Aberdeen’s 22nd defeat of the season may not have smarted as much as many of the preceding 21, with nothing material left to play for. But it was nonetheless a noteworthy figure for this most uninspiring of squads to reach.
For it lifted 2021/22 into the club’s all-time top five for defeats in a single season. Only in Ebbe Skovdahl’s comically disastrous debut, the woeful campaigns which brought about the firings of Steve Paterson and Mark McGhee, and a 1916/17 effort in which many of the Dons’ players were called away for more significant duties in World War I have Aberdeen teams been beaten more frequently than this.
That they could be attracting comparisons with the likes of those extraordinarily shambolic predecessors would be bad at any time, but immediately after a period in which the side had been a fixture in the top four it is almost inexcusable.
For the club to feel it could progress from the position of comfortable atrophy it had slipped into was laudable; that it was willing to take risks in the pursuit of something better cannot be criticised.
But it is clear that many of the decisions taken towards that end were wrong. Some ruinously so. The upshot is that the prominence won hard over the previous eight seasons has been frittered away in one, meaning what lies ahead is far more akin to a rebuild from scratch than it ever ought to have been.
Where Aberdeen will be a year from now is anyone’s guess. There is significant room for fast improvement, but equally it is not certain they have bottomed out yet. Inevitably the refit will be funded by the sales of Lewis Ferguson and Calvin Ramsay – there is no guarantee next season’s team will be better than this.