Derek McInnes

[57vintage]

Dinnae be so daft. Of course it's a greater achievement, it's the Scottish Cup!

Just ask yersel which one you'd rather have.

It carries far more prestige, but looking at it analytically, only clubs from the senior leagues 1-4 are in it, so the chances of being drawn against pish like East Kilbride or the entitled Locos, which would be a bye for a club like Aberdeen, are nil.

Theoretically, that must make it more difficult to win the League Cup.

I'd still have the Scottish Cup over it, like.

70, 82 ,83, 84, 86, 90 are among the best memories I will carry to the cremmy when I snuff it.

[Red Zone]

If you had to choose between one or the other, which would you pick & why?

St.Johnstone & Hearts were absolutely criminal results. The first showed how shyte McInnes is at dealing with a match while it’s on & the second was entirely down to the way we defend set pieces.

The first thing I would say is that I don't think we are good enough to be picky about which cup we win. If someone offered me two LC wins every five years I would be more than happy.

Having said that to answer your question in the mythical world of free choice I would choose the SC for two reasons. Firstly for what little it is worth it gets us into a later round in Europa League versus finishing second/third in league and secondly it is seen as a more prestigious cup (plus having been lucky enough to have seen us win 5 Scottish Cups and 3 League Cups first hand there is something about winning the SC standing in short sleeves versus LC with 17 layers of clothes on!!!)

[Mason89]

Im not slagging the league cup, I love it. It gave me my happiest ever day as a Dons fan (no prizes for guessing). If I was offered the league cup & 10th every year I’d take it.

The Scottish Cup is better though

[Red Zone]

Dinnae be so daft. Of course it's a greater achievement, it's the Scottish Cup!

Just ask yersel which one you'd rather have.

It depends on what you man by achievement. I would maintain that both are equally difficult to win for a club like Aberdeen, it's not like Celtic play a second 11 in the LC, they try just a s hard in LC as they do in SC.

As I have said in a couple of posts so probably boring people now, I completely agree that SC is more prestigious so would rather win it but doesn't make it a bigger achievement than winning LC

[Aldo1983]

It is a bigger and better achievement. It's also been easier to win the last few years.

[rico94]

Dinnae be so daft. Of course it's a greater achievement, it's the Scottish Cup!

Just ask yersel which one you'd rather have.

Not sure if Aberdeen fans should be sticking their noses up at the League cup considering we have only won 3 trophies since 1990.

[afc1903mad]

I always think that for a club like Aberdeen we should be targeting two trophies every five years

Statistically, our club has won 19 honours (17 domestic) in our 115 year history.
That means we average one trophy every 6 years.

If you discount our two European trophies, our average is higher at one trophy almost every 7 years (rounded).

Still far better than the likes of Hearts (One trophy every 9 years) or Hibs (One trophy in 14.5 years) or SevCo (0 Trophies in 6 years).
Of course I'm only citing major trophies

[DollyLongstaffe]

Scottish Cup is better than the League Cup in every way. It has been won by footballing greats like Yogi Hughes, Alan Thtubbs & Tommy Wrong since McInnes came to Aberdeen.

McInnes having won the league cup once, is in with the likes of Danny Lennon, Kenny Shiels & Jim McIntyre. Parkred is starting to look like a bit of a fluke

It's of course interesting that these teams/managers have won cups, but I would draw more or less the opposite inference.

Celtic have been by a wide margin the best team in Scotland in the past 7 seasons. During that time they've won the league cup and the Scottish cup 3 times each, meaning that other clubs have in total won one of the cups 8 times. Teams winning one or other of the trophies include: ICT, St Johnstone, Ross County, St Mirren and Kilmarnock.

What that points up is that the relationship between the quality of a team and its chances of winning a cup are much more tenuous than received wisdom suggests. Even if you have the best team in the competition by a country mile, you are far from certain to win the trophy: Celtic, paying their players 6 times as much as most of their competitors and winning leagues in a canter, have failed to win these trophies around 60% of the time.

So what are the chances of winning a cup with the second best team in the competition? The counter intuitive answer is, actually, quite poor. If the elements of luck and randomness in a one-off knockout competition mean Celtic can only prevail against much weaker opposition 40% of the time, then the next best team, with at best a much more marginal superiority, won't get anywhere close to that.

The results bear that out: in years where Celtic didn't win the trophy, the list of winners looks very random - because it is very random. It would be hard to argue that Ross, or ICT or St Mirren were even close to being one of the the strongest teams in these competitions, or that they or their managers had a special quality that meant they 'deserved' to win the cup that year. People know that winning a cup doesn't make you a good manager. How long on average, for example, do these cup-winning managers stay in the job, even with the glory of a cup win at a minnow club on their CVs?

That's one reason it's tough for managers of our bigger provincial clubs. You can't win the league, so the only real target you have are the cups. But knockout cup competitions are a lottery. All you can do is build as good a side as you can reasonably be expected to with the resources available, and hope you get the rub of the green in the cups. Because you are going to be judged by something you have much less control over than fans think.

Deek's record in cups - a win, finals, semis etc - is actually very good. But cup competitions are not a very good way of assessing a manager.

[mastrick1960]

The first thing I would say is that I don't think we are good enough to be picky about which cup we win. If someone offered me two LC wins every five years I would be more than happy.

Having said that to answer your question in the mythical world of free choice I would choose the SC for two reasons. Firstly for what little it is worth it gets us into a later round in Europa League versus finishing second/third in league and secondly it is seen as a more prestigious cup (plus having been lucky enough to have seen us win 5 Scottish Cups and 3 League Cups first hand there is something about winning the SC standing in short sleeves versus LC with 17 layers of clothes on!!!)

Winning the SC gets you starting in the same round of the europa league qualifiers as finishing 2nd/3rd....i.e ...first round ( unless we as a country have picked up more coefficient points recently )

[mastrick1960]

Winning the SC gets you starting in the same round of the europa league qualifiers as finishing 2nd/3rd....i.e ...first round ( unless we as a country have picked up more coefficient points recently )

Edit: just noticed we have crept in at 24th place for our country’s coefficient...25 th place would have seen our cup winners starting in the first round