Off The Ball 17.05.2008

Ah well, that’s the FA Cup out of the way. Not a great match and personally I thought Cardiff where the better side. Congratulations to Our ‘Arry and Portsmouth for at least bringing back the spirit of the FA Cup by having someone other than the usual suspects playing out a cautious 1-0 victory.

So now your wondering “wait a minute here, this blog is supposed to be about Scottish football, and here he is talking about a bunch of Southern poofters!”. True, but there is a link, because playing for Cardiff today was ex-Aberdeen player Kevin McNaughton who, being an ex-Aberdeen player had a cracking game. Ehm, by which I mean he was good when he played for Aberdeen too, not that he became better because he no longer plays for Aberdeen …

Hey look bawbag, it’s my blog and I’m biased, right?

Anyroad, in the end Kevin didn’t win a medal, but this got me thinking right throughout the game about ex-Aberdeen players who have gone on to win FA Cup medals. Fortunately I only had 90 minutes to think about this, because the amount of thinking involved nearly killed me, so bad is the migraine I have now. Thank goodness it didn’t go into extra time, that’s all I can say. So this is the list I came up with. Can anyone correct or add to this list?

• Gordon Strachan (Manchester United, 1985)
• Jim Leighton (Manchester United, 1990)
• Willy Young (Arsenal 1979)
• Martin Buchan (Manchester United 1977)
• Charlie Cooke (Chelsea, 1970)

So, with that done, on to today’s news and once again, my predictions turned out to be utter shiters.

Rangers did what I thought they’d never do: lose points to Motherwell. A more developed opinion on this game will follow, but put it this way: the league has just got a lot more interesting! See also the article below this one to see what I mean.

Kilmarnock beat Falkirk by 2 goals to 1, with Taouil and Di Giacomo scoring for Kilmarnock after Moutinho had opened the scoring for The Bairns. This result has no impact whatsoever on anything, so lets say no more about it.

Inverness CT and St Mirren played out a no-score bore in front of lots of equally bored people no doubt. Caley tried to make it easier for someone, anyone to score by having one of their players sent off, but to no avail. 0-0 it remained and let the record show that like the Kilmarnock v Falkirk game, it has no bearing on anything at all. Other than ninth place which is like, yeah, you know, whatever.

With these results behind us, the SPL table now looks like this (important team highlighted in bold):

             P W  D L   F  A  Pts GD
Celtic      37 27 5 5   83 26 86 +57
Rangers     36 26 5 5   81 31 83 +50
Motherwell  37 17 6 14  48 46 57 +2
Dundee Utd  37 14 10 13 53 46 52 +7
Hibernian   37 14 10 13 49 43 52 +6
Aberdeen    37 14 8 15  48 58 50 -10
Falkirk     38 13 10 15 45 49 49 -4
Hearts      38 13 9 16  47 55 48 -8
Inverness   38 13 4 21  51 62 43 -11
St Mirren   37 10 11 16 26 51 41 -25
Kilmarnock  38 10 10 18 39 52 40 -13
Gretna      38 5  8  25 32 83 13 -51

Here’s one result I got right, even though the score line flattered to deceive. Fort William 1 vs 7 Deveronvale. Either Fort William played a stormer or Deveronvale sent out the U11 team, because I really was expecting a few more goals in this one. Ah well, shows you what I know eh?

Till next time!