tmonkey

Harewood off, Ranger on please. Harewood can't hold the ball up for shit, and certainly doesn't look like scoring.

This is exactly like watching a Roeder team. Abysmal first half due to the inability of the "manager" to motivate, organise and strategise effectively before kick off, players go in at half time and receive a bollocking, they come out attacking because the manager has no choice but to tell his players to play that way, and as a result performance levels are raised significantly.

Smith ends up at centreback and Simpson in midfield. We concede. Great idea whoever's that was.

Nice clearance from Andy.

Quality play from Gunter.

Nolan clearly auditioning for the "*kicks ball out of park* Ave It!" role in the next John Smith advert.

Harewood He's a striker ffs, at least touch the ball.

Who was meant to be near post for that corner? Abysmal.

All Forest so far.

Enrique put Smith in trouble, but Smith overhit the ball to Enrique in the first place.

I'll be shocked (and pleasantly suprised) if Houghton does anything other than make defensive substitutions if we're level come the last half hour.

Love Iniesta so much... he came out last week saying that playing in the CL final carrying a groin injury nearly destroyed his career (he's been 4 months out of it), but that he "would do it again". Best midfielder in the world last year for me, by some distance. Showed up in all of the big games.

Without having any concrete evidence whatsoever to base this on, I believe to this day that Shearer had a big part to play in Bellamy leaving. Hence the text to Shearer whilst Bellamy was at Celtic with the supposed "I'll knock Seven Bells out of ya" response.

We looked like a potential top 6 side once the results started picking up under Keegan (key word being potential before I get crucified). It wasn't merely a matter of wins against average or poor opponents, it was the fact that we were playing decent football on the deck with a tailor-made formation that got the best out of most of the players available (including Nicky Butt). Something we never saw under clueless managers like Souness, Roeder, Allardyce, Houghton, Kinnear, et al. IMO it was no different to seeing the initial slow improvement under Sir Bobby, back when he took over from Gullitt (in fact, Shearer getting a new lease of life under Sir Bobby was pretty similar to Owen finding himself again briefly under Keegan). Take away the random 8-0 win against an awful Sheffield Wednesday, and we were pretty mediocre under Sir Bobby for some time due to the limitations of the squad he had at his disposal (limitations that were only removed once he spent big money on players like Bellamy, Robert, etc). But even during that "mediocre" spell, we still saw an improvement in the team's shape, the football it played, the solidarity, the motivation and performance levels of individual players, so on and so forth. That was entirely down to Sir Bobby making good use of the assets at his disposal, assets that looked alot worse under lesser managers. It'd be easy to point to individual games and say things were average under Keegan, but as with Sir Bobby, a good manager can't turn water into wine so to speak. There's only so much he can improve without investment and backing over a good period of time.

Anelka scores. Good finish, great cross from Drogba.

Has he said anything yet? I think they'll avoid it tbh. Not yet. Keys said something like "we'll talk about Newcastle a bit later", to which Wise replied "not a problem". Most likely will be generic comments that don't give anything away. I'm expecting Souness to chip in with bullshit about the fans being unrealistic too.

The prick that is Wise is on SS1 now, about to be asked about the Newcastle/Keegan situation.

Is he even fully fit, or is he being a prick in the same vein as Michael Owen, i.e. rushing back because Argentina are playing a few games in the next fortnight?

Also a major mistake - buying this crock of s*** who thought himself too good for us for £17m instead of £8m on a desperate-to-sign-for-us Anelka. Might be a bit of a bitter "told you so", but as time has proven, Anelka has been the much, much better striker on the pitch and far less of a mercenary prick on/off it. No doubt there are some who'll still claim that he'd have been an "accident waiting to happen" if he had signed for us, or "poison in the dressing room", notions based on thin air and tabloid sensationalism, but that's football for you.

In a flash. Premiership mid table at the end of next season with him in charge of his own squad.

Get in. It's clear that Llambias/Ashley are devious, lying cretins. The entire statement casts doubt on their claims about Keegan from the start. They basically went in there and lied their heads off.

He's not injured. He's out for 3 weeks with "bad luck".

It won't make much difference given that we'll win this game 5-0.

Pathetic dive from Gerrard there.