HawK

MOTM vs Manchester United, that'll do. He's become a fucking beast.

Needs a safety eyeroll-smiley at the end

I'm just happy we seem to be approaching people who actually 'know' football, rather than bringing in lawyers or ex-casino managers to run the club and make footballing decisions.

For sure we've made some shocking decisions, especially recently, and I was putting the point across these seem to have gotten worse since Carr has moved on. Our whole infrastructure stunk to the core, and has only gotten worse the longer Ashley has been at the helm and made more and more decisions based on saving £ or minimal investment.

Not sure about the last sentence, some of the players that have moved through our doors in the Ashley era, under Graham Carr in particular, have been frankly very good, or gone on to be very good. Cabaye, Tiote, Ba, Thauvin*, Debuchy, Enrique, Wijnaldum*, Sissoko* are the some that come to mind, I'm sure there's others that I've missed. Those starred obviously had quality but never showed it here for whatever reason among many at the time. I would say in the past few years the quality of incoming transfer has rapidly declined, coinciding with the loss of Carr as our chief scout. I think we'd do a lot worse than just re-approaching him to be honest.

Maybe we should bring Mark Lawrenson back as defensive coach..

Sean Moustaff

This is amazing

Great player, shit manager in the little he showed. It's really not a debate It was just interesting that he was labelled as a potential PFM which caught my attention.

Do I remember right, that the first thing he did when announcing himself to the squad was to read out a list of fines relating to tardiness for training sessions etc? The thing about being a good manager, is the clue is in the word. Very determined, driven individuals like Alan probably have a blinkered approach when it comes to others and just don't get why other people wouldn't put in 100% like he did, rather than engaging in man-management and trying to get people onside individualyl. Not often do great players become great managers :/ Was it Robert Lee that spat his dummy out at how he had to work harder when he saw Ginola swanning around, and Keegan said something along the lines of 'Can you do what he does? No? Then what's your problem!' lol. I've probably horribly misremembered the actual quote but that's what stuck with me.

The goals that I remember most, other than the ones like Ginola from outside the box, were when we were counter-attacking from deep, though. Gillespie legging it up the right hand side with an inhuman amount of pace, with the trademark falling-over-as-he-crosses it right onto the head of Ferdinand.

I'm ambivalent, providing the owners keep Howe if we do go down. He's the man that needs backing. When players realize they have no power because the manager has the club and the fan's full support, suddenly they either put up or shut up. With respect to Rafa, as a man and a manager I admire deeply, we've now been playing very negative counter-attacking football for over 5 years. Most of these players have been here that long and really don't know another way to play. Some may never be able to play front-foot football with confidence. We're going to probably need a sea-change in personnel in the squad or we risk the 'rot' spreading to our new players. It reminds me of the England situation with Southgate. I recall that he really didn't like having much of the old guard in the squad from the underachieving years. Rambling now, ;tldr, I hope the board sticks with Howe even if we do go down. He gets it.

Maybe because our training facilities are absolutely dogshit?

Stavely's pose, has no idea how to present herself in public

Bore off, wrong forum for that shit.

It's crazy when you consider we've paid the best part of £20m to have the privilege of Steve Bruce managing us (release fee, sacking compensation, wages).

I'd argue the contrary, regardless, every single part of that second sentence above could written about Rafa too.

Something like this I reckon :

The northern-Spanish accent uses the 'S' sound we have in English a lot less, and the majority of the time is pronounced how we pronounce 'th' in 'thistle' for example. The rest of Spain and the Americas tend to pronounce it the other way and is more common. That's not to say they don't use the 'S' sound, but they will almost never lead a word with that sound so it's hard for them to form the 'S' at the start of a word like 'snake' and will end up saying 'esnake'. Spinach gets interesting, I'm always asking my wife when she's cooking it why is she spying on us when making dinner when she say she's cooking espionage (spinach)

My wife will be pleased (she's Basque). They're all related to each other over there so she's probably his first cousin or something

We're missing Almiron off the ball

I just don't think people would behave much different if the shoe was on the other foot. Their behavior isn't an excuse for us to lower ourselves to their level.

/tinhat Feel sorry for them tbh, they've definitely got the 'Everton' complex, where they've been born into the shadow of a bigger club and there's really not much they can do apart from being bitter, jealous and angry about it. But I'd rather they were in the PL so we could actually play them regularly, those are fun times Don't think kicking them while they're down is the thing to do. A prosperous Sunderland football club indirectly helps Newcastle, if only to show prospective players that there's more than just us this side of Burnley/Leeds in the country.

Harder to push agendas with fewer words.

Steve Bruce Bruce Springsteen Fiona Bruce.. Yep this'll work actually