|
Like a'bidy else I was delighted when he returned (on the proviso he bided awa fae the business side and Stewartie bided awa fae the fitba side)…now, well I'm not so sure.
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding his job title, I mean fit is and fit does a 'Director of Football' do?
Willie himself has said he's not there to tell Tango and Sash who to pick or how their sides should play so I assume his role is the recruitment and retention of players and management, and also maintaining and improving the youth set-up.
Now he brought in the highly respected Lenny Taylor to revamp our once vaunted youth system and to be fair we'll only be able to genuinely judge how successful that's been when the players who've moved through the system have settled into the first team squad in about five to six years time at the earliest. Of course using the Ryan Strachan example (good enough to travel to Bayern but wasn't rated good enough to face the might of, say, Smurn next season), god knows when this will happen.
So leaving aside the youth system it would appear contracts are Willie's bag and let's just say this year there were some decisions made of a dubious nature.
First off there were the manager and staff deals. The most common form of deal these days is the rolling deal for the simple reason that it makes sound financial sense that if things go wrong then you don't end up paying hooringly large amounts of compensation if you sack your manager.
So what did Willie do? Why he went and signed them all on THREE-AND-A-HALF YEAR DEALS! A ridiculously long deal. I mean for gods sake, even Sir Alex is on a one year rolling deal.
Why three-and-a-bit years?No one was after them or trying to tap them up...Christ, Burnley went straight for Owen Coyle and didnae even give Tango a second look.
Willie tried to justify this by claiming if someone came in, the club would be due a large amount of compensation...a frighteningly naive view, as any compensation could be easily avoided by Tango and Sash simply resigning and conveniently signing on with their hypothetical new club the following day...the compensation for the Dons: £0.
In any other form of business, eyebrows would be raised at a member of senior management signing off such deals...I could make some facetious comment about parallels to Willie's less than illustrious business career, but as a mark of respect to the man I won't go that low.
But then there is the way the players' contracts were handled...
Go into any pub and any random punter can explain the reality of footballers contracts in the post-Bosman world. Essentially as a rule of thumb, you begin negiotiations 18 months from the end of a deal, if they ain't signed 12 months from their expiry date you put them on the market...six months out you pretty much take what ye can for them.
The number of players leaving at the end of this season because their contract had expired was embarrassing. Okay so you were hardly gonna get a king's ransom for the likes o Richie Bryne or Soutar, but if Lovell or Barry Nic had been put on the open market last summer we probably could have received six-figure sums for both. As it was, the squad was allowed to stagnate and from January we had far too many first teamers who knew they had no future at the club...is it any wonder some looked like they didnae give a flyin f*ck as the season developed?
Willie also ignored Fergie's Three Golden Rules about building a squad (passed down to him by Jock Stein):
1. Never have all your players out of contract at the same time.
2. Rebuild when your successful.
3. Always rebuild every two to three years to avoid complacency and staleness.
There is an argument to say Willie spectacularily f*cked up all three.
If that wasn't bad enough, there was the rant about us not showing up in large enough numbers at Pittodrie which, given the standard of performances from the side, was on a par wi Gerry Ratner ranting about folk nae buying his gold plated tat. But even that was put in the shame by him committing the most egregous insult you can ever throw at a Dons fan, our version of the 'Protocols of Zion'.
'The Proto-fit?' I hear ye saying...ye ken, 'The Protocols of Zion' min.
Basically in the 1850's tae excuse the latest round of pogroms the Russian secret service created a piece of vile anti-semitic propaganda involving blood sacrifice etc. It was a complete fabrication but it went round the world and today is cornerstone of every right wing nut job group's idiotic and paranoid world view.
Okay, even at their worst the Weegia are hardly on a par wi Hitler, Bin Laden or the likes but they continue to spout the 'Living in the 80's/Fergie's Poison Chalice' bullshit to this day.
Obviously expecting 'journalists' like Daryl Broadfoot or Bill Leckie (who've clearly not spoken to a Dons fan since circa 1986...unless of course they've kept a couple of us locked in a cellar in Anderston Quay denying them daylight and occasionally poking them with a stick to get some deranged outburst) to know the difference between 'an aspiration' and 'an expectation' is asking too much but to hear this garbage from God himself...I'm sorry, that's too much.
If anyone should know how Aberdeen fans think and what they expect from their side it should be Willie, he should know these days we don't expect to win anything, he should know we're fully aware of the new economic order in fitba where the likes of Southend or Colchester make twice from one years TV rights than we make in total. To pander to such lazy hackneyed journalism, and, because it was Willie Miller, give it a form of credence, is exasperating and disappointing.
The fact is if it was anyone else in the Director of Football role and they'd cocked up their duties to such a degree and made the statements about the support he has, we'd have strung him up on the 'Y' floodlights by now.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want him sacked and I'm more than willing to forgive...after all he is Willie Miller for God's sake. I just want him to raise his game, for while it's true that Aberdeen Football Club owes Willie Miller a lot, it does not owe him a living.
The Red Avenger