Red tide is rising… and it could spell bad news for Clement if Thelin’s Dons continue to keep Rangers in the shade

Seven months ago, Aberdeen was eyeing a trip to Fir Park with the kind of zeal you might reserve for a visit to the dentist.

At the start of the year, Barry Robson ran out of time. The Neil Warnock experiment had blown up in chairman Dave Cormack’s face.

After losing his first game as interim manager at Dundee, Peter Leven boarded a bus to Motherwell, needing a win to prevent the team going eight league games without a win, hitting an all-time low of 25 years earlier would match.

Leighton Clarkson’s goal proved enough to complete just a second league win of the year. It said everything about the hole the club was in: the main emotion afterwards was the relief that the fear of relegation had been removed.

If someone at the time had predicted what would happen next, you would have been tempted to suggest that he or she needed a day off.

The team that forgot what it felt like to win football games has become a team that now knows no other outcome.

Despite the fact that Jimmy Thelin’s side did not face European football at the start of the Swede’s reign, thirteen wins in a row is simply an astonishing achievement.

To put this into context, the Dons are the only club in Europe’s top 50 leagues to perform impeccably in all competitions. Records are being broken so quickly that it’s hard to keep up.

This would be impressive enough if Elfsborg’s former manager had enjoyed the financial backing of an oligarch. He doesn’t have that.

Eight of the fourteen players who won at Motherwell that day are still with the club. Likewise, only six of the fourteen who recorded another dramatic win against Hearts on Sunday are new to this.

Thelin has spent some money – as much as £800,000 in the case of Topi Keskinen – but the seismic shift in Aberdeen’s fortunes is down to his coaching rather than the chequebook.

He has been without Bojan Miovski since being sold to Girona for a record £6.8million and has recently been without Pape Gueye, still the Premier League’s top scorer, due to injury.

As Aberdeen’s high of 15 straight wins from the early 1970s comes into view, the Swede’s impeccable record also underlines the importance of being the key player at any club.

Make sure you have a good management agreement and everything will change. In the Granite City they see that a rising tide does indeed lift all boats.

Thanks to Ante Palaversa’s late winner, Sunday’s victory left the Dons 19 points ahead of Hearts with a game in hand. It has not escaped anyone’s attention that the home team is twenty points behind the team that finished third in the Premier League last season. That race already seems to be over.

The side benefit of this tectonic shift is an increase in revenues. A healthy crowd of 16,064 attended the last meeting between the sides in Pittodrie in December. On Sunday there were 19,175.

Ahead of a tempting trip against Celtic on Saturday week, the whole city has got on board with what Thelin is doing.

Given his record in his homeland, where he took inexperienced Elfsborg within touching distance of the title, there were high expectations of what the 46-year-old could achieve in time in Aberdeen. But this is off the charts now.

Apart from the fact that Thelin’s men have the momentum of a juggernaut when they return from the international break, the difficulty faced by his colleagues in the Premier League is a matter of perception.

The longer Aberdeen’s renaissance continues, the harder it becomes to view the efforts of other top executives in a favorable light – especially those with much larger budgets.

Although Philippe Clement’s Rangers did the right thing by beating St Johnstone on Sunday, a league table showing them still five points behind the Dons is not good enough reading.

We are now a year on from the point where the Ibrox board targeted Michael Beale following a home defeat to Aberdeen, then managed by Robson.

You cannot say that the Belgian’s time in charge has been disastrous. That is clearly not the case. Any rational analysis of his tenure must take into account circumstances beyond his control.

The need to reduce the wage bill and average age of the squad this summer was a legacy issue. The delay in completing the building work at Ibrox is the responsibility of those above him.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem unreasonable for Rangers supporters to believe their side would be in a better position at the moment.

In golf language, Clement has leveled the course. While the glory for winning the League Cup and captaining a Europa League group evaporated when the title and Scottish Cup were painfully lost, there have been just enough positives along the way to suggest he’s on the right track is. Just not enough to believe that the team will arrive at the desired location anytime soon.

He needs time and patience to get there. While the good news is that the board and most supporters are still behind him, the reality is that the situation will not continue if Rangers are in second place for long, let alone third.

Achieving prosaic wins like Sunday’s over Saints is certainly essential as the 50-year-old prepares for a year in the job.

While a win rate of around 69 percent is favorable, this must be taken in context; Beale achieved a 72 percent share, while Giovanni van Bronckhorst had only 59 percent. Without contradiction, the Dutchman was a better manager.

The team’s form so far this season has been staccato. A draw at Tynecastle on the opening day set the tone.

The disaster of the loss to Dynamo Kiev at Hampden in the Champions League qualifiers was followed by a mini-resurgence and then a thumping at Celtic Park.

Clement still remains without a win over Celtic after five attempts, an unwanted point that even Beale avoided.

Four wins in a row, including a famous night in Malmö, were achieved without losing a single goal. They gave rise to the belief that Lyon had only made a U-turn to break up Clement’s side at Ibrox.

Although the manager has rightly moved on from John Lundstram, Ryan Jack and Borna Barisic, the jury remains cautious about many of his signings.

Connor Barron is off to a flying start. Jefte, Hamza Igamane and Neraysho Kasanwirjo have talent. Vaclav Cerny, Nedim Bajrami and Robin Propper have a lot to prove.

Clement must ensure that skipper James Tavernier puts a difficult start to the campaign behind him. Cyriel Dessers scored seven goals in eight games, but has not found the net in four games. With Danilo injured, it is imperative that he finds his way back to goal quickly.

After bouncing back from the defeat in Lyon with a win over Saints, the break feels like a rude interruption for Clement, but the breather could still come in handy.

His side resume at Rugby Park before taking on Steaua Bucharest and St Mirren at home, all whetting the appetite for a visit to Pittodrie on October 30.

It will hardly be his fault if Aberdeen are still knocking over teams like nine pins in that encounter. But it will be his problem.