If Aberdeen’s fall from grace has felt abnormally sharp, that’s because it absolutely has been.
Only once in the club’s history had it experienced both a winning and a winless run of seven games or more within the same season. As the sequence without a victory now extends into double figures, that record has been blown sky high.
Equally head-spinning was the speed with which the roof completely fell in on the Dons here. Though swaying at 1-0 down, their 11 players were still in this match: four touches later, one of Slobodan Rubezic’s frazzled head and three of the ball, they were facing total annihilation.
Jimmy Thelin declined to describe Aberdeen’s appalling form as a crisis before this outing, and while it would seem excessively entitled to apply that label to a team still, somehow, in the top four – a healthier position than it has often occupied in recent times – it is unquestionably experiencing a crisis of confidence, whether or not the manager accepts it is one of results.
That Aberdeen’s best periods of play for many weeks came with ten players and no centre-backs on the field – the result having already been functionally resolved – is both an indictment of the ponderous, meandering fare it has been serving up and a reminder of better times.
So far up the pitch did the Thelin turnover machine formerly operate, it scarcely mattered how many were behind it manning the back door.
Long since did it grind to a halt. So workmanlike and sterile have Aberdeen become it is almost understandable to wish to bash one’s skull against something, even if Rubezic’s choice of target was staggeringly unwise.
It has begun to look like the parts for the repair no longer reside in Pittodrie stores. Scrappage and replacement is the obvious step.
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