The Year in Review 2020 (1)

[Footymad]

Football was put in its place as health concerns dominated 2020. - External Link

[LawSteelman]

Obviously a very strange and trying year, mostly for reasons far bigger than football.

What I would say though, from a purely football point of view, is that it's been a very poor year for us and our league form has been that of a side battling relegation. The domestic Cups have yet again also been awful from us.

I know it's held up as a big achievement by many, and it does deserve credit, but I just don't see us 'finishing' third last season as anything other than a hollow achievement, mostly because we didn't finish third atall, because the season didn't finish. Add to that our rank rotten form from the turn of the year and some of the dismal results and performances between then and the shutdown then 'finishing 3rd' in season 2019/2020 isn't something I'll look back on in much fondness. Each to their own though.

[Handsome_Devil]

I still don't understand how we collapsed so completely for so long earlier this year.

And it wasn't the turn of the year, we actually started with a solid win in a potentially tricky cup tie, a great 1-0 away to Pittodrie and a draw with Hibs which if a little disappointing was certainly fine in the circumstances.

So even going into February we were flying and given the 2019 points total etc had every reason to be extremely confident.

You can then find excuses for almost every individual game (the dodgy pitch at Livi, deflection at St Mirren in the cup, Gallagher being injured and Hartley being too ill to play but playing anyway in the replay, the list is never-ending) but it wasn't just that we were losing which was the problem, it was losing week in, week out in a manner which suggested the players had never met each other and certainly didn't give a toss about results.

Obviously it's daft to moan about football during the pandemic but had that been a normal season, I've no doubt we would have done enough to still finish fourth - Hibs were well behind and far from the side they are now. So even had we not recovered top form, we would have stabilised a bit and finishing fourth (still Europe given Celtic would certainly have won the cup anyway) on the park would have been celebrated as a much bigger achievement than third via our living room.

Long would likely have nudged his goals total from the 11/12 he was on to 15-plus, a superb tally for a Motherwell player who doesn't take penalties and would have got his move. Tait and/or Hartley would probably have remained on back-up deals so while we'd still have plenty of problems - Robinson's flaws would not vanish - the squad going into this term would have been a lot more balanced than the shambles we ended up with.

[LawSteelman]

I just think it was a case of a poor side going through an extremely poor run of form. We weren't great at any point last season but had a decent spell before Christmas and picked up some good results at Tynecastle and Pittodrie in particular. It obviously helped that the standard of the rest of the league was also poor and whenever we slipped up Aberdeen always seemed to slip up too.

The loss of James Scott on the January deadline day was a blow for us, though can hardly be solely blamed for our wretched form in February.