share of the credit for the emergence of this season's crop of superb young players. Cooper's main offence seemed to be that he had been promoted to help Paul Heggarty during the last few matches of the season before last. When Millosovich Milne decided that Heggy had to go it mean tatties for Cooper too. No account was apparently taken of the highly successful youth team he had been working with for several years before (three youth league championships). There have been calls for Cooper to be brought back to Pittodrie and TRF would like to know what you think about it so we have posted a question in our Votecaster. Please take part and we'll post the final results at the end of next week.	8th October - Tenth Century of the Century At the risk of putting him off the whole idea, I have to share with you the news that Eoin Jess is about to make it into the history books for Aberdeen. Well, any that I might write anyhow. You see Jess struck his 94th competitive goal for the Dons when he scored with that beautiful free kick against the addled Arabs. Not a very significant number you might argue, but it means he is homing in on the ton for the Dons and only nine other players have ever broken that number for us. That makes 100 a very significant milestone and one I'd love to see him hit this season, well ahead of the Club centenary. Some of the goals have been spectacular, remember his destruction of Dunfermline at East End Park? How about that volley at the spring down Iprix way? Hats off to Eoin Jess - footballer. For the record, the other guys who have achieved the milestone or better are (were): Benny Yorston (125) Willie Mills (114) Matt Armstrong (155) George Hamilton (153) Harry Yorston (141) Jack Hather (104) Joe Harper (199) Drew Jarvie (130) and Marc McGhee (100). Most of these players could have had even better records for us but for one reason and another they didn't make it. Benny Yorston was ditched, Harry Yorston gave up playing early when he won the pools. King Joey could have had piles more if ha hadn't wasted seasons with Everton and Hibs. Harper was just one short of hitting the 200 mark and it's unlikely that anybody will ever get close to that record for the Dandies, but Jess can easily add his name to this particular role of honour before the end of the season and if he signs a new contract then he can improve the tally even more. I just hope that writing about it won't put an Indian sign on the guy. OBE
	4th October - Return to Normality? The Dons must be BACK. That's back as in a serious threat to the Old farm.What's the basis for the argument? STV's coverage of the tim visit to Todders last week. The absolute bias of the editing would stun a bull elephant at fifty paces, although it doesn't spring any surprises for battle hardened veterans of following the Reds over the years. As ever, the editor managed to cut the coverage together to show anything worthwhile that the tims did (and that wasn't much) whilst ignoring as much as possible of the Dandies efforts. The crowd noise was also curiously unclear most of the time. That in particular must have been a problem for him because the traveling support didn't utter a peep until Lardson headed their equaliser. At the game, the noise in the top deck of the Beach End was deafening at times and I refuse to believe that the effects mikes couldn't pick it up. But then the cameras also seemed to have difficulty in finding decent crowd shots when Winters whacked his goal away. Strangely there was no problem at the time the greeners scored - maybe the cameras were repaired by then? Combine it all with Archie McPhartson's inane commentary that would have you believe the bits of the game they didn't show us were not worth seeing and all the old anger about West Coast bias comes welling, like an ooze of rancid sewer sludge, to the surface. Why didn't Grampian take over STV instead of the other way round? Even the BBC find it hard to see past the Glasgow teams but STV are in a class of their own and always have been. Take it as a positive sign though folks, if we were still slumped at the arse end of the league they would have been quite happy to patronise us by showing our contribution to the game (i.e. picking the ball out of the net a few times). Make no mistake, our kids are restoring our reputation and with careful handling can make us a force to be reckoned with. All they need is some decent, experienced, reinforcements to help them through hard times and cover suspensions, injuries and the inevitable shit stirring from the Glasgow papers. The squad is too thin just now, but obviously not thin enough to leave the cocky west coast media unconcerned about the way things are going.
4th October - The decision by Ebbe S. to transfer list Paul Bernard comes as no surprise. here we have an expensive and highly paid player who has failed to give the Dons a return on their investment. In the five years since he was signed, Bernard has scored just 8 goals in 121 appearances, not a very high rate for a midfield player. he has been unlucky with injuries, but even when he has been fit he hasn't lived up to expectations. He arrived at Pittodrie with a decent pedigree but has rarely produced the goods - how many of his appearances would you describe as memorable? It's going to be interesting to see who, if anybody, comes in for the guy. He shoulda been a contender - but he wasn't. TRF has posted survey question to try and assess if our readers think Bernard's departure will hurt the playing squad or not. We are biased so won't be voting but hope that you'll take part and help us measure his popularity.	1st October - Ebbe Skovdahl has heaps of critics in the ranks of the Red Army but I ain't one of them. He has got the Dons playing very watchable football, well organised (usually) with plenty of good passing and players getting into space. How long is it since we have been able to say that about a Dandies' side? He has been forced into using kids through lack of funds but he is getting a terrific return from them and if he can sign a couple of good seasoned players to reinforce the squad and help the youngsters along then we will be getting somewhere. It's just a shame that the same can't be said for the commercial side of the club, where chaos reigns and the income is far from flooding in.

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