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Who signed this off?

Let’s see how we respond against Ipswich. 1 game at a time. Hope Eddie is on the mend whether we see him or not anytime soon and he gets all the recovery time he needs. It’s still in our hands.

Transfer news: one of those routine swap deals you always hear about... in the second game, @Slim will now be playing for RedsBlues and @TheInfiniteOdyssey will be wearing black and white.

I haven’t been watching spurs much but the squad doesn’t seem ‘that’ far off on paper, if a better approach could be applied and a few weaknesses shored up. Guess you could say that about most average sides, but it’s true. Sometimes when I see the lineup on paper I literally can’t imagine how it functions on the pitch. But I’m no manager obviously.

Not sure he would have necessarily, we've had games like that previously when it's gone badly wrong, and not been able to change much. To tighten up defensively, we'd have needed to do it from the off, maybe a similar gameplan to the one we deployed at Arsenal in the cup semi final, but I am not sure Howe would have done that following five wins on the run. But it will impact our performances if Howe is not back soon, Tindall's interviews don't inspire confidence for more than a couple of games.

Surely Gordon is valued at between £70-80m, that sort of area? So we would be offering around the equivalent of £130-140m for Sancho. Weakening our squad in the meantime and crippling our current wage structure.

That’s one of the wildest takes I’ve ever read.

He’s done alright. He’s a kid developing. After the Frankfurt games there were a lot of us really excited about picking up the option.

Sort of, but they did have a couple of incredible goal-line clearances and the keeper played a blinder.

Plus the £200 odd grand a week. Making him our highest earner.

Ah yeah, and then you are cutting right before the 4-0 game vs us, so it will never be equal. The game before the Spurs game they lost to Liverpool. Bar Villa they are facing no opponent remotely close to what Liverpool were at that time, so including that game seemed pointless. Again, if I am uncluding that then I am cutting it right before their biggest win of the season. If I was only interested in pushing an agenda, I would have included both of those games, as the total of those 2 (considering oppoonents) only strengthens the idea that their form has been good. We can include the game before aswell where they got trashed by Arsenal, but then again, what they are facing are nothing like those teams anyways. If we look past the strongest opponents (since they are already done playing them), they are consistenly getting more than 2 pts per game against the type of teams they have left. They might absolutely draw a game, but even a loss against Villa and a draw against mid table side puts them in a great position if they win the other 3. They will have 68 points if so.

Can we have an official latest update in the title please? If Tindall said he's still in the hospital on Saturday - that should be it. Very selfishly, I think that would be the difference in us qualifying for the CL or not. We've had lots of bad halves this season. But I feel like Eddie would've went tighter/more defensive

It's never a bonus when we have players like Isak and Tonali. They've already got momentum. A draw is bad. Villa win is bad. Minimum requirement is finishing above 2 of the teams in the chase. That's most likely to be Villa & Chelsea at this point. Best likely case scenario at the end of the weekend - 2 points ahead of Chelsea with a better GD, 1 point ahead of City, 5 points ahead of Villa - effectively 6 points. a smaller gap to 6th. Think Chelsea are always liable to drop points though.

He should probably just take the rest of the season to recover.

Given that we were playing 3 games in 7 days, you could argue we should have played a more conservative game and that way we wouldn't have needed to match Villa's energy, which with their resources, was definitely a level above ours. But hard to argue changing a gameplan when we'd won 5 on the bounce. But in hindsight we didn't really have the legs to go toe to toe with them.

Just that he's off for a few more weeks allegedly - just seen it on Facebook and Twitter

Saying?

Newcastle United are set to issue an official statement ahead of the Ipswich Town game regarding Eddie Howe, according to various sources

I expected us to sit back more after half time, but it wasn't really in the plan I guess. TBF we started the second half quite well IIRC, just the underlying tactical situation hadn't really changed enough.

It wasn't too dissimilar to the City game in a lot of respects. One the man for man press works, it's brilliant, but when it doesn't, our paceless defence is dragged all over the show. You can see why we pursued Guehi, but it'd be nice to see a bit more tactical flexibility in these situations until we can buy a fix.

Felt like that was happening in midfield as well, we were attempting to press all over the pitch, but they held the ball well and sent runners away into space.

I haven't even contemplated any other result. We'd expect to win this normally, but this is the last easy fixture left. We don't want to be needing to win the hard ones.

Indeed, although I’d still take if it ends 5-1.

Can we try it this year without the conceding in the first few minutes and the could/should have been 0-3 down before we equalised please