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Happy to be proven wrong but I would be staggered if Wilder would come up here. Of late he has managed in the EPL and with Middlesbrough in the Championship and in financial terms I cannot imagine he'd be in our stratosphere. Middlesbrough have regularly bought players for £2M-£3M, they must have been paying Wilder something like £20,000-£30,000 a week? They get crowds of 25,000 down there. Most of the time we are signing players from leagues one and two on frees. He could easily get another gig in the English Championship so with the best will in the world, what would be his motivation for being interested? For me it goes back to being realistic with our targets. A lot of our fans (and I also think our chairman thinks the same) have wild ideas about us being some sleeping giant club but we're not. Our average attendances are fifth in the country by some distance. I just cannot see why someone like Wilder, Hughton, Bruce or Solskjaer would be remotely interested but time will tell I suppose.

Yeah that would be a concern but that could be the same for Knutsen, Bekke or Cifuentes if they start well.

Coulson could do a lot of damage further forward on the left,...or possibly in place of Clarkson if unavailable. A few useful tricks up his sleeve for a stuffy defence

Yep. Or Barry Robson. One of the first things Cormack said when he came in was that he wanted good succession planning at the club, and I was delighted as I've been saying it for years. When McInnes was getting in his own sports scientists, scouts etc if concerned me greatly. Cormack made absolutely no changes to the club that hinted at succession planning, and we didn't have recruitment or DofF positions filled when Glass arrived and we all saw the disaster. Whoever we employ as manager, we have to do it on our terms (compromise, to a degree of course), with succession in mind, always. If Wilder were to come in and immediately say that a person was underperforming, then that's fine, but we don't need him picking his mate from Halifax or wherever, we go through a proper recruitment process to get a new person. Similarly, he should be able to identify players, but those players must be filtered through our recruitment team and processes. None of the above managers have experience of taking a player from their country to play in the SPFL and as we've seen on many occasions, good players aren't good everywhere. If Wilder is a great coach and manager, and he can add his specific talents to the recruitment negotiations, allowing us to sign players who might not otherwise come to us, then that's certainly worth getting him here for. Those qualities are specific to him, but they're things that we can look for in a replacement when the time comes. What we never want to go through again is an exodus of staff upon a manager leaving because he was the one in complete control (and in McInnes' case, probably left it to stagnate). Edit: to clarify, the line should be drawn between manager and first team coaching staff, with the rest falling under director of football.

nah, he's called Ryan...

Against a rotten Motherwell side. One of those who looks good when team are on top but disappears when team are doing badly.