Benwell Lad

Howay man Bimpy, get back on that Spuds website and tell us what's going on.........

Without Niall Quinn we'd probably be somewhere near league one. Your equivalent would be Newcastle sinking without a trace and Shearer managing to buy the club from Ashley and taking you back up. Shearer was a good footballer. Would be more like Paul Kitson buying us and bringing us to the blessed ground of mediocrity. Niall Quinn was also a good footballer. Albeit nowhere near Shearer but he did manage to form one half of the best front two I've seen at Sunderland. Not saying much as we've won nowt for ages but I'm only 23. Hopefully there's still time... Phillips was certainly one of the best strikers the PL has ever seen. Quinn was a bit of a plank, but in fairness it worked quite well.

sounds like .com are telling porkies.........

Without Niall Quinn we'd probably be somewhere near league one. Your equivalent would be Newcastle sinking without a trace and Shearer managing to buy the club from Ashley and taking you back up. Appreciate you'll know more about it and be closer to it than I am, but isn't that comparison somewhat distorted and seen through rose tinted specs ? I know he was credited with brokering ownership deals, but didn't he also recruit and extend the contracts of Bruce and sanction some very dubious spending which may well have been the root cause of the shit you're now in. Ellis Short certainly wanted rid of him. The Shearer comparison will probably find some sympathy around here but personally I wouldn't want him anywhere near us. Best centre forward in the world at the time but not much good at anything since. A real "legend" though.

....sorry just quoting directly from them and putting complete faith in their meticulous research....

From .com's report. "it's a matter of record that Spurs have lost six Premier League games in the last year - all on Sundays and all after Thursday night Europa League ties. We of course were able to adversely affect our league performance last season for a fraction of Tottenham's outlay... " Pardew/Excuse arguments apart, that is quite an amazing statistic.

Saw the interview with Saint Niall of Pennywell after his latest Wearside canonization. What a fucking arse licking bullshitter he is. Unsurprisingly macums will be lapping it all up as usual. They really do fall in love with their owners/chairman etc, or indeed anyone who is prepared to say something nice about them. At most clubs someone who had overseen managerial appointments and spending like he did would have been chased out of town, but throw them a few platitudes and phoney, insincere compliments and you're a legend forever. Strange people.

The problem is that if a player is 'exceptional', they're likely to have offers from more successful clubs, and we can only secure them by paying over the odds in wages to overcome their reluctance. That's the route to trouble (eg QPR) If another 10-20k can secure the player, why not? It's not as if we are offering wages of 150k, 200k all round. That extra 10-20k for ONE player won't break the club and send us to the same path QPR has taken (full squad of mediocrity ridden with huge wages). I think the same formula will be applied to a potential Remy deal as has been with every other deal we've done recently. The fee and wages will be weighed against what they believe the player will bring to the squad, club and what his potential resale value will be. Injury/fitness record etc will be a factor too. In Remy's case his signature should be viewed as pretty positive all round so they should be prepared to pay the "going rate". We're probably the most calculating, empirical dealers in football at the moment, which is not really a bad thing, it seems to work quite well and is quite refreshing after a generation of Owens, Luque's, Boumsongs etc.

Yes we are, quicker Ashley gets his money back the quicker he will f*** off. We are turning in a decent enough profit whilst still building a good side with players we enjoy watching. If Ashley recoups the money he put into us to save us from Shepheard's crazy spending, he will be off like a shot. After then it's a case of pot luck with the new owner. In the end I think we'd be daft to throw 80K wages around. People saying Man City do it...well they can afford to, their oil rich owners have bottomless pockets and so barring the coming of the apocalypse nothing will trouble them. We need to be a savvy club, bide our time over a few seasons, build a squad with the right attributes for the right money. Get players who see long term, don't mind competition for places and who truly love to play football. As for Arsenal, they have the CL money right now, why do you think they p*ss their pants whenever it looks like they could finish outside the top 4? We have a salary budget, much like any other sensible club or business and apart from the well known big spenders (CL regulars, sovereign states, oligarchs, loonies, etc) we're pretty competitive. We're not really "stingy". It's a bit like the popular "selling club" myth, we've been anything but over the last couple of seasons. Can't understand why Ashley's personal wealth is brought in as an argument by some for spending beyond the club's means. "Come on spend more of your vast amounts of money on us you FCB and by the way fuck off you're not welcome round here".

Please don't pay for Inochi to be removed from N-O. The number of intelligent, witty posters on here seems to have dropped significantly in the last few years and the debate seldom rises above the banal. We need more bright sparks and opposing views, not less.

Aye, much was said about Krul's 14 saves but a corner count of 0-14 must be some kind of record too shirley.

Is Larsson's horrific attempted leg breaker going to be reviewed or has he got away scot free again ?

Pardew's from a working class background and he came into pro football the hard way. He will relate to the majority of our support.

bollocks - he's used the tactic countless times and we've lost points as a result...this time we didn't, that's it in a nutshell really if he's not popular it's because he's lost so many fucking points doing it EDIT: and i'll not ignore the fact that spurs are the better team, most people would expect us to be dominated to some degree away from home however if you're playing the rope-a-dope game then there has to be a punch in there for yourself as well, you can't just take the hits for the entire match as more often than not you'll get knocked the fuck out Whey I'd argue that our tactics were imposed upon us thanks largely to Tottenham's quality. Fully appreciate he has previous for sitting on marginal leads like, but it's a bit petty to criticise him for it after a fantastic victory. We're never going to agree, just find the mentality a bit depressing. Even more depressing than Pardew's management. Absolutely. In the glow of a great/surprise victory it's probably too easy to overlook just how good a team Spurs are. You'd pretty much expect to spend a large part of the game on the back foot when playing away to such a talented side.

The way he uses the outside of his foot to turn inside a defender is sublime, it looks so effortless, "glides" is a great description.

No but you have nothing if the players are not with you, I think its a good thing that Tiote feels that way. The fans may have lost faith in him if we ever really had it fully in the first place but as long as the squad are with him we will be ok. Getting along with your players and staff indeed doesn't make you a good manager but it is arguably the most important aspect of management. Not sure "the fans" have lost faith in Pardew, some have and as you say some never had any in the first place, but opinions vary a lot. Take for example on here, you have Brett and you have Mick and then you have several intermediate levels between them. I would also say that the crowd at SJP remain largely sympathetic towards Pardew.

Great spot

Ashley knows what he's doing with regard to having a PL club to promote his core business. I said many years ago when we signed Shearer for a world record fee, just as football was really taking off as a global TV medium, that the story was carried on every news programme and newspaper in the world. Newcastle United got talked about in the USA in the days when "soccer" hardly registered. We probably got 15M worth of marketing that day and the best centre forward in the world thrown in for free. That said, I see Quayside's point that SD would still have got to where they are today even without NUFC.

Aye, the macums did us a favour

He is amazing in the air, will miss that no matter who replaces him. That's what makes me think Pards will most likely go for Mbiwa at RB.

Those situations are definitely more difficult for keepers to deal with nowadays knowing that even the slightest touch can see them walking.

Was Shola's "goal" offside? Looked very tight and another incident that MOTD chose to ignore.

He was shot away, totally lacking confidence and overplayed towards the end of last season. Rest of the time he's been a reliable stand in central defender and very good pro.

The reality is also that we're not playing to our potential by relying upon it. You can't plan and account for Chelsea being shit in front of goal and Tim Krul pulling off 14 brilliant saves. Therefore the game plan is either isn't sustainable or needs to be tweaked to reduce their chances either through better defending or by being a bigger or more prolonged threat ourselves. We can do it, but it needs to be for longer periods than 15 minutes or even just 1 half. I believe that we have a very good team and that it can be utilised in a better way than it is at the moment, even against the best teams in the league. That does not in any way imply that I want us to or expect us to dominate teams. It means that I want us to rely upon ourselves to win, rather than doing it for a bit and then stopping and relying on the opposition to lose. Brett is perfectly capable of fighting his own battles, but I can't let the bolded bit past - especially when you accuse him of twisting arguments or embellishing or exaggerating or so on (which you have, in this thread.) Chelsea were not shit in front of goal. That is an outright misrepresentation. Terry's missed two headed chances. Hazard's chance was on the angle and while you might argue he should have put it on target it was a good shot that went just wide. We beat Chelsea becayse we nullified their attack, not because their attack didn't turn up on the day or they missed enough chances to be "shit in front of goal". Tim Krul did not "[pull] off 14 brilliant saves". That is hyperbole, an exaggeration. He did make a lot of saves, but some of these were regulation, some were 'good' saves and, yes, there were some "brilliant saves". But to suggest that we only won because of "14 brilliant saves" is a fallacy. We won thanks to the ruthlessness of Remy, the discipline of the midfield, the resolution of the defence and an excellent performance from Krul. I can dig what you're saying about how we might be 'too' defensive and that you'd like to see us as being more expansive, but you have to acknowledge the validity of the argument that we've got some excellent results against some very good teams, and that as... unpleasant as the tactics might be you can't argue against their effectiveness. You spoke earlier of a middle ground - well, you were right. The tactics aren't great. Neither are the tactics shite. They are effective and have given us some excellent results. I don't think you can put those three results wholly and solely down to the opposition having a bad day... That really is very well put.

Taking nothing away from Timmy's performance and world class saves but I really think that Mbiwa's save on the line was the most incredible of all.