Beren

Currently Birmingham, Liverpool and Wolves.

Votes for Man Utd and Liverpool!! Chose Blackpool (mainly because of Holloway), Fulham (good football generally) and Arsenal (good Arsenal fan mates/good football).

To be fair to the FA, they tried doing Essien for a hard tackle the ref had incorrectly down in his report as a fair tackle, and FIFA threatened them with all sorts of sanctions. Sadly the FA are tied down by FIFA who have no sense. If Newcastle want some justice, they will have to take the legal route. I'm picturing Lionel Hutz as being the only who would take this case on.

Fantastic photo, that! Harper and Jose looking grumpy, Shola's smile bragging that he's still at the club, Krul with singularly windswept hair, Tiote suspicious of cameras, Hughton a shortarse... Bags of character!

Davies Teddy Sheringham is still only a spritely 44, Fabio.. might want to get him in the mix for 2012! Delighted Carroll gets a break

Feel better than after the Stoke match. Bring on Wigan, I guess

Positives We probably deserved a draw. Jonas Gutierrez played fantastically/consistently had a decent end-product. Good response after the Stoke defeat - no problem with spiralling deflation it seems. Campbell did brilliant for Colo when he came on. Hughton brought himself to substitute Nolan! Tiote. Krul beginning to command his box a bit more/come off his goal line every now and again. Negatives We got nothing from the result. Ben Arfa injury looks serious. When Carroll comes on we play long ball/hit'n'hope. Routledge was very poor. Perch continues to look shaky. Shola played poorly. The ref did us no favours. Edit: Oh, and Nolan was so anonymous it's barely believable he played today. [/iMO]

It appears as though I'm fairly alone in feeling pretty optimistic about this one, then?

Ameobi ftw

Ketchup?

Hope Johnson gets benched again.

Wigan win would be nice. Wolves deserve relegation.

Tried to exploit Barton's reputation with the refs and has subsequently won himself a reputation among such titan thug non-footballers superstars such as Cattermole. Justice for a moron.

Henry sent off!!

I'd be ashamed of the victory.

"Taking screenshots in Mac OS" Well done though

This is what I was going to post, more or less. A little sad about it though. CH still sees us as a Championship side that needs a fish'n'chips player like Nolan, when not all newly-promoted teams necessarily have to fit a certain style of play. As I said, sad. If Hughton's lucky, Nolan will pick up an injury.

Bale.

Inter beat you when it mattered though

He's a player learning, there was nothing for him to do in that match because he was isolated. Fair enough his defensive duties didn't make the grade but really not many would have faired much better the way we played Carroll yesterday. He had no service, Routledge managed only a couple of decent crosses in to the box, but were too far away from Carroll, wrong angles or pace and his only really chance for me came from Jonas and he at least hit the target, one or two more of them and he might have got a goal. The team 2nd half was atrocious, uninspired crap, we can't expect the young lads to pick us up, it has to come from our captain and senior players but those have shown to be the real problems, ones which show no signs of going away until their contracts run out. You mentioned his movement, but really his movement was typical of the whole front line. Carroll needs a partner to help with the burden, preferably a fast tricky player he can flick and head on too and be set up by. HBA is the only player we've got that matches that description even though he's not a striker but that means dropping Nolan, and that isn't happening apart from injury or hell freezing over. I agree with you mostly. Obviously playing up front alone and Hughton's stupid insistence for Nolan to 'support' him contributed to him not beng able to do anything of substance. But putting these factors aside, he too had a poor game (perhaps measured by his earlier performances). What struck me the most was that he wasn't making any runs at all. Surely he realized at some point that it was gonna be difficult for him to outmuscle both Huth and Shawcross, but even when HBA ran to the middle and looked up for a killer pass, Carroll jus remained static. There were just no options for HBA. Compare this to his run against Villa for the last goal. My assessment of him does not depend on him scoring, like against Everton eventhough he didnt score, I thought he had a decent game. Remember that run he made when HBA perhaps passed a split second too late? Carrol had a shot anyway but the keeper saved. Didn't see any of that against Stoke. Agree with Alpal, though he wasn't atrocious by any means IMO. Don't like the idea of having a nippy second forward just so Carroll can flick stuff on to him - it would seriously under-utilise his capabilities and make our team play unnecessarily ugly and one-dimensional stuff. If Carroll had dropped back a bit and collected the ball at his feet, he could have held the ball up and encouraged our relaxed midfield forward a bit more - that was my main gripe. No shame in winning only 50% of your headers when you're facing fucking Stoke - even if you are as good in the air as Carroll is. Relatively speaking a two-game "drought" is nothing, but sure a goal would pick up his confidence which is generally a good thing for a striker

http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/1006/montgomeryburns7004450.gif

Arsenal isn't great news for us. Rather they were worrying about their midweek Shakhtar ties either side of our midweek Carling Cup tie with them and consequently fielded a weaker team. [/speculation]

Can't argue with that. All the more frustrating because, though it wasn't nice to see Ricardo Fuller hurt, it did give us a lot of time to re-organise ourselves before the freekick was taken - and this was after they'd launched a barrage of undefended aerial attacks at our goal and hit the woodwork a few times. Yet somehow little Perch ended up marking Huth.

'kin hell, how many Saturday 3pms have we had this season? 1 or 2?