‘The secret of management is to move while you can still be viewed well’
McINNES PROUD OF DONS REIGN AS HE PREPARES FOR PITTODRIE RETURN
WHEN the offer was made to him in 2013, Derek McInnes had plenty of people telling him to give Aberdeen a wide berth.
The club were on a downward spiral and slumped near the bottom of the league. Experienced figures like Mark McGhee and Craig Brown had both failed to turn things around.
McInnes admits that Pittodrie was viewed as a ‘graveyard’ for managers at the time. Many others would have run a mile had they been offered the job.
But, to his credit, he ended up being the club’s most successful boss since Sir Alex Ferguson.
He spent eight years at the helm, the highlight of which was winning the League Cup in 2014 to end a trophy drought for the Dons which had lasted almost 20 years. He also racked up four second-placed finishes — and qualified for Europe seven years on the spin.
When he parted company with Aberdeen in March 2021, he certainly left the club in a far better state than he found it.
McInnes will return to Pittodrie tomorrow chasing a victory with Kilmarnock, the club whom he guided to promotion from the Championship last season.
Reflecting on those eight years in the north east, McInnes said: ‘I always remember when I first went to Aberdeen, people saying it is a graveyard for managers and that they spit managers out there. But I’d like to think we showed what could be done and it was through a lot of good work being done by so many people.
‘At any level, being at one club for that period of time is unusual. I had almost 400 games and I’m proud of that fact.
‘Eight years was a long time and it was right, I felt, at the time for us to part company and move on.
‘I was bit disappointed in how it ended. I never got a chance to say cheerio to people I had worked closely with but, by the same token, it doesn’t always end well.
‘The secret of management is to try and move while you can still be viewed well, but the vast majority of the supporters, I mean a lot of people, reached out to me.
‘I still have regular contact with a lot of them, and emails sent to me at the time. I know my time will be looked back fondly by the majority. Not by everyone, but you are not going to get that.’
When McInnes left Aberdeen some 18 months ago, it felt like a natural parting of the ways. Things had gone stale and it was probably the best thing for all parties to go their separate ways.
Yet, even so, the way in which the club then toiled under Stephen Glass only highlighted the consistency and body of work that McInnes had been able to put together over a number of years.
Jim Goodwin has since taken the reins, but McInnes insists there will be no bad blood or ill-feeling on his part when he makes his return tomorrow.
‘You cannot give eight years of your life to a club and not have that attachment,’ he said. ‘They were so good to me and I would like to think I tried to give that back.
‘We had a strong budget and we had success through hard work and togetherness. The board, the staff, hungry players and good recruitment all contributed to us doing well.
‘We had four second-placed finishes and it should have been five. We did a lot of good work and there was a real upturn in fortunes for Aberdeen over that period.
‘I would have liked to have won a few more trophies but success comes in different shapes. It was a decent period for us and a lot was done right — and that was down to a whole club working as one.
‘That is what I am now trying to develop here at Kilmarnock. The first step was getting promoted. The second was getting the wheels in motion to get the best people in place to be the best version of ourselves.
‘That is what I am concentrating on now. My time at Aberdeen has gone and it was always inevitable I would go back as a manager.
‘Saturday will be special and significant but, once the whistle goes, it will all be about trying to win the game for Kilmarnock.’
McInnes is delighted to welcome Russ Richardson to Rugby Park as the club’s new head of recruitment, having worked with him at Aberdeen. Richardson is credited with signing players such as Sam Cosgrove and James Maddison among many others and had been working as a scout at Liverpool prior to joining Killie.
Explaining the influence of Richardson at Pittodrie, McInnes said: ‘Signing loan players, his connections getting Danny Ward, Michael Hector, Max Lowe, James Maddison — you can rhyme seven or eight off after that.
‘Then you have signings in terms of Sam Cosgrove. He cost us £25,000 from Carlisle reserves. We sold him for over £2million. Lewis Ferguson was also part of the process in that.
‘Any time we brought players up from England, Russ had a big handle on that. I think that is the benefit we are going to have at