Ex-Celts Top The Uninspiring List Of Bookies Favourites For Aberdeen Job.

There is something unseemly about taking bets on the next manager of a club which at the moment of writing this still has someone in the job. I am no fan of Jim Goodwin as Aberdeen boss, but that guy should not be getting up to read such reports.

Still, those reports are out there and Aberdeen fans must wonder if things would necessarily get better if Goodwin went, or worse. There are three names, in the main, which are all over the media and none of them would have me breaking out the champagne in their shoes. They are all Scottish, two with links to Celtic. One is Neil Lennon.

Clubs in Scotland ought to have learned their lesson on Lennon by now. If Aberdeen were to hire him, I doubt it would go down well with their fans. He would get results in the beginning and he would not fear Ibrox or Parkhead … that would be a step forward. But with Lennon any step forward is undermined by at least one step back.

And if that’s true of him it’s even truer of the second name on the list, Jack Ross, who is simply Jim Goodwin with a slightly more extensive CV.

The third name is Paul Lambert, and I reckon he’s marginally better than those two … but another really uninspiring name, another that shows a fundamental lack of imagination. None of the three is going to take the club forward in the manner it needs.

Now this is a lot of speculation at the moment, nothing more, and it might well be that one or all of them is talking to their mates in the press to get their names in the public eye here. That could be. Anything could be here. You just don’t know.

But Aberdeen really needs to do better than this is it turns out that Goodwin’s time is up. Their fans deserve more than the abject performances they are getting from their team, and few of them believe it’s a knee-jerk reaction to say that this one just hasn’t worked out. Their board badly needs to get the next decision absolutely right.

None of these three comes close to that. Lennon, at least, has a record of winning things and he would initially build confidence throughout the squad that they were better than most of the teams around them … I would welcome any manager who did that.

If a challenge is to emerge, a genuine challenge, from a club outside Glasgow there are bigger things they need to get right than just the manager. They need an analytics based transfer strategy, real investment in fitness infrastructure and a youth development program capable of producing a couple of first team players every other year.

Lennon has little time for any of that which means that even if there’s some short term success they’d be essentially starting from zero when they brought in a manager who gets that stuff.

The sooner that club emerges into the light the better and none of these possible managers will get them there.