The Old Firm finally have a credible threat with irresistible Aberdeen on the rise

Nobody saw this coming. Aberdeen were a club living on   the past, every reference harking back to a time 40 years ago when a superstar manager lifted them to heights subsequently unvisited. And after defeating Rangers at Pittodrie on Wednesday it underlined that, for the first time since the glorious days of Alex Ferguson in the mid 1980s, they are back in proper contention at the top of the Scottish League.

Along with the leaders Celtic, they remain unbeaten this season and sit second in the table only on goal difference. The way they are playing, it looks as if, for the first time in a generation, the Old Firm has a real rival.

And it is an accession that has apparently come from nowhere. Last season, Aberdeen appeared to be marooned in the doldrums. There was a sense of desperation around when, in February, the veteran Neil Warnock was appointed as the third manager in as many seasons. His tenure did not last long. In March, after failing to win any of his six games in charge, he quietly quit and headed back down south.

Yet, with almost the same squad with which Warnock faltered, this season the Dons have accelerated to the summit. Whereas last season it took them 17 matches to accumulate 22 points, this term they reached the same mark after just eight league fixtures. Thus far, the only one of their 10 league games from which they did not secure maximum return was away at the serial champions Celtic, where they spirited a dramatic comeback draw.

How did it happen? Where did the change come from? What is going on in the Granite City?

Well, most observers reckon the sudden turnaround is all down to one man: the club’s new manager, Jimmy Thelin.

“He has brought a style of football that you can easily get involved with, you can easily applaud, you can easily support,” Willie Miller, the skipper of the Ferguson-led glory side told the BBC this week. “I have had a few seasons where it hasn’t been particularly enjoyable going to the games. But this season has been perfect.”

Fairytale start for Swedish manager

Thelin is an unusual football manager. He is from Sweden. Unusual because, while Dutch, Portuguese and German coaches have been fruitfully employed by the dozen in the British leagues, since Sven Göran Eriksson’s time a couple of decades back not a single Swede has managed a club in the English or Scottish leagues. Roy Hodgson and Graham Potter may have found work over in Sweden, but the brain drain has been entirely one way. Until now.

After a modest playing career, Thelin’s management began in the less than stellar surrounds of Jönköpings Södra in the Swedish second division. He did not hang around: he took them to the top flight for the first time in 46 years. He then progressed to Elfsborg, where in his six years in charge he twice finished runner-up in the Swedish Allsvenskan, once merely by goal difference. It was there his aggressive, hard-pressing, hard-running style of play caught the eye of the Aberdeen board.

Though in truth they were probably equally attracted by how he operated in the transfer market at Elfsborg. There he had forged a reputation for having an eye for a bargain and an ability to deliver profitable improvement on every investment. “Buy for a quid, sell for two,” was how one observer described his dealings.

It was more his ability to glean the best from those already at the club that has underpinned his success at Pittodrie. When he took over in June from the interim coach Peter Leven (who had steadied things after the Warnock catastrophe), one of the first things he was obliged to do was sell the club’s leading scorer Bojan Miovski to Girona. But Thelin has quickly reinvigorated the forwards he inherited: both his leading scorers, Ester Sokler, the Slovenian, and the Senegalese Pape Gueye, who have six goals each this season, were already at the club when he arrived.

When Ferguson produced the glory days for Aberdeen 40-odd years ago, he inspired his team by casting them as the underdogs, the outsiders, the eternally put-upon. He nurtured a siege mentality, based on the idea that the Glasgow hegemony got all the decisions and the only way to seek justice and turn that around was to work harder than anyone else. It worked brilliantly. Players like Miller, Gordon Strachan, Alex McLeish and Eric Black thrived under his demanding tutelage, convinced by their charismatic manager that they were on some sort of crusade.

Thelin exudes none of that sort of energy. In press conferences he is far more in the modern mould of Eddie Howe or Arnie Slot; undemonstrative, unemotional, resolutely calm. Like many of his countrymen, brought up on a diet of televised British football, Thelin speaks excellent English. And he will cheerfully fill his public discussions with words like “transition”, “between the lines” and being good “with or without the ball”. Thus far he has not once suggested his club was somehow maltreated by the self-serving Glasgow lot.

The players, however, report he is warm, approachable, superb at quickly analysing issues and diagnosing solutions. It is a quality evident in his excellent use of substitutes. As in Aberdeen’s most recent league game against Dundee United, when the late replacement Peter Ambrose scored the goal which secured a ninth home win on the bounce in all competitions this season.

There is a long, long way to go before any comparison can be made to his great predecessor, the last manager to win the Scottish title with a non-Old Firm team. But Ferguson was there in the stands when his old club drew in dramatic style recently at Celtic Park, beaming with delight at the revival unfolding in front of him (much more uplifting than watching the continuing crisis at his other former place of work).

No longer obliged to attend matches at Old Trafford since his recent sacking as club ambassador, Ferguson could want to be in the middle of a heaving, excited, optimistic Pittodrie whenever he can. Victory over Rangers would suggest this is no blip. And that Aberdeen really are back.