Aberdeen captain Graeme Shinnie has been around a while. And as he watched his shot loop into Celtic’s net to erase his side’s two-goal deficit, he would have had to delve deep into his memory bank to recall anything of the sort.
Shinnie was part of an Inverness team who, in better times 14 years ago, recovered a point at this venue from two-down. No other Scottish club had since.
And plenty, as a function of Celtic’s domestic dominance, had tried. To be precise, 166 Scottish teams had fallen 2-0 behind away to Celtic and all lost the game – indeed, they would be almost five times as likely to concede the third goal as to score it.
So it would appear we have an answer to at least one of the questions those outside of the north-east’s canny bubble spent last week desperately posing.
Are Aberdeen title contenders? Perhaps not.
But are they a flash in the pan? No.
What Jimmy Thelin achieved on Saturday is not normal. And it is crystal clear it was only possible thanks to Aberdeen going outside of Scottish football’s zone of familiarity.
Where all those steeped in its norms stand off Celtic in fearful reverence, Thelin, the uncowed outsider, set the dogs on them, blitzing them in possession in a way they so often struggle to handle in Europe, but never see here.
Backing their fitness, Aberdeen’s players threw every last inch of themselves at their opponents for 106 minutes, culminating in the outlandish sequence where Dimitar Mitov, Duk and Nicky Devlin produced an inconceivably athletic rebuttal of Celtic’s final foray, and celebrated it like a win.
Which, in many ways, it was – A vindication of the strategy of both the club and its coach. This is the blueprint; let’s see where it leads.
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