BlueStar

Why? Frozen pitch. Thought all grounds were meant to have undersoil heating? They might be in trouble for this actually, the was a big hoo-ha and an FA investigation a few years ago when a few games were called off cos of frozen pitches.

Struggling to land Barry Ferguson. Sigh.

I think he's one of the most promising players we have and we're never going to replace him with someone with the same potential. Sulkiness aside, he's sometimes the one person on the pitch who actually seems to want the ball and does something with it other than passing it backwards like a hot potato. Someone like Wenger could get the best out of him and there's no way he's going to want to spend the prime of his career at at club with zero ambition being played out of position.

Sigh. Would the last one out of St James's Park please turn off the light.

Or the next three summers, for that matter.

Makes me crave a lemon and lime refresher bar

He brings absolutely nothing. He's got all the slowness of a big guy but he still manages to be weak as shit and bullied off the ball. He's tall but he's still shit in the air. He hasn't got the pace to beat people, but he can't make up for it with clever runs because he doesn't know the offside rule. He doesn't have physicality, pace, natural talent, a footballing brain or a reading of the game and he doesn't even make up for a complete lack for ability with even an average workrate or doing what most large and mediocre strikers do to make up for their failings, just putting himself about. There's no excitement when Shola gets the ball, be it deep, wide, played through, one on one with the keeper or in front of an empty net, it never looks like anything's going to happen apart from him looking directly down at his feet, taking ages to get control and make a decision and still managing to make the wrong one and tripping over the ball anyway. His goal where he fooled the keeper by doing the exact opposite of what he was trying to do and accidently making it roll into the goal after deflecting off his hip is the best we can expect but I doubt he's going to get 20 of them a season. His cameo against Spurs is the worst performace I've seen in a black and white shirt all season and that's saying something. Even crap players usually have one redeeming aspect to their game, we're still looking for Sholas'.

would you like to qualify that statement as that seems to apply to many a player in our team/squad Shola makes the rest of our squad look like the Harlem Globetrotters.

Great typo - I can just imagine Shola shouting from the living room "Hoe! Is the house a mess?"

Wonder if he's ever thought his house was stolen, only to realise he was standing ten yards outside his front door instead of in his living room.

This club curse gets worse all the time, all that needs to happen is give it a day or two and

http://i42.tinypic.com/1zwksh2.jpg

Gazza said he played pool against George Clooney with a hairbrush.

Don't be daft man, our away kit would be white and black stripes.

Because he tried (and failed) to copy a management model used elsewhere to varying degrees of success? He's made severe mistakes and he's got a lot to learn about the football industry if he's going to continue to have a part to play in it. But yeah, let's just call him unsubstantiated and agenda-ridden stuff like 'delusional'. The fact he called it the Arsenal model for a start clearly shows he knows nothing about football. Especially as Wenger came out and backed Keegan. Aye, right, what on earth do Arsenal have to do with a strategy of not overspending on marquee signings and instead developing gifted young players? Or not letting the manager have full control? You think that's what he meant when he talked of "the Arsenal model"? I think that part of it was more of an attempt at the 'Real Madrid' model - although I don't think most managers would really mind if the club were trying to bring in players like Ronaldo over their head, which is a bit of a different kettle of fish to being lumbered with a few continental rejects who are going to warm the bench while you have positions that still need urgently filled.

Absolutely. Also, the water board are spying on your through a camera hidden in your televison and that weather girl you send fan mail to is giving you coded messages in her forcasts. Your GP is in on the Ashley conspiracy as well, those pills he's given you are actually slowly poisoning you in order to keep you quiet about it, stop taking them.

Jose rejects Owen speculation http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,11661_4738875,00.html

Exactly, we can barely scrape together 11 people to put on the pitch today

Times like this I do sometimes get the paranoid feeling that we're watching a slow-mo Leeds impression unfolding before our very eyes...

Only hope is that it's an emotional respose to the 5-1 thrashing (you could see how furious he was) and he might reconsider when it's died down. Wan't it only a week or so ago he said he wanted to finish his career here?

Some of the fawning comments on that article make me want to lose my lunch.

Some guy in the Mirror going on about how it'll be "Eating Stevie up inside", poor fella. How did he become the victim in this?

If he says he didn't do it he's been stitched up and victimised, if he admits it then that will have been an incredibly brave and honest thing for him to do.

Some legal guy on the news saying "Of course if there are mitigating circumstances, such as the defendant being of good character, there will more likely be a lenient, non custodial sentence" ie, he'll be OK cos he's good old Stevie G, English Hero.

If you mean why weren't people furious about it or wailing from the rooftops, it's because it was pretty much expected. You could see after the first 20 minutes that there was an absolute gulf in class and the players we had available just weren't good enough. I don't really think it was for lack of trying, some of our players had a decent game, we were just outclassed. Our best chance of getting a point would have come from playing like we did against Chelsea, getting 11 men behind the ball and defending for 90 minutes, but we can't really do that at home because the crowd would go mental and interpret it as not trying to get anything from the game, then at the end they'd be booing because we'd not even tried, rather than still singing at 5-1 down (thought the atmosphere was pretty great last night for a home tonking)