tmonkey

Third. Some wanted him gone in the Championship season when we were sort of struggling in the first half of the season and sitting back with 1 up top at home against dross.

Fernandez > Lascelles imo, ability wise at least.

Wouldn't mind seeing if Shelvey's passing unlocks Miguel more often.

Don't know how that's not a penalty for Liverpool.

If you watch the replay from the sideline camera you see both of Boly's arms come down on Dubrava as they're both jumping, and both of his arms are wrapped around Dubravka's head/shoulders and making full contact on Dubravka before the ball arrives. His arms are holding Dubravka down, they allow Boly to hang in the air a little longer (leveraging himself), and obstructing Dubravka's vision/mobility. If VAR was operating, 1000000000% the goal is ruled out.

We should have £100m or more sitting in the bank from my crude calculations, based on looking at the 2017 accounts, published 17-18 PL TV money, etc etc. Possibly alot more.

Too forrin.

Makes sense to me he'd sign something like that because it's a common sense sort of clause that I'd expect to be there. Thinking about it: [*]The clause would have been aimed at getting money if Rafa is poached by another club and therefore has to exist. If this clause doesn't exist then he could be tapped up by a club like West Ham/ManU/Everton/etc, resign with no fee, and then be free to sign with whoever he wanted 6 months later. [*]This clause is probably a mirror of a bigger compensation clause should the club sack Rafa (like Mourinho and his £22m payout for getting the boot). Kind of a fair deal for both parties actually and what you'd expect during contract negotiations, if he gets sacked he gets compensated, if he leaves the club gets compensated. You'd have to be a terrible negotiator to have a one way clause only. [*]It was signed at a time when Ashley was making promises about money and being in charge of transfers, hence why Carr left soon after. He may have evaluated the risks vs rewards and decided it was acceptable to sign a 3 year contract. If Ashley doesn't screw him over he turns NUFC into a top 8 club. If Ashley does screw him over, he just sees his contract out and lets the wider footballing community know what the situation is. He still gets paid and he's still near his family. In the absolute worst case scenario where his job is made untenable he quits and sues for constructive dismissal.

Because they've bought players who are both extremely talented and have very high fitness levels. Fitness shouldn't be an issue at Premier League level. Most of our squad aren't even inrernationals. They get summers off, national team breaks, etc. Well, this is a deep and complex subjective topic and I'm sure you'll have reasonable counter arguments, but the first thing I'd argue is that fitness is always going to be an issue, otherwise managers wouldn't rotate players at all. The winter break is one of the more controversial topics in the sport for the UK at least, with many top managers in the sport calling for it, and that is entirely about giving our players a rest mid-season to recover and extend fitness levels so they can compete. Another perspective is managers protecting players by rotating them and giving them rest. It's all about the long game here, keeping players fresh for the latter stages of the season when they're likely to get tired quicker. Second thing I'd argue is that fitness per se isn't the issue, it's fitness + performance/ability levels + team's style of play. Our players are reasonably fit, they're all athletes, but the problem is they're barely PL quality so if they're not at 100% and an opposing PL team are then it's handing them an advantage (e.g. we'll tire in more over the course of the match, which means more mistakes, more attacking opportunities missed due to being knackered, etc etc). Whereas Man City's squad is filled with players who in addition to being the cream of the crop as athletes are also top class footballers so even if they're not at 100% they're still likely to be very good. Third point is that City also dominate possession massively so it's normally the other team chasing shadows and getting knackered both mentally and physically whilst their own players come out of games barely breaking a sweat. By contrast in a team like ours where we're utterly shit in possession, we're the ones going to be doing the running, ergo our players need to be fresh to do all that chasing. On top of this they also have a deep enough squad where if key first team players did get injured they'd get by, whereas with ours it's going to be a serious setback, so given that more games = higher risk of injury I can see why Rafa would be cautious. Another perspective I'd put forward is to look at individuals. E.g. Ritchie and Yedlin, it goes without saying Yedlin's fitness and stamina levels are significantly higher and that he can comfortably go on for 90 minutes consecutively without seeing a visible drop in his performance levels. Whereas Ritchie is more likely to gas out after 60 minutes, so when the ball breaks he'll be even more restricted than normal. In terms of comparing to Man City, if Ritchie had the pace and stamina of Yedlin and then on top of that had better dribbling/crossing/shooting abilities, you now have a Man City player (basically Sane). You can field a player like that 2-3 times in a week without worrying about their performance levels dropping too much if they get a bit tired because even if they do they're still going to be pretty good. Add in the aforementioned team domination dimension and it's less of an issue for them to have to rotate. I'm sure if Rafa really wanted to he could field our first team every week till the end of the season in the hope that progress made now leads to success towards the end of it, but it's at the risk of struggling badly in the latter stages of the season when injuries and fitness issues are likely to be more prevalent. I suspect a part of why we saw moderate success in the latter half of the last two seasons is because Rafa has rotated players and kept them fresh.

Because they've bought players who are both extremely talented and have very high fitness levels.

In the first half of the Championship season two years ago when we weren't doing too well Rafa was heavily criticized for being too negative especially at home. He refused to change anything and then publicly stated that he viewed it as important to establish a system at this club that all the players know off by heart, and to stick with that system instead of chopping and changing it (like a McClaren or Pardew would do). Come the end of the Championship season it turned out to be a walk in the park and he was proved to be right, and of course those criticizing him went a bit silent. In the first half of last season, the same thing happened. We're struggling, our players look terrible and unable to match other PL sides, Rafa is refusing to change things, so some fans are on his back calling him shit and that he needs to be sacked. Yet again Rafa sticks to his guns, believes in the system getting the necessary results in spite of working with sub-standard players, and yet again turns out Rafa made the correct choice in sticking with the system he has faith in. This season is probably going to be the third season in a row where this happens. The risk of this system/defensive mentality not working is greater this year because it's now the 4th successive transfer window where Rafa has been seriously screwed over and all other teams have had two summer windows where they've spent alot of money to improve their first team, which is a huge advantage. As frustrating as it is to see defensive football at home even in the FA Cup against in a lower league, I fully understand why Rafa is stubbornly sticking to his this system - he believes this system will get us over the line in terms of our most important objective, as it did in the past two seasons.

Would love to be wrong, but personally thought the takeover was dead as soon as Ashley went on holiday. I know things can get done remotely, but that applies more to competent professional people, not someone like Mike Ashley on holiday. The guy gets drunk and vomits into fireplaces during normal business meetings, imagine what he's like in the Bahamas. And whilst he may be worth around £2bn, most of that isn't liquid, so this £300m sale would be genuinely big for him. I doubt he'd saunter off and let the lawyers handle things if such a massive deal was on the verge of completion, he'd want to be there for every negotiation, issue, question, etc. He did the same thing last year with Staveley, negotiations advance and reports of Staveley completing due diligence come out, then all of a sudden he jets off on holiday for a few weeks and everything grinds to a half. We then had reports in the press that Staveley had no idea what was going on because Ashley had cut all communications and she was waiting to hear back on her offers, it later briefly came back to life with that curry night, but in hindsight him going on holiday in the first instance showed he wasn't planning to go ahead with anything. His actions are essentially what you expect of a very stubborn and bipolar person who isn't serious about selling the club unless someone pays way over the odds. He's open to selling if he can rip someone off, he'll let people bid, lets them inspect the books, he'll hope for a really high price, but when they've finished inspecting the books and realize he wants a premium of a £100m+ or more that's when Ashley sticks his fingers in his ears and runs away. Sort of like some ebay sellers who'll list an item in the hope that it attracts more than they paid for it but when it looks like the item will go for less than they want they'll pull the plug and cancel the listing. I also have an impression that he's a bit of an insecure coward who doesn't have the balls or decency to reject these successful/rich people who aren't minions of his face to face, like when he ignored Shearer for an entire summer after promising him the managers job full time, or how he cut off communication with Staveley and then had his media contacts release news articles about how he thought her to be a piss taker. The Jonas cancer, the Barton/Nolan/etc power group retaliation, the Keegan debacle, the Hughton sacking, the Rangers thievery, the anti-Rafa PR campaigns, all these various negative actions by Ashley were always done through his lackeys. The relevance of this is him cutting communications/going on holiday is his way of saying "no".

Away game and Wijnaldum hasn't scored, created any chances, dribbled past players, put in any monster tackles, or stood up and forced something. He must be hiding. Absolutely must be. Any other explanation is impossible.

If that was Shelvey it's a straight red.

The Return of the King. The sad thing is we probably do have some fans who'd actually prefer Pards over Rafa. Pretty sure Crumpy is one of them.

"I suspect Rafa is too afraid of getting the team to attack because on the one hand our attacking quality is so low that we're not likely to make use of more numbers getting forward, and on the other hand if we open up we leave ourselves exposed to counter attacks. Combine the two (shiite attack, open defense) and it's high risk to go gung ho be a bit more ambitious at home." Happy? Nobody can make excuses for having no shots on target at home against the worse defence in the league - 7 points out of 27 prove it's not working something has to change either the way we play or replacing personnel who are fixtures in the team despite offering virtually nothing. Was it high risk last year when we competed with Man Utd, Arsenal and Chelsea by taking a more ambitious approach in those games - were we gung ho then? What are you rambling on about? All I've done is written what I think is Rafa's thought process. I've not said I agree with his philosophies, tactics, lineup, subs, decisions, instructions, etc. He's a cautious manager who balances risks/rewards when setting his teams up on a game by game basis. He would've gone for the low risk gamble of not conceding or having weaknesses exploited like e.g. West Ham did to us, and relied on a bit of magic to get a win. Bit like Pards, except Rafa is actually good at setting up a defense, hence why we came away with one point instead of zero. Could the football be better? Undoubtedly. Are there better managers out there who create teams that play a better brand of football? A few, yes, but the ones who've had any form of success are pipe dreams and Rafa is better than pretty much everyone else who isn't them. Could results be worse if we played more expansively? Certainly - see McClaren/Carver. What's there to argue about? In terms of criticizing him for one poor performance/result or his general negative tactics at home, I have no problem with that, but that's not criticizing him within the wider context. We know he's a cautious/defensive manager - even when we were in the Championship at home to dire opposition, teams at the foot of the table with zero hope of stringing a few passes together whilst we had vastly superior players, he set the team up defensively and stuck one up top. Last year we played defensively most of the time, as you've implied through mentioning a few exceptions. So if anyone was expecting any different this year, especially given how bad a 4th transfer window in a row was and how every other PL team has improved/invested heavily, then that's just a case of expecting a leopard to change its spots. It gets even worse when you factor in declining morale this year, Rafa's contract nearly being up (teams always perform worse), individual players being off form, etc. The point of backing Rafa for me at least is the knowledge that if you give him just a reasonable transfer budget and a competent negotiator to sign players for him, he'll turn this club around because that's what he's done elsewhere consistently. He won't produce a good footballing side through his tactics or philosophy, but he'll produce it through his knowledge of players/the transfer market, knowing what he's looking for, and his ability to organize. Heck, if we had just signed Andros Townsend in the multiple windows where it was feasible had Ashley not been a dick, we'd probably be far better going forward - and that's just one player. Imagine if he could bring in half a dozen of his preferred targets and not the cast-offs noone else wants. Until Rafa gets that sort of backing it's really hard imo to be overly critical of him having no faith in this group of players to go out and dominate "lesser" sides. PS you mention Fulham's defensive stats and completely ignore the attacking ones which reflect really poorly on us. Only Huddersfield have scored less goals than us.

Think it's perfectly reasonable to single him out. For whatever reason he's turned to utter shit this season, it's genuinely staggering how much he's dropped off from what he showed last season. The frustrating thing is it appears to be just mental issues. - the pace/skill is visibly there but it's like he's buzzing on cocaine, doing whatever fancy tricks he thinks of with zero fucks given about whether they work or not. Thanks Mike for not buying a squad/getting Townsend in when we had the chance and allowing us to drop players out of form like Kenedy...

"I suspect Rafa is too afraid of getting the team to attack because on the one hand our attacking quality is so low that we're not likely to make use of more numbers getting forward, and on the other hand if we open up we leave ourselves exposed to counter attacks. Combine the two (shiite attack, open defense) and it's high risk to go gung ho be a bit more ambitious at home." Happy?

I suspect Rafa is too afraid of getting the team to attack because on the one hand our attacking quality is so low that we're not likely to make use of more numbers getting forward, and on the other hand if we open up we leave ourselves exposed to counter attacks. Combine the two (shiite attack, open defense) and it's high risk to go gung ho at home.

Ritchie for me is like Gouffran, or Jonas when he went shit after discovering Pardew loved him playing as a second fullback. Really mediocre player with no business being in the first team of a PL club, but not so shit that he won't have the odd decent performance (like 1-2 good crosses, couple of alright passes, etc). Usually whatever flank he is on is entirely dead unless the fullback behind him carries the attack, because there's zero creativity/quality coming from him and no threat ever to take players on/exploit space/hurt opposition defenders out of position. Yet he does enough of the "bonus" stuff to get on the good side of fans (initially at least for Gouffran) and managers - running around alot, tracking back, getting stuck in, looking like you care or are passionate, etc etc, these traits should be the icing on the cake of a good player, but some lesser players are smart enough to know that these things are relatively easy to do. It's really conniving in all honesty, and is office politics on a football pitch. If you're not good at the fundamentals of your role then do the bonus stuff because it catches the eye of your managers/others who are easily impressed and can't see that you're masking being shit at your core job role.

Dunno if posted already: https://www.shieldsgazette.com/sport/football/newcastle-united/mike-ashley-s-telling-move-as-takeover-talks-falter-at-newcastle-1-9503060 Did the same thing with Staveley iirc. Someone wants to buy, talks open, Mike goes on holiday, everything goes silent for the next few weeks. Has done this at other times too, it's a blatant tactic of going on "holiday" during key moments for the club, such as when we need to appoint a new manager but we can't cos Mikes in the Bahamas, or it's the key stage of the transfer window when everyone else is getting the bulk of their activity done but we can't do anything because Mikes partying it up in New York.

Personally thought Wijnaldum was fairly good overall in the relegation season for the player that he is, and the criticisms of him going missing/not caring were really over the top and a case of angry fans looking to scapegoat players because the entire team was dross. Wijnaldum's playstyle, facial expressions, etc, made him a very easy target in this sense. It's always easy to label someone as a mercenary when they're not a visibly physical player. In terms of him going missing, it felt like some folk were just expecting him to be something he's not, failing to take into account his limitations as a footballer and the team he was in. He can't actively beat players (he can be slippery but it's not the same thing), he has neat technique but is not particularly skillful, not fast, very average passing, an average shot on him, etc etc. An all round average player with some alright technique, and that's it. He was never going to drag an average or poor team to decent results entirely on his own, nor was he going to start running around like a headless chicken getting knackered after 10 mins, or lunging into bad tackles giving away dangerous free kicks, just to appease some fans who view those things as passion when in truth they're things poor players tends to do to mask how crap they are. In those games where he did play well mainly by scoring, I always felt like it was a combination of the team somewhat attacking more at home (more men forward, more balls into the box, pushed higher up = more opportunities for Wijnaldum to ghost into the box) and also some opposition teams not bothering to track/mark him or having poor tactics or poor defenders. Combine the two and ice that cake with some decent technique and you get the goals he managed to get for us. The rest of the time we were either playing poor or playing away from home (sitting deep, hoofing, poor balls into the box = alot fewer opportunities for Wijnaldum to even get into the box, let alone have a chance at scoring), and I think in some games the tactics involved him playing deep, which is sort of what he does for Liverpool now. In a piss poor team unable to retain the ball of course an average to good footballer like Wijnaldum controlling a ball well, being a tad slippery and passing it simply is going to have little impact. And of course if the opposition teams were just competent at tracking his runs or marking him it meant he posed no goal scoring threat at all, home or away. All of this ties in with how he started the season in hot scoring form but then it all dried up when teams realised he's our only real goal scoring threat and started marking him properly. Maybe there were some games where he wasn't 100% up for it, but I'd give him the benefit of the doubt. Firstly, I can't really blame any players for feeling demotivated under a Mike Ashley regime, so a few dejected performances are tolerable (only a few though). Secondly, he's had plenty of very quiet games for Liverpool, which indicates he's a decent player who can only play well when circumstances permit (rather than playing well all the time, which is what your quality players do). I'd say he probably played better for us than he has for Liverpool, but the current performance levels appear to be higher simply because he's in a far better team. In fact take Liverpool's front 3 out, stick Ayoze, Mitrovic and Obertan in their side up front (i.e. shiite players who can't control a ball at times), and I imagine Wijnaldum as he is now would be getting the levels of stick he got for us because he'd be doing sod all.

Mourinho has spent £400m+ at ManU in the past 2 years.

Pards would drop Kenedy for Colback out wide.

If Pardew, Souness, et al, had had the sort of start to the season we had under Rafa, they'd have panicked, chopped and changed the team every week, utilized completely different styles of play from one week to the other, tried things we don't have the players for for 45 minutes before doing the opposite, thrown some players (the easy targets) under the bus to deflect attention, blamed someone/something/everything when losing, etc etc. By contrast Rafa remains calm, composed, doesn't let the building pressure or negative voices in the media get to him, sticks by his guns, protects his players, doesn't confuse things by introducing different play-styles willy nilly, and sees his plans through. Essentially the difference between a genuinely good football manager with natural competencies in the role, and those who've merely grabbed the opportunity to be a PL manager despite having few of the skills or traits required by the role.