STORM THAT THREATENED TO BLOW DONS AWAY HAS CHANGED DIRECTION
STORM Caroline hit Scotland yesterday, closing schools, causing travel chaos and leaving homes without power.
But, on a dramatic day in the blustery north-east, the winds of change that looked set to blow through Aberdeen FC failed to materialise.
When Sportsmail arrived at Pittodrie at lunchtime, players and club staff appeared to be completely in the dark regarding the protracted pursuit of Derek McInnes by Rangers.
Yet, also evident was a growing acceptance within the club, however grudging, that the matter had now gone so far that it seemed inevitable their 46-year-old manager would be replacing Pedro Caixinha at Ibrox.
Taking a phone call from McInnes on Tuesday night, Under-20s coach Paul Sheerin — aided by Barry Robson — was tasked with preparing the team for tonight’s Premiership match at Dundee. He fully expected to be directing proceedings from the dugout at Dens Park.
But then news broke just before 6pm last night that McInnes had turned down the chance to move to Rangers.
Just as with Sunderland’s failed approach in the summer, he had declined the opportunity to become the first Aberdeen manager to be headhunted since Alex Ferguson left for Manchester United in 1986.
Leading the cheering at a relieved Pittodrie was Sheerin, who now steps aside to allow McInnes to take his usual position in the technical area this evening, aided by his assistant Tony Docherty.
‘I was asked on Tuesday night to take the team for a couple of days along with Barry Robson and I was happy to do so,’ smiled Sheerin last night.
‘But I’m even happier to hand it back to Derek now that he’s staying with Aberdeen.
‘I didn’t know about his decision until this afternoon. It was after 4pm when I was leaving Pittodrie that I got a call to say he was staying.
‘It’s fantastic news for the club. Everyone wanted him to stay. What we were all hoping for has happened.
‘It was obviously a tough situation for everyone, but the players have been fantastic. They were all totally focused on the next game against Dundee and they worked as hard as normal.
‘We just kept everything the same. Nothing changed at all. It’s football, these things happen and the players were able to cope fine with it.
‘Derek will now come back in and he will pick his team for the game at Dens Park.
‘It will give everyone a boost — the players, staff and supporters — to know that he’s going to remain the manager.
‘He’s done a fantastic job here over the years and enjoyed a good level of success. He’s built the place up and he clearly feels he has unfinished business.
‘It’s great to have a resolution and the fact it’s the one we wanted makes it better.
‘To be honest, most people probably thought he would go, so it’s massive for Aberdeen that he’s staying.’
It also has to be said, however, that a quick trawl of social media and online forums uncovered some toxic comments regarding McInnes and Rangers.
Many Aberdeen fans clearly viewed the prospect of their messiah joining their biggest rivals as the ultimate betrayal.
Speaking earlier in the afternoon, however, Sheerin insisted that McInnes’ record at Pittodrie means he will have no problem building bridges with disgruntled members of the Red Army.
This fallen giant of a club had finished in the bottom six of Scotland’s top flight for four consecutive seasons before the arrival of McInnes in March 2013.
He has since steered Aberdeen to three successive second-place finishes and lifted the club’s first silverware since 1995 when his team won the 2014 League Cup on penalties against Inverness.
‘If Derek decides it (Rangers) is not the job for him, then he still has a job to do here,’ Sheerin had said at lunchtime yesterday.
‘That may take time to get back into it and get the trust of the fans and things like that, but I am sure that would happen easily.’
The task now facing McInnes is to get Aberdeen back to securing the kind of results that saw them become Scotland’s second force behind Celtic.
Amid all the uncertainty over his future, the team have won just once in five matches, their poorest run of form for a year.
That sequence included damaging defeats to Rangers in their previous two games, which has seen them drop below the Ibrox side to third in the table.
However, Dons captain Graeme Shinnie insisted the speculation surrounding McInnes was no excuse for recent below-par performances.
Speaking before the news broke that McInnes was staying, the 26-year-old called on his Aberdeen team-mates to see off the challenge of Rangers and Hibernian and hang on to their hard-earned status as best-of-the-rest.
‘It’s an easy way out to say the uncertainty over the manager’s situation is why we haven’t been
getting results,’ shrugged Shinnie.
‘You could say it has been no coincidence but, as a player, I wouldn’t say what has been going on around the club has affected me. It has just been down to poor performances.
‘As players, we can’t let it affect our football. We have to go out and do as well as we can.
‘The last two results haven’t been good enough and we need to get back to winning ways.
‘We want to do as well as we can, which means closing the gap on Celtic. But, given the form they are in, that has been tough.
‘After that, second place is where we want to be.
‘We know we haven’t hit the heights like we know we can this season, but we are still in a good position overall. We have lost six points to Rangers in the last week, but we are still on the same points as them.
‘We are in a good position in the league fighting with Rangers and Hibs for second place.
‘Our focus as players right now is on the Dundee game on Friday night.
‘We naturally want to get back to winning ways for the supporters and the club.’
A day that had threatened to blow Aberdeen’s season off course ultimately ended with strong winter sunshine breaking out in the skies above the Granite City.
Rangers, meanwhile, started battening down the hatches some 150 miles south as they prepared for the fallout from yesterday’s dramatic events.