Scott Booth: Aberdeen as a club, the only club in the city, have lost their way

SCOTT Booth calls it a “wash of red”, by which he means tens of thousands of long-suffering Aberdeen fans providing the backdrop to one of Scottish football’s biggest occasions, a visual reminder, as if it were needed, of the potential just waiting to be fulfilled at Pittodrie.

In Saturday’s William Hill Scottish Cup semi-final, their colours will be splashed once again across the Hampden canvas, together with those of Hibernian, another of Scotland’s heavyweights punching below their weight. For both clubs, it will be a vibrant, old-fashioned spectacle, with the Old Firm nowhere to be seen.

Aberdeen, of course, have been this far a few times in recent years, only to botch their attempts at rolling back the years, most traumatically when Queen of the South denied them in 2008. Booth, who scored the winner against Hibernian in the 1993 Scottish Cup semi-final, and has recently swapped a media career for a coaching job with the SFA, believes that if his old club is to have any chance of making progress in the long term, it must take advantage of days like these.

Booth says that there has been a breakdown in the relationship between the city and its football club, one that no amount of community work will repair unless the team can at some point demonstrate that they are worth supporting.

“Aberdeen as a club, the only club in the city, have lost their way,” he says. “I’m hoping that the new stadium will change the dynamic because the connection between the club and its people has been lost. Whether that’s through social issues, with kids not going to football as much, or whether not a lot of effort has been made to connect with the fan base… I don’t know.

“A lot of things have meant that the club has struggled in recent years, but the first thing you have to do is find a way of making the team successful. It’s not very easy, if you are an unsuccessful team, to get the public to buy into you. It has to come from the team first, then it becomes reciprocal. It’s silly to ask the fans to do more if you keep coming up with poor performances.

“There have been times when I have been at Pittodrie in recent years, working for television, when it has been almost a full house, and there was that feel that it had 15-20 years ago. But the performance in front of an expectant crowd was really, really poor, and everything dissipated again.”

Booth believes the club cannot keep squandering these opportunities. Aberdeen haven’t been in a final for 12 years, and haven’t won a trophy since lifting the 1995-96 League Cup. That year, Booth played a key role in their run to the final, but missed the climactic defeat of Dundee through injury.

Two years before that, his winner at Tynecastle, when he stole in at the front post to convert Paul Kane’s cross, put them through to the Scottish Cup Final at Hibs’ expense. Booth recalls that goal, as well as several in the earlier rounds, including three against Hamilton Academical, and two against Clydebank in a 4-3 thriller at Kilbowie.

It wasn’t the greatest Aberdeen team, but it is one their supporters would kill for now. Some were faintly disparaging of Booth’s career, which they said was unfulfilled, but his nine years at Pittodrie included the famous title decider at Ibrox in 1991 and, despite frequent injuries, enough goals for club and country to attract the interest of Rangers.

It is a tale he has seldom told. When his contract was due to expire in 1997, the Ibrox club tabled an offer of “hundreds of thousands of pounds”. Booth said to his manager, Roy Aitken, that if the club did not accept, his only other option would be to go abroad in the summer, a move that would be worth nothing to Aberdeen.

As it turned out, the offer was declined, and the deal fell through. “They wanted a crazy price from Rangers because it was Rangers. I went to the manager and said ‘if I were you, I would take the money. It’s the only substantial offer we’ve got. If you don’t, I’ve got offers from abroad’. And I’ll never forget what he said. He said, ‘you’ll never go abroad’. I can still hear those words ringing in my ears.”

A few weeks later, Booth was abroad. In hindsight, he is glad it worked out that way, partly because of the baggage that comes with joining Rangers from Aberdeen, and partly because moving overseas was the making of him. He soon signed for Borussia Dortmund, despite Aitken’s refusal to let him play in a trial match. “I could have just played the game and not told them, but I phoned back to ask the manager if it would be OK, and I was denied the chance to prove myself in a team that were about to win the Champions League.”

Booth, when he eventually joined, was mainly a substitute for Dortmund, but a couple of loan deals set up the most fruitful period of his career. After spells with Utrecht and Vitesse Arnhem, he made a permanent move to Twente Enschede, with whom he won the Dutch Cup, scoring in a penalty shoot-out against PSV Eindhoven.

Booth says that he always wanted to play abroad, thanks mainly to the influence of his Dutch team-mates at Aberdeen. There were a few of them in those days, from Theo Snelders to Hans Gilhaus and Theo Ten Caat. Paul Mason, a Liverpudlian who proved himself at Groningen, also had something a little bit different. “He was an exciting player, a dribbler,” says Booth. “He played with a freedom that you could see he had picked up in Holland. Guys like that maybe opened my mind a bit.”

Now 40, Booth works for the SFA, appointed by its performance director, Mark Wotte, who was his coach at Utrecht. He has responsibility for Scotland’s under-15 team, as well as the performance schools programme, where he says the objective is to swap our obsession with the long ball for the kind of patient, passing game made in Holland.

Booth believes passionately that if it does for Scotland’s emerging players what it did for him, the country can look forward to a bright future. “I came into football with a certain set of tools, and given those tools, I was astounded that I played for Scotland, scored for Scotland, and went to a World Cup finals, but the reason I was able to do all that was that I took those tools and tried to make them better. I had some good years at Aberdeen and we were fairly successful for a period, but I played my best football abroad.

“What Mark is putting in place here is what he experienced in Holland. The way the Dutch did things was different, and in a way, we have to be different too. We have to be open-minded. The fans, the managers, the press... everybody needs to change.”

Aberdeen, you have been warned.