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I hope Miggy is saving his money because he certainly isn't having a second career as a rocket surgeon.

He just wanted to stop us mocking him for eating spaghetti, and now look what's happened.

Think it's more perfect if he took himself there.

Brings back memories of Souness reminiscing in the away press conference about feeling the dew on the grass at Wembley as a player, and then thinking how this could be interpreted in Israel

Gorgeous.

But he was in the passenger seat, right?

He sounds like an AI trained exclusively on LinkedIn.

Please not blue.

Finally listened to his interview - he comes across as nowhere near as nervous and clueless as some made out. Think I've perfected the art of totally zoning out when our interviewer speaks, which probably helped. He spoke well and seemed pretty sincere, just very professional with it. Already coming out with a handful of Eddieisms, about good and not so good times last season etc.

He first visited the club when he was three years old? That would have been Mike Ashley's first year in charge of the club. His entire conscious life re: Newcastle football has been misery. Can't blame him in the slightest for being a bit detached. His brother's first memories would be the Bobby Robson era. Totally different experience.

Yes, very much so. @Thomson Mousepretty much sums it up. Once John Hall withdrew from things, in retrospect, we were just freewheeling and disaster was simply a matter of time. We were run like a failing family carnival. Just gradual decline with occasional bursts of misplaced effort while the world moved on.

Apart from our decline on the pitch, I also wonder how much we drifted apart due to Shepherd and co. not engaging as partners off the pitch. We looked a lot less serious as a business in 2006 than we did in 1996. I can easily see part of the blame being on us.

His whole point is that a casual non fan may well not hang around for the second episode though. If you have no reason to care about NUFC already, why would you? Was really surprised how many people in here were saying the semi-neutrals in their lives found the first episode interesting. Can't help but wonder if them sitting alongside filling in the blanks helped with that, though. Even casual football fans can be absolutely clueless about us though. There's probably still a solid number who think Rio Ferdinand was right about Ashley doing us a favour 'investing his money in the club' before the takeover - in their minds we've probably lucked out twice, now. Agree with your point that we were probably unable to go too deeply into the specific Ashley topic, though.

There's pressure but apart from a few muppets we're under no illusions about where we're at as a club re: seeing our long term future and Howe's needing to remain tightly together for the foreseeable. Last thing we need to do is let us overachieving last season unbalance our project.

I think the focus on the quality of the game* is somewhat of a red herring for both sides of the argument. There's no question that people can get very emotionally invested in watching very crap footballers - seeing parents being transfixed by their under 8s playing tells it's own story. I think especially for commercial team sports a large part of the interest comes from tracking the narrative. I can personally confirm that football in general is a hell of a lot less interesting when you're not following a club. The vast majority of things you might normally pay attention to lose any relevance through lack of context. Hence if you've never had any interest in women's football, it is that much harder to become interested in it. Basically the same problem football has in breaking America. That's why I see women being treated more equally more easily in individual sports like the Olympics and tennis. The focus is far more on one person's life and nature of the sport itself. There shouldn't be any surprise that all of these sports - men and women alike - are far less popular and commercially robust than multi-decade narrative-driven team sports. Shallower to opt in, easier to opt out. And at the moment, women's football is viewed more like an Olympic sport, while men's football is viewed more as a primal, tribal, dramatic battle. I think that's what women's football needs to focus on if people think it should be comparably popular with men's football and not only exist happily in it's own space. It's why I think NUFC have been smart to focus on trying to make the women's team an arm of the club and emphasizing regional identity, rather than just saying women are great at football and equality is great and here's why you need to be interested. Plonking something decent down and ordering people to pay attention is how you get a team like MK Dons, who are probably the 10th most popular team in a 1 team city. Getting people to feel a sense of organic ownership is far more sustainable. *Apart from the goalkeeping. That does kill the game for me because it breaks the reward mechanism. But that's another story...

There is a bit of an agenda against Man City, it's not that hard to spot. It's complicated, not least as many stakeholders are worried about damaging the "Premier League product", so there is plenty of overt admiration also. Similar to what we're now getting. But there's plenty of snide articles and digs about asterisks and such, and it's palpable that many are salivating for the day Man United and Liverpool assume their 'rightful places'. I don't believe they would get similar treatment in the slightest all other things being equal. The thing about the investigation is all fair enough. But I question whether we're all more aware of that and the actions being taken BECAUSE of who the action is being taken against. Whereas against other favoured parties issues are downplayed or hushed up e.g. I have no idea about Liverpool hacking Man City - it could be nonsense or it could be them being successfully protected by biased outside parties.

Sometimes there's a place for it.

Yes, I don't think Wilson would've been more effective, but I'm thinking it could've been his body absorbing Man City's energy rather than Isak's. Can't help but feel Isak having that 2 on 1 opportunity in the second half would've been a different story.

Part of me wonders if we'd have been better starting with Wilson to do the battling, and then bringing Isak on to exploit the gaps as the game wore on. Hindsight is wonderful, of course.

Just needs to keep heeding the Eddie Howe mantra - never feel too high, never feel too low. By his mid 20s I think he'll be a clinical finisher. But I don't think it'll happen this season, or probably next. It's dramatic how rarely he gets into rows on the pitch now though. Felt like it was every week when he was at Everton.

Mine wasn't really. Realised it was Schar that went down, so just waited for him to get back up and carry on. Standard

Had to watch this game in a distracted way, but with that in mind... Felt like a very European game. Hopefully will be taken as an early lesson for how to deal with CL ties. Overall I feel good about how the game went. We went up against the best team in the world and weren't made fools of in the slightest. They clearly felt they had to be at their best to beat us, and had we been a little bit more mature at dealing with this kind of rhythm and being surgical with our chances, we could even have stolen the game. It would have been theft, but that's how you become winners. We aren't good enough to do that yet, but we aren't too far away either. P.S. I wish Miggy had two feet.

Hope Bruno has been a sensible boy...

That's a potential career wrecker