macbeth

Hey, your man Freddie also sanctioned the purchase of Luque. (NE5 starts melting, 'DOES NOT COMPUTE') eeerrrr....so you think that the chairman should overrule his managers judgement on footballers ? elbee starts melting, DOES NOT COMPUTE The bigger picture also being of course, that pre-1992, we could only dream of setting transfer records and paying money for players such as we paid for Luque whether he is a flop or not, like the other top clubs, this being the subject of the thread "are we a selling club" and Mick insists that we are still a selling club just like when we sold Gazza, Beardsley and Waddle. Question. What would you do if we bought Beckham [ex or recently discarded England Captain at 31 years old] and sold Zoggy, Duff and Owen ? Selling club or ambitious club ........ I asked Mick a similar question and he chickened out of it. Or he's taking his time. Do you know why he is taking his time ? or two of the last 5 Young Players of the Year ?

I don't doubt this, I'm just struggling to remember the England players he bought for Everton ? I think there was a one-cap wonder, who is often mentioned in those "name the one cap England players", just can't rememebr the others. Who were the England players he took to Everton ?

probably cos as soon as he makes a comment you'll jump down his throat for not being old-enough to know how bad it was "when a were a lad"

Mick, beware of trying to be reasonable :winking:

pretty sure that if you said of any side in the PL that they were about to bring in 4 class/quality players they would say they'd not have a bad side. In the 102 days of searching between 8th of May and 18th August one new player has joined. In a position you view as already being a strong area. I hope that in the remaining 13 days you get your four others

when did we last have one of them ?

No. I may have started with anger in my heart, but that doesn't mean that is where I ended up. The site has no rant about "fat cat salaries", not any comment on anyone bleeding the club of money. Take the dividends page http://www.nufc-finances.org.uk/dividends.htm I will happily comment on here that I hate, with a vengeance the clubs dividend policy. The site doesn't give that opinion, just states the facts and lets you decide. The site has been thro many filters to try and ensure that it is fact based. This message board is opinion based, with the occasional fact backign it up. I fell the figures are so pwoerful themselves I have no need to guide anyone to make a conclusion.

Newcastle United 1970-1991, a selling club? thread brought back on request of Mick, and merged into here. Fuck me yous must be bored Actually, it was an interesting idea for a thread and was going ok until you binned it. The motivation was obvious like, and was doomed to failure because facts are facts, but it was still potentially educational for the head in the sand crew, which is why you binned it of course. The history of the club is interesting for some, however we've established it's not of interest for everybody, those who believe football began in with Sky TV. I thought at one point in time that you were interested in the facts surrounding the history of the club but it seems not. It's a shame that you've become so blinkered by your hatred of Fred that you can't see how far your head is up your arse, but you'll get it one day. To be honest, when that day arrives I do believe you'll be man enough to admit it though. So credit where it's due and all that. I think he went searching trying to 'prove' a point by getting the facts to justify it. It's always better the other way around and starting with facts and making opinions ofmr them. It's not dissimilar to havign a gut feel that Emre and Parker are a good partnership and going to get facts (results) to prove it. When they don't actually match the opinion (which nonetheless may well be a correct one) it is always frustrating. I have tried to do this with the club accounts, many times. Start with an opnion and try and prove from the figures that a gut feel is right. When I started out with the web site I knew for a FACT that the wage bill was under control, other things weren't but I just knew that was. I barely looked at that area I was so sure of my "facts", and as it was a big plus for Shepherd I avoided it for ages. When, for completeness purposes I did go to the figures I found my gut feell was wrong. Things had moved on from when I'd last looked. The transfer sales figures are so difficult to find, so difficult to compare with today that it was always going to be difficult to get a meaningful answer. All of us who lived thro it remember the horrendous frustration of selling players. We were always fooled by the replacements coming in though. (I still remember Big Jack describing Pat Heard as the new John Wark!) Sadly nothing changes on that front :confused:

like a fly to NE5 ?

Edited above. Still no reply. You weren't there, really. Weren't you Mick ? ooh, you need to be careful with your made up stats. We don't average 5th place, with only twice having finished above 5th that is really really hard to achieve. I realise it is numbers, and you don't do numbers but when you try to your really should think hard before you commit to something. And saying it lots and lots of times won't actually make it a FACT.

That post covers all of our views. We all want success. The differences are that many are concerned that the current board are now showing every sign of not really knowing how to take us forward. For me it is the financial side that highlights this, for others it is the more visible league position, and cup performancese . You are right to be concerned that in our history there have been some bad, bad times and that a return to that is a possinility. For some of us the concern is that in an Animal Farm sort of way the liberating pigs have tuned into greedy incomepetent humans

Oh dear there was me thinking you could express your own opinion rather than putting words in to my mouth. If I needed you to speak for me I would create a name of "NE5 version of Macbeth". You really should stop saying things like "despite what macbeth thinks" it just makes you look like a 14 year old rather than the sad old man you are showing yourself to be. I will make my own comments thank you. Or maybe you would recommend that we all start saying " NE5 version of things" and make up really really stupid comments on your behalf. The problem we'd all have is that we'd never be able to reach the stupidity of the original :winking:

I'd be horrified. But I was horrified at us selling two Young Players of the Year too. The PR spin was better at the club with both Bellamy and Jenas so that we viewed it as being justifiable. At teh time I was also horrified at the sale of Robbie Elliot

Now you're doing it too, I thought it was only NE5 !! A fact is something like "Newcastle won the FA Cup in 1932". An opinion would be something like (as NE5 puts it ) "Luque is crap". It is easy to see which is which. Now stating that those players left the club because "all left the club because the Board didn't have the same level of ambition to succeed as those individuals did" is not a fact, it is an opinion. It is a subjective view taken from reading what others have said. It may well be an opinion repeated hundreds and thousands of times which may well make it look like a fact, but it really is just an opinion. I do believe most of those players did leave because they saw more chances of winning things elsewhere, but it is only an opinion I have on the matter, it is not a fact. If I met them all and asked them all personally why they left and heard them say it was so, then I'd have an even stronger belief in my opinion. When we see a double figure number of players leaving the club during the tenure of a certain Board, all reported as slagging the club off for a lack of ambition, I take that as pretty solid information. I know why you don't, however. I do say that I believe it too, (in bold above) cos I do think it it why many of them left. I understand why you ignore that comment of mine, however. :winking: You obviously believe in coincidence and also in fairies. There were too many similar reports in the media, made by too many different players over that particular time period for it not to be fact. Your tactic of deflection is pretty weak, trying to turn the discussion away from the point to one of discussing the difference between a fact and an opinion is a bit of a refuge, mate. No, it just highlights that the things we often quote as facts are just other peoples opinions repeated many times. For example anyone reading only NE5 comments on here would genuinely belive that it was a fact that Newcastle were the "5th best side in the Premiership over the last decade". If he was our only source of information and he has repeated it so many times that it is now a fact in his eyes. That it is based on a dubious statistical analysis is ignored completely. Similarly if another poster had posted continuously that we have an average position of 8th or 9th, or whatever it is, also views that repeated bit of info as an opposing fact. I have no time for the board form the 70s or 80s, and you will find nowhere where I have supported them. I may well have pointed out that they occasionally did something postive, but that doesn't mean I backed them. I have also pointed out that the fhinancing of the ground development in 1999 was superbly done, or that we had the 2nd best wages policy in the Premiership up to 2003. That doesn't mean that I support everything the current board has done. As I've just said to the biscuit man, in conclusion, if people want to discuss only things that are proven to be from the inside of the club then the forum may as well close down. We can discuss nothing. I agree absolutely. My 'problem' comes from when I was creating my web site. It was easy to create, anyone can make a web-site. I had access to the financial figures published by the club so that was easy too. The huge problem was trying to take opinion out of it. I was contacted by a guy who said I didn't recognise how much the current board had put in, how they had saved the club, how the current board were great in everything they did. There was also a veiled threat at the end of the email, suggesting if I wasn't careful my site would be closed down. I replied to the guy saying I was more than happy to publish anything he had which gave the board's position as long as it was factual, and not just hearsay. He never replied. (I had tens of emails from people who accused the board of financial misdemeanours but not of them could be backed up either, so weren't published). I know you think there are still opinions in the site but it took ages to get it refined to the stage it is now. What the exercise did for me was teach me how to recognise what was fact and what was opinion. The site has no quotes from people, so nothing from Freddie or Douglas that I could have used to make cheap shots at. I received so many emails from people suggesting the Boumsong deal was corrupt that it must be true. No one had any facts though, it was just repeated wisdom, or repeated urban myth. I will always be boring and fall back to the clubs published financial position as that is a stated fact, most other things are opinion, and should always be recognised as such . Not that any of us have any way of knowing if somebody here is or was involved in some capacity with the club. Macca was though. Perhaps he might shed some light on the thoughts of people such as Irving Nattrass, who left for the nappy rippers to 'win the league'. Did you not read the Mag interview with Nattrass ? It nearly made me cry. He so regretted leaving. He was my hero, the only challenger to Woodgate as a great defender in black and white. (Opinion !!) I suppose the straight question for you is do you think today's Board is performing better than all Board's of the club before 1992 going back to at least the end of the War? Here's where you'll immediately start thinking about finances. I have no idea how the clubs finances were then. I can see the current ones, so it is unfair to compare. Well here's a tip. Look at the league tables, because the league performance is the overall measure. Look at the players who departed and those who arrived and where they arrived from, because that shows you the quality that wanted to leave and the level of ambition we had for improving the team with the players we brought in. Look at the attendances, because that shows you how the people of Newcastle viewed the ambitions of the club to succeed. Yes that's a convincing argument I suppose. :winking: But that logic makes Murray a great chairman for sunderland too. My concern is financial. At the end of the McKeag regime we were close to bankruptcy. Unfortunately at the time we had no means of seeing the books to know that was how it was. Now we do. Now we have the opportunity to see how the custodians of the club are doing, to highlight how things are. You seem to have fallen for NE5's view that 'ambition' is the key factor in a board, and that spending bucketloads of borrowed money shows ambition. I want to pass my team on to my son, if the current board's borrowing policy which gets sold to us as 'ambition' is allowed to continue then he won't have that opportunity. There are many ways to view the financial mess the club is in. The key one for me is the dividend policy. £35m has been given away by the club in dividends, and share buybacks. We are now borrowing money to pay for that giveaway. We now have no money for our current manager to spend because of that giveaway. I have no doubt that the Halls and Shepherds are Newcastle supporters, but their prime concern is their own bank balances, not being supporters. They view it as being preferable for them to have had that £35m and the club to currently have a £17m overdraft. I cannot accept, and never will, that that can be viewed as being the right sort of attitude to have. The future of the club matters to me more than their personal wealth. Since 1991 we have had better league positions and played in Europe more than ever in my life. I am a person who reads everything about the club, is a boring statto on past players. I do know where we have been, and where we are in comparison. I still shake my head in disbelief at our ground and that it is full. Having the sense of history means I am always nervous of returning to how it was. In the 5 seasons since 2000 and the ground extension I have seen no progress on the previous five years. We have had an advantage due to our ground size, and we seem not have used it while we had it. I believe that the current board has lost its way, and that their current policies are threatening the future, while making the present seem exciting with the occasional expensive signing financed on borrowed money.

Now you're doing it too, I thought it was only NE5 !! A fact is something like "Newcastle won the FA Cup in 1932". An opinion would be something like (as NE5 puts it ) "Luque is crap". It is easy to see which is which. Now stating that those players left the club because "all left the club because the Board didn't have the same level of ambition to succeed as those individuals did" is not a fact, it is an opinion. It is a subjective view taken from reading what others have said. It may well be an opinion repeated hundreds and thousands of times which may well make it look like a fact, but it really is just an opinion. I do believe most of those players did leave because they saw more chances of winning things elsewhere, but it is only an opinion I have on the matter, it is not a fact. If I met them all and asked them all personally why they left and heard them say it was so, then I'd have an even stronger belief in my opinion.

you're not one for alternatives are you ? If my comments are bollocks, and I excluded John Gibson as a soruce, can I ask where you got your info from in the 70s and 80 ? Do you ever question your own view of reality ? I do all the time.I always want to question what I'm told. I'm comfortable with facts, so historically things liek us winning the Cup in 1924, and 1932 are things I accept totally as being fact. Reading that McCracken was the greatest fullback there ever was, or that Hughie was a great, great player, these things make me happy to read about. I don't know whether it is true though. I don't see someone writing a book about the Wembley Wizards and saying Hughie Gallagher was crap. Similarly I don't see juornalists/writers writing about the sale of a player and putting a postiice spin on it. (I am not saying there was a positive spin on the headline sales mentioned above, just that a journo reporting on it has to play to his audience). My son, who has only been going regularly to games for 6 years isn't really old enough to judge whether Robert Lee was a great, or whether Laurent Robert was a great. He's seen them both, but his views will always be tinged with how I reacted to those players when he was in his formative years. If I told him Lee was hopeless by the time he left, he will not have the same warm feeling that from me sayign Robert scored some of the most amazing goals I've ever seen. Local journalists has huge power in the 70s and 80s when there was no live football, no internet to exchange views etc. John Gibson being in a good mood (or needing info) would produce positive stories about the club, him being blocked by the club, or him being in a bad mood would produce bad stories. How did you get to find out more about why, say, Alan Kennedy, left than any other supporter at the time, or anyone reading about the history of the club ? Why is John Gibson writing in 1977 a better source than John Gibson writing a book quoting the same stories in 1997 ? What more do you know than the person who read the book rather than the Chronicle ?

But claiming greater knowledge of players reasons for moves just cos you went to the match at the time is a pretty dubious bit of logic too. I was there, I know what you're on about, but all my knowledge comes from reading the Chronicle at the time. I never met any players, never knew any directors and everything I knew apart from what I saw on match day was filtered thro either the Chronicle or Metro or Radio Newcastle. Someone quoting what they have read in a book yesterday is not that dissimilar to me quoting them what I read in the Chronicle 30 years ago, but which I know view as being something I lived through. This is totally different scenario from reading a match report as opposed to being there. Two match reports from two journalists are often very diferent due to their opinions being different. I might have a third view. I would trust my own view. In the case of discussing what was reported in the Chronicle 30 years ago, against what was written in a book, say, a couple of years ago, isn't as valid. As both of those views will be filtered through the head of a journalist. You say you lived through say Pop Robson or Alan Kennedy leaving, and that you know why they left. I lived through it but I never spoke to them, I read lotsre and know the common knowledge but that is the same sort of common knowledge we now get from Alan Oliver. If Alan Oliver's view is that which becomes the future history then we could end up with Laurent Robert being the worst winger we have ever had

I have the shareholding figures for the then board at the time of the failed share issue in 91/92. In it it looks like there are at most 2% of the shares not held by the then board members, although another conclusion that could be drawn it is actually 1 share that i sunaccounted for :roll: PM me if you want the numbers

I didn't. It is strange that if he had some sort of stake that he hadn't appeared as a board member. People like Forbes who owned 4% of the shares had a place on the board. Freddie must have had very few indeed if he didn't merit a place on the board. Clearly you know, and I am genuinely interested as I like to know how much the current board has put in. So when did he take put in his stake, and how much did it cost him ? And do you have any feel for how many shares (%) he had a hold of ?

and not withstanding their baggage, in the last 18 months we have sold two of the last 6 PFA Young Player of the Year winners. We are still a seller of our better young players. Zog will be the next test

Getting Duff for only £5m is a fantastic price. I hope that it isn't a case of having got bargain for a position we don't need to fill as urgently as some others, and that we will be short of cash for those other areas later on. I'd be surprised if Duff was top of the manager's want list.