HawK

Sometimes I will want to know, it's curiosity, but for that I go to RTG. As regularly as I go to RAWK, redcafe or gloryglory. I welcome sensible posters from any club here, as it provides a different angle, but preachers are unwanted. And a club as deeply obsessed with us as Sunderland simply don't produce the type of fan that could integrate here. They are the stereotypical angry man of the PL who at the age of 27 is not going to grow any taller than 5ft 4 and is completely in denial at the lot they have been dealt.

Nail on the head. Already noted his username previously on RTG as one of the argumentative and nonsensical hot-heads that epitomize Sunderland fans, by virtue of the fact that everyone on there tends to agree with him. Having started posting here, I don't think he's prepared for the higher level that most of us are on and his attempts at acting smart are swiftly going to result in hilarity on the way to his destiny of resorting to his real RTG persona, and subsequently rage quitting the forum only to re-surface each time we lose in vein attempts to troll us. They still haven't figured out how to not have half their front page on their forum swathed in Newcastle United related topics

Again, No-one. There's a reason they aren't already playing for top clubs. It's very, very easy to stand out in a shower of s***. Of course there are exceptions, but on the scale of perhaps at most one per season, and last season it was Demba Ba. This season I don't see anyone at all. We are a club now, to much of our own surprise and delight, mixing it in the top 6 on merit alone, and we need to alter our perceptions of what sort of player would be of the right calibre to join us, I just don't see bargain-basement buys from the PL's relegated teams to be what we need to kick us on to the next level. Just take a look at Liverpool as to how taking supposed stars from lower teams does not work as a shining example. Aside from Ba, who was a free transfer and who we only signed because he failed a medical at Stoke, it simply wasn't our policy last summer, let alone now with us in such a stronger position to attract good talent. Also, unless the prices were extremely low, there isn't a chance in hell that this club would sign any of them, they have to meet the criteria of our transfer strategy of being young, underpriced, have the right attitude off the pitch and the almost certain chance that they would develop and increase their value. That they are already PL players already inflates the price, regardless of the owning club being relegated, as with clubs coming up and the dross in the bottom half circling like vultures, there will be no shortage of suitors for the better of the cloggers. I know the club knows this already, but it seems a lot of people on here don't =) Not that I'm saying it's bad to discuss the better players from the worst teams in the league, but rather than read threads like this for potential transfers, I would much rather a few threads on some of the better players from the Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and the Eridervisie or some of the lesser-known stars of Serie A and La Liga that most of us won't even have heard of before. These are where our players are going to come from this summer, not from Wolves or Blackburn. At the start of last summer this thread would be totally valid, but having seen our transfer strategy subsequent to that summer and our increased position to attract a far better calibre of player, we need to be thinking a little more highly of ourselves. Newcastle is an incredibly attractive proposition to many players right now, across the world.

Having just discovered this by virtue of your kind self, my fondness for the club is also on par with yours right now.

Yeah i don't get this about people not believing it's intentional, at school I couldn't do much at all in a football playground but I was godly at getting the ball to go wherever I wanted off any part of my lower body, ankles, shins, thighs, instep, outstep. Scored many like the Villa goal in jumpers-for-goalposts. Only seems fitting that players 1,000,000 times better than me could do it too.

yes remember it well and we went in for him but was always going to Chelski if memory serves me right . Indeed it does =)

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/sp20120407cd.html? Jesus christ I've never seen so many factual errors in an article before, and one from a supposed national news outlet! Already written a letter to the editor on this

Ferguson did look more involved, but from what I can see he seemed very off the pace, reminds me of how off the pace Viana was in that Euro game before he went.

edit: Apparently I didn't vote. I put down a genuine 12+ vote the moment the poll went up.

Danny Simpson, the marauding fullback who never stops running, whipping in crosses and essentially running the entire wing singlehandedly. And is that what you want him to do behind HBA while HBA tracks back to cover him while he goes up the pitch? Get a brain. Exactly the reason he'd do well for us in this role is because he doesn't have to do that, even though as a RB he has run more miles than any other RB in the league this season.

Knew drogba was class the moment we got ripped apart by him in Europe.

The sort of full back who'd do well in a 4-3-3 tbf

I could feel the reverberations of your hammer striking down the nails that every one of those words represents into his metaphorical coffin. So much passion in the hatred

Why hasn't this thread been renamed yet? Perchinho . .

Not sure anyone could give a s*** if HBA murders England tbh. Yup, in fact if England is managed by slappy face, I'd probably celebrate With Cabaye and Ben Arfa in the first 11 for Les Bleus, I know which time I'm going to be cheering for.

No-one

From a talk-in at Dunston last night. I don't believe for one second that Alan Pardew had any say whatsoever in the transfer. Whether or not you believe that is neither here nor there. Carroll did. And he chose them c***s. Opinions are allow on forums, you know.

He's been poor since Christmas though. Ah fair play, hadn't kept up to speed with him at at Liverpool recently, just that they thought he was transfer of the season for the PL. He must be getting as disillusioned as he was with us, poor bloke. Totally understand why he left, the line he peddled from January was always, 'I'm not signing until I see the club has ambition', and by halfway through the summer we'd not signed 'owt and further sold Kevin Nolan. Would cheer him if he came back to us, one of my favourite Newcastle players of recent years.

From a talk-in at Dunston last night. I don't believe for one second that Alan Pardew had any say whatsoever in the transfer.

Enrique would stop all width on the right against anyone, ripe for another 4-3-3 allowing HBA to cut inside. People forget Enrique was easily one of our best players for the previous 2 seasons that he was sold .

It's his former agent, probably bitter. It's not just Ba and Cisse i know some of them where bought before Carroll left but lets look at the players we have signed that equals Carroll's fee its practically a new squad...... Cabaye 4m, Tiote 3.5, Marveaux free, Ba free, Ben Arfa 5m, Santon 5m, Cisse 9m....... That's around 27m its impossible to argue we didnt get the better end of the deal infact it was probably the best bit of business we ever did. Aside from Ben Arfa, and Tiote being signed before he was sold. We still have a fair amount of cash surplus including TV money and player sales still to spend.

He's nae Mourinho but in the summer he pointedly came out and said that he wanted to introduce his new style of football which is why he'd started bringing in the players he did. That we started the campaign with a couple of key players (a LB, HBA, another attacker) not available for selection somewhat forced him to continue with the existing methodology - make the team hard to break down and exploit the attacking situations. It was effective, not exactly free-flowing football. We came unstuck with the trio of difficult matches co-inciding with Colo's first injury and Saylor going down - two major losses and it told on the pitch as we dropped points in the three games after Man U/Man C/Chelsea. Some people saw this as a sign of Pards' "luck" running out (many of these didn't/don't trust the man). Some saw it as a flaw in his managerial accumen, as he wasn't able to change things when we'd been "worked out". Some rode out the rough after so much (relative) smooth. We also had the distraction of a not fully fit HBA having to be integrated back into the side with the vast majority pinpointing him as our real flair player who would at least be exciting, if not match-winning. We then lost Ba and Cabaye for a few matches (along with new signing Cisse) but stuck to the older methodology to grind out wins and points. We get howked off Fulham experimenting with the 4-3-3 (using Best and Shola instead of the first choice pair who were unavailable) - although the match isn't a total write-off as we were very good for 30-45mins at the start. With the full squad almost back and more than enough points on the board to surpass this season's expectations, Pards can now begin to 'experiment' with his chosen formation and the best players playing (injury permitting). The last 60mins of Wolves was a shambles, but every team has it's off day and there were extenuating circumstances (to some extent) and we battered the mackems for 45minutes before losing to a last gasp Arsenal goal at the Emirates. In any league, going without a win for 4/5 games is tough, so that's why the emphasis was placed on securing the 3pts against Norwich. The press have stopped dropping our name into Champs League talk (thankfully) and it looks as though Europa League is going to be out of our hands - all we can do is use the last 8 games to find our 'best' set-up and get as many points as possible so we set the standard for next season, but without having any real pressure on us. I don't see this as a new side to Pardew, I see this as him doing what he originally set out to do: get enough points to secure safety (done by Xmas really), then kick on from there after seeing out the Jan transfer window. If anything, he's encouraging the development of our football at a quicker rate than he probably envisaged with us having the 'comfort' of such an expectation-surpassing opening 30 games. His critics/detractors will call this revisionist, but I he's either the luckiest man in the world or he's got half a brain. That hardly required a Picard did it? And in the end you basically agreed with the part you decided to embold in the quote, that you're happy for him to continue also.

Yep I wasn't happy with the man's apparent ability, and to be honest it has still taken him this long to attempt what to most of us seems a very obvious square pegs to square holes solution. That he chose to do this in an away game was a bit baffling, but hey I'm a lot happier now that he has seemed to have grown a pair in finally taking that decision. This is a new side to Alan Pardew and I'm happy to see how he develops, he's showing something now that he hasn't shown before. I honestly think he or someone close to him reads what is written about him, because I've noticed several times when a few people are chiming with the same chords on here, there seems to be a reaction on the pitch. For what it's worth, I still don't think based on evidence so far that he's going to be as successful as Sir Bobby or KK; he is limited and is being flattered by the personal available to him. That said, he isn't royally screwing it up, and we could do with a bit of stability right now and a couple of seasons challenging in and around 6th I think is exactly what we need. Happy to bide time with him and see what happens, if this new side to Alan Pardew progresses.

http://i971.photobucket.com/albums/ae191/neisied1/giant_rolleyes.gif It's well documented that he's on a numeration package that includes percentages payable on transfer fee profits.

AP just needs to pay a bit more off now, that's all.