UV

I think it's ridiculous how much Hughton's tactics are being criticised tbh. I laughed at the naivety of it before, but it really does seem like a lot of people think it's as simple as putting (what they think is) the best 11 players on the pitch at the same time all the time. This gives absolutely no consideration to the fact that the manager has far more information about the players to go on than we do. He sees how they perform in training, no doubt trying different formations, he gets fitness reports on them, he should even give consideration to their mental state and what's going on in their personal life. He also has to try and balance playing the best team every week with rotating things to make sure the same players don't wear themselves out over a long season and that fringe players are not frozen out. We've got 5 games in 16 days coming up next, but I guess that won't come into the equation when people convince themselves the 11 players they put in a formation on a message board would have played beautiful flowing football and won every game 4-0. The fact is Hughton has very limited options to change things in any significant way as the players we have are limited in their ability. We've been very limited in terms of numbers in wide players, and in central midfield they are all much of a muchness except that Nolan has a knack of scoring goals. The players are good enough to get results in this league in the style we've been playing, but no way in the world is it going to be pretty no matter who plays or how they line up, and if we did try to change it there's absolutely no guarantee that "better" football would even maintain the same level of results let alone improve them. Here's some of my favourites from the crap that comes out: "He'll never drop Butt" changed immediately to "he'll never drop Smith/Nolan" once he did in fact drop Butt. I'm not sure who exactly is supposed to play in midfield once we drop Butt, Nolan and Smith. Guthrie and Vuckic I suppose, even though Guthrie's been equally poor when played central and hardly anyone's seen anything of Vuckic so he obviously "must be better". Lovenkrands dad died and because soon after he played one game and scored, that's all gone away and he should be playing week in week out again without a care in the world. "Why didn't he play <insert recently or even currently injured player>?" which of course would turn into "Why did he play <insert previously injured player> rushing him back too soon?" if any player who's been injured in the last month gets injured again. "When player X came on he changed the game". Of course this is used not as a compliment of a good substitution that a player was saved to be fresh coming on against a tired defence/midfield, but as a criticism that the player should have played from the start (where he may well have been far less effective pacing himself for a full game and up against a fresh defence). I swear even if Wenger or Ferguson were manager half of you would be criticising their tactics week in week out.

Because home advantage never used to exist in the olden days? I don't pretend to know why, but home advantage is indisputably a reality. Look at managers and teams who do not modify their game home and away. There's still nearly always a difference in results. I don't have the source to back it up, but I remember reading once that the likelihood of a win was indirectly proportional to the distance travelled. This would explain a number of phenomena such as derby equilibrium (most derby records through the years are very close between 2 clubs). Our poor London and South coast record (and vice versa) and why we're at more of a disadvantage than most clubs playing at Wembley. The reason Liverpool & Man U have been strong (central and lots of NW clubs). It's not our fault we've not won anything for ages, it's Geography.

You mean like Barton (24), Martins (21), Owen (25), Emre (24), Parker (24), Boumsong (25), Babayaro (26)?

How exactly are you classifying "a club like us"? ie one which not so long ago was constantly in the top 20 of the highest turnovers in the world in spite of supposed completely incompetent ownership (so obviously with a lot of room to improve it's finances), and which would certainly go straight back in the top 30 at least immediately on promotion. Which clubs has it worked for out of interest? don't confuse turnover with doing well. seems like you are forgetting the outgoings. Not at all. When run properly we have a financial advantage over a lot of teams in this country, all but half a dozen or so at the moment. We can afford higher transfer fees and wages than a lot of teams in the Premier League. There are limits of course, but just because we didn't cross the line and win the league or a cup when we were actually trying doesn't mean we should just give up and be happy to just get by as a club without any ambition other than to stay in the Premiership. This lad is proposing "a club like us" shouldn't get ideas above our station and should settle for buying a couple of cheap players on low wages a year. This is apparently the road to success, but actually it's the road to mediocrity which leads you down the path of falling attendances and reduced merchandising ending up back where we were 30 years ago. the big thing that stands out is "when run properly" and i agree 100% with that. however we are still suffering from not being run properly since about the time robson left. The majority of the squad was easily good enough for top half of the table when Ashley took over. Plenty of saleable assets. Sell the high earners and replace them if the wage bill was too high (and only Butt, Duff, Given, Martins & Owen remained as pre-Ashley high earners at the start of 08-09, just over 1 year after Ashley took over). Where we are now is all on Ashley.

How exactly are you classifying "a club like us"? ie one which not so long ago was constantly in the top 20 of the highest turnovers in the world in spite of supposed completely incompetent ownership (so obviously with a lot of room to improve it's finances), and which would certainly go straight back in the top 30 at least immediately on promotion. Which clubs has it worked for out of interest? don't confuse turnover with doing well. seems like you are forgetting the outgoings. Not at all. When run properly we have a financial advantage over a lot of teams in this country, all but half a dozen or so at the moment. We can afford higher transfer fees and wages than a lot of teams in the Premier League. There are limits of course, but just because we didn't cross the line and win the league or a cup when we were actually trying doesn't mean we should just give up and be happy to just get by as a club without any ambition other than to stay in the Premiership. This lad is proposing "a club like us" shouldn't get ideas above our station and should settle for buying a couple of cheap players on low wages a year. This is apparently the road to success, but actually it's the road to mediocrity which leads you down the path of falling attendances and reduced merchandising ending up back where we were 30 years ago. Eh??? I'm not proposing we settle for mediocrity... I'm just suggesting we have a more sensible transfer policy. I can't see any merit in us buying foreign players for large sums of money for the reasons I listed earlier. I would also prefer we didn't buy players from top 4 clubs. Yes you are. Completely. Any player over £6m who was any good would have been bought by a bigger club than us, no sorry, by a FAR bigger club than us, and they wouldn't want to play for us anyway even if we fluked into the top 4 because Newcastle's shit so why bother. Let's just go for players who noone else wants or ever wanted (don't want any cast offs from "big" clubs do we) to avoid disappointment. What an amazing strategy for success. I'm still waiting for a list of the teams it's worked for.

How exactly are you classifying "a club like us"? ie one which not so long ago was constantly in the top 20 of the highest turnovers in the world in spite of supposed completely incompetent ownership (so obviously with a lot of room to improve it's finances), and which would certainly go straight back in the top 30 at least immediately on promotion. Which clubs has it worked for out of interest? don't confuse turnover with doing well. seems like you are forgetting the outgoings. Not at all. When run properly we have a financial advantage over a lot of teams in this country, all but half a dozen or so at the moment. We can afford higher transfer fees and wages than a lot of teams in the Premier League. There are limits of course, but just because we didn't cross the line and win the league or a cup when we were actually trying doesn't mean we should just give up and be happy to just get by as a club without any ambition other than to stay in the Premiership. This lad is proposing "a club like us" shouldn't get ideas above our station and should settle for buying a couple of cheap players on low wages a year. This is apparently the road to success, but actually it's the road to mediocrity which leads you down the path of falling attendances and reduced merchandising ending up back where we were 30 years ago.

How exactly are you classifying "a club like us"? ie one which not so long ago was constantly in the top 20 of the highest turnovers in the world in spite of supposed completely incompetent ownership (so obviously with a lot of room to improve it's finances), and which would certainly go straight back in the top 30 at least immediately on promotion. Which clubs has it worked for out of interest?

Well to be fair it's me who keeps bringing it up repeatedly, it must get tiresome but still Llambias said it was the team we sold Milner to who have spent over £90m net in the last 5 years, all financed by the owner that we're copying. http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/feb/10/derek-llambias-newcastle-united-mike-ashley Only 4 years until we're challenging for everything now.

They will sell him in 18 months for £7-10million + . Great move Ashley. I really don't think that we've missed out on him because of money. Even if we have then it's understandable, we've just started to reduce costs/wages... wouldn't make sense to start breaking the rules now. You reckon with the new wage cap we can't match Wigan for wages now then? In 07-08 Wigan's turnover was £43m. We turnover more than that in the Championship.

The slob who's scored more than Leon Best? In more appearances. Nolan hasn't scored in 7 games, and for the most part hasn't looked like threatening to score. Best is a striker and hasn't scored in the league in the last 10. He has 3 league goals in the last 4 months in fact (17 games). Did someone say he was in form?

Last 8 games in all competitions DDDWDLWD As I thought. 11 points from 8 games is pretty worrying. 14 points from our last 8 league games isn't all that much better mind. It is like. An average of 1.75 points per game to the end of the season would have us on 89 points. Typically easily enough for automatic promotion, in fact that form throughout a whole season has been good enough before. That's if we continue on the same appallingly poor, dismally abject performances and tactics etc, etc that we're currently going through with injuries and new players still fitting in. Ridiculously simplistic.

I love how some people make out that Ashley is doing things radically different from any other club or the previous board here. When we bought players in their mid-twenties before they were over the hill / on the way down / looking for one last payday (only if they turned out to be less than brilliant of course), now when we buy or look at players in their mid-twenties they are young and hungry and can only improve (typically because they've done nothing their past careers to be on the way down from). All clubs and the previous board here would buy players on the quiet if at all possible and to say this is some radical departure by Ashley is just not true, especially considering all the fuss this window over the first choice players we were after and didn't sign. Just as an example, we signed 4 players in the Summer of 06, Duff, Martins, Sibierski & Bernard 3 out of those 4 were completely out of the blue. Duff wasn't out of the blue. It took a while for the confirmation to come through. Bernard doesn;t count as a signing and Martins took ages to come through. So 1 out of the blue signing 4 years ago. Nice. Not how I remember it. Reports were all about Duff going to Spurs. Then news leaked about us & Liverpool being interested and we signed him the next day. So it wasn't out of the blue then? Okay. I thought we were talking about keeping transfer activity out of the press until a deal was agreed, I didn't realise your criteria included making sure no-one spotted the player while he travelled to the ground for a medical or anything. We obviously have different thresholds for "out of the blue".

I love how some people make out that Ashley is doing things radically different from any other club or the previous board here. When we bought players in their mid-twenties before they were over the hill / on the way down / looking for one last payday (only if they turned out to be less than brilliant of course), now when we buy or look at players in their mid-twenties they are young and hungry and can only improve (typically because they've done nothing their past careers to be on the way down from). All clubs and the previous board here would buy players on the quiet if at all possible and to say this is some radical departure by Ashley is just not true, especially considering all the fuss this window over the first choice players we were after and didn't sign. Just as an example, we signed 4 players in the Summer of 06, Duff, Martins, Sibierski & Bernard 3 out of those 4 were completely out of the blue. Duff wasn't out of the blue. It took a while for the confirmation to come through. Bernard doesn;t count as a signing and Martins took ages to come through. So 1 out of the blue signing 4 years ago. Nice. Not how I remember it. Reports were all about Duff going to Spurs. Then news leaked about us & Liverpool being interested and we signed him the next day.

I agree that Taylor could probably have been sold in the Summer for a decent amount and that supports your argument, but a counter to that would be that Taylor was such a fan favourite that it would have pushed supporters over the edge (it's not a very good counter argument as Ashley knows by now he can do what he wants and people will still turn up and pay to watch the team). Maybe Taylor blocked any move himself? We didn't hesitate to sell Bassong though and he is exactly the sort of player we ideally would have hung on to ahead of the likes of Coloccini if we wanted to lower the wage bill. Where I disagree is with people's valuations of the likes of Enrique, Coloccini and Gutierrez. I like Enrique and disagree with the negative reports he gets, but last season you would struggle to see a positive comment about him from anywhere outside of message boards or local press. No English team would touch him for a decent fee, and the kind of foreign teams who would be interested don't have the money. Coloccini and Gutierrez are simply not really worth more than £3-4m, and their high wages make them very hard to shift without us subsidising the move and negating much of the transfer fee. We didn't sell anyone who didn't make it known that they wanted to leave for a start, and I disagree with your assesment of our other assets - A good few of the remaining big names could have been sold if Ashley had the mind for it and ended up like Boro and their great chairman, but we didn't. We kept the core of the squad and, with the players commitment and Hughton's help, got them playing for one another for the first time in a long time. Could be wrong but I don't remember Duff saying he wanted to leave, and IMO more than any of the midfielders we kept he'd have stormed this league. Of course you could be right, no-one here really knows what Ashley's intentions were, but going on past form and on the players who left, I think you're deluding yourself if you think keeping the majority of the squad was the intention.

I agree that Taylor could probably have been sold in the Summer for a decent amount and that supports your argument, but a counter to that would be that Taylor was such a fan favourite that it would have pushed supporters over the edge (it's not a very good counter argument as Ashley knows by now he can do what he wants and people will still turn up and pay to watch the team). Maybe Taylor blocked any move himself? We didn't hesitate to sell Bassong though and he is exactly the sort of player we ideally would have hung on to ahead of the likes of Coloccini if we wanted to lower the wage bill. Where I disagree is with people's valuations of the likes of Enrique, Coloccini and Gutierrez. I like Enrique and disagree with the negative reports he gets, but last season you would struggle to see a positive comment about him from anywhere outside of message boards or local press. No English team would touch him for a decent fee, and the kind of foreign teams who would be interested don't have the money. Coloccini and Gutierrez are simply not really worth more than £3-4m, and their high wages make them very hard to shift without us subsidising the move and negating much of the transfer fee.

It must be remembered that you don't have to in any way sympathise or give credit to Ashley to be accused of "bumming" him by many on here. (What a horrible expression that is btw) Simply not blaming him for the global economic crisis or Africa's starving millions is enough for some. Mike Ashley - Newcastle's best ever chairman/owner. by Benwell Lad

Taylor yes (but he's injured now), maybe Enrique, but the other 3 would not have attracted interest for any significant amounts of money, especially not Coloccini and Gutierrez who are on high wages. During the Summer I would be amazed if it were not the case that most of the squad were up for sale, but that we were just lucky (from a getting promoted point of view) that there was little interest in most of them. Now it's a different scenario of course as we've done better than most would have predicted and are a very good bet to go up, so I'd agree I'd be very surprised if we sell anyone significant.

I love how some people make out that Ashley is doing things radically different from any other club or the previous board here. When we bought players in their mid-twenties before they were over the hill / on the way down / looking for one last payday (only if they turned out to be less than brilliant of course), now when we buy or look at players in their mid-twenties they are young and hungry and can only improve (typically because they've done nothing their past careers to be on the way down from). All clubs and the previous board here would buy players on the quiet if at all possible and to say this is some radical departure by Ashley is just not true, especially considering all the fuss this window over the first choice players we were after and didn't sign. Just as an example, we signed 4 players in the Summer of 06, Duff, Martins, Sibierski & Bernard 3 out of those 4 were completely out of the blue.

http://www.robertwilson.talktalk.net/ScottishMags/1-awardgallery-POTYA.html Hopefully their player of the year this season will be Coloccini.

it may be the only way forward for the club, given the financial climate. Its a diffrent market now. Things actually seem to be coming together a bit now, Ashley's penny pinching completely f***ed us up, but I think I'd prefer that than us being in a West Ham or Portsmouth situation like we may have been had Sheppard continued his borrowing. The way I see it: Ashley's an idiot, and has gone about pretty much everything the wrong way. Weirdly enough, despite royally cocking up the short term future of the club, it may have saved our long term future. Imagine what we could have done had we had a competent owner. does that mean you think we really had to cut costs and quickly ? It means I think had we continued with the transfer policy we were following under the old board we'd have been screwed. Sadly Ashley took it way too far in the opposite direction and would hardly spend at all. what if he had planned to spend but only when he freed up money by getting rid of some big earning wasters ? not saying thats what happened but it's as likely as "he's an idiot" ? What if he did? Doesn't change the fact that his inability to spend when we really needed it (after selling the likes of Zog) was part of what got us relegated. his inability ?.....wasn't it the clubs inability ? just because we sold zog doesn't mean we have that money to spend when the big wasters were still there. No, his inability. He's the man with the money, he's the one that lets the manager spend or not. Are you honestly saying you were satisfied with the January window last season? It was a joke man, we needed investment and we got Nolan and Taylor. Wasn't good enough, at all. no i wasn't happy but in the position i could just about understand it or as you say, we could have been in pompeys position...is it beyond the realms of possibility that he saw that. still can't excuse him bringing in kinnear and then hughton mind. That's what I'm saying, cocked up the short term future but maybe saved the long term future. Not beyond the realms of possibility that he saw that at all, just think he could still have invested a small amount more to keep us up. Completely agreed on the management, could not have gotten that any worse. but the way you are describing it he didn't cock up the short term future, he saw what it was and realised we couldn't go on like that. madras - in your rewriting of history where Ashley was sorting out our finances are you just going to ignore the fact that the wages went up 12% in Ashley's first year and up again in his next year. That we were buying 26 year old players unproven in our league on high wages while selling our best young players on low wages. If cashflow was a problem can you explain why we were paying up front for players while everyone else pays in instalments and why ALL debts were paid off even the ones which were not due or called in? In Ashley's first year we got an £18m bonus in extra turnover just because of the new TV deal, but that just vanished in the expenditure despite no net spend on players. The extra money that Ashley put into the club in the first 2 years was not in fact all necessary because of the state of the finances when he took over, but was mostly to fund his buy up front but sell on credit policy, and the money he is putting in now is to cover the cost of relegation due to HIS appalling decisions and appointments. His personnel decisions were terrible, but his financial ones were equally as bad. This idea that all the problems the club has had were inevitable and would have happened anyway is rubbish. Between 97 and 01 we had 4 years in the bottom half of the table. During this time the stadium was expanded and the net debt stood at £66m while the turnover was half what it was for Ashley's first year (taken from nufc-finances). Did we go under then? Did we weaken the squad and risk relegation? Nope, in fact we built on the good squad we had and had a moderately successful footballing period because of it. In the 15 years of the old board the final financial position was £70m debt, £45m of which was due to the stadium expansion which was paying for itself (as long as the ground was kept full - as it was). So that's £25m of debt due to the signings, wages, dividends and other costs over the years. Hardly massive financial mismanagement or over extending ourselves in my book, and before Ashley came in and told everyone who wanted to listen he had just saved us from the brink of administration, finances were only a topic of discussion when people were complaining about dividends, and how we weren't spending as much as Liverpool. The only talk of financial worries was from mad fantasising mackems. In fact the only thing particularly wrong with the finances in the last years of Shepherd & Hall was that the wages had grown too high. Not unrectifiable especially given the extra TV money due to come in which meant we only had to maintain our wages at the same level and we'd have been fine.

I never said Llambias and Ashley were picking the players so I don't know where you got that from, but I do think they will have hired an agency to do the job Wise was supposed to do and Hughton will have little say in who the targets are (but will probably identify the areas we need players for). You do realise the 2 players you highlighted as Hughton targets are Simpson who was loaned mid August and Williamson who we were linked with back then too. 2 months before Hughton got the "manager" job and 2 weeks after he said: Or was he just lying as he masterminded it all? It was Chris Hughton who was caretaker manager at that time right? In which case you would think he might have made suggestions as to who he would like within Ashley's budget? Or are you absolutely certain that Hughton has no input whatsoever and just trains the players who are expertly bought in by Ashley/Llambias through this agency? People at the time were wondering who was responsible for the signing. No-one really thought it was Hughton and some thought it was Ashley nicking ideas off the ex manager: More likely Ashley picking the cheap options from Shearer's list and quietly sidelineing the ones where he will have to pay a fee. So like I said if it was him in charge of transfers, he did a good job of keeping quiet and pretending he knew fuck all about what was happening.

I never said Llambias and Ashley were picking the players so I don't know where you got that from, but I do think they will have hired an agency to do the job Wise was supposed to do and Hughton will have little say in who the targets are (but will probably identify the areas we need players for). You do realise the 2 players you highlighted as Hughton targets are Simpson who was loaned mid August and Williamson who we were linked with back then too. 2 months before Hughton got the "manager" job and 2 weeks after he said: Or was he just lying as he masterminded it all?

Do you believe that Hughton is allowed to identify players ? Are you saying Ashley has employed an expert who is successfully identifying players other than Hughton? I'd argue with the word "expert", but personally I expect transfers and loans are still being handled by an agency as they were during the Summer when Hughton knew nothing about what was going on. First Artists agency wasn't it? Oh, hey look at some of the players on their books: http://www.firstartist.com/sports/clients.asp Recognise anyone?

would you say that last seasons back four was better than hughes,bramble,dabizas,griffin ? Would you say that the quality of attack for mid to lower table teams was the same then as now? I don't think so. The extra money that all Premier league teams have now relative to foreign leagues compared to back then means even the poor teams in the league now are much better than the poor teams were back then player for player. So a like for like comparison of defences is largely irrelevant. The current back four would have been good enough in 2000, but that doesn't mean they're good enough in 2010. Plus Bramble is and was a far better Premiership defender than either Taylor or Coloccini. No he was not, Bramble made a lot more mistakes than Taylor and Coloccini has made... He'd make occasional obvious stupid mistakes which would be remembered for weeks, but he was far more solid throughout the game than either of them. Coloccini's usually too far out of position to make the mistakes Bramble made.

would you say that last seasons back four was better than hughes,bramble,dabizas,griffin ? Would you say that the quality of attack for mid to lower table teams was the same then as now? I don't think so. The extra money that all Premier league teams have now relative to foreign leagues compared to back then means even the poor teams in the league now are much better than the poor teams were back then player for player. So a like for like comparison of defences is largely irrelevant. The current back four would have been good enough in 2000, but that doesn't mean they're good enough in 2010. Plus Bramble is and was a far better Premiership defender than either Taylor or Coloccini.