tmonkey

You lied.

Justice kinda served there imo, as never a penalty for me. The contact was minimal and made after Sturridge had clearly lost the ball with a heavy touch.

Oh.

Scrap that. Awful keeping.

Great goal.

Our fullbacks are shiite on the ball.

Must be deflected.

Noobmar more like.

Class goal. We should sign him as he looks a bit like a young Clarence Acuna.

Pretty obvious that Ba was keeping his options open earlier this month.

This is so dull. Competitive club football can't come quick enough.

I'd go somewhere in between. Swansea fooled a lot of people last season, they showed how possession football could be massively ineffectual and made the argument for it not being as important as I'd always deemed it Swansea were brilliant though for a newly promoted side with a tiny budget and relatively unknown players. Of course they were going to be ineffective most of the time, they don't have players capable of cutting teams open at will and creating chances like many of the "bigger" clubs do (and like we have). The basics of what they were doing, and how they played, was spot on, and it's how we should play given the players we have as it'd make best use of our best players.

I've genuinely not seen much of him, but even when I watched Swansea last season he was hardly miles above the rest. What are the stand out attributes that make him a 12 million pound player? To be quite fair, £12m for a player who was fundamental to the way Swansea played under Rogers (i.e. 30+ passes sideways/backwards per move) is a no-brainer, as Rogers can guarantee that someone in the middle of the park will do what he wants.

Liverpool paid more for Andy Carroll + Henderson than PSG have paid for Ibrahimovic + Thiago Silva.

Looking objectively at his NUFC career, if you take away the fact that Owen was (and still is) a massive cunt, there's no way of finishing this sentance as there'd be nothing left.

Suprised Fat Sam hasn't gone in for him.

To be quite frank, I still don't get why Ba gets so much praise for his play outside of the box. There's good work rate, granted, and a bit of decent hold-up play pre-ACoN, but that's pretty much it. For me his all-round play outside of the box ranges in between "distinctly average" to "Shola on a bad day". His dribbling is comical, his first touch can often let him down, he doesn't have good passing range, and he isn't remotely creative. As Cronky says, I fear that the team has possibly outgrown his ability levels, and that without the goals to gloss over this he gets exposed and frustrated because he knows he isn't playing well. It needs to be remembered that Ba was at his best for us prior to Ben Arfa's inclusion in the first team, Cisse's arrival, and the emergence of Santon as a pretty classy attacking fullback. On top of that we had a bit of a renaissance for Jonas in central midfield, plus Cabaye being more effective as he was given more freedom to get forward. Ba was playing so poorly in this team imo that even Shola would come on and look a considerably better footballer with the ball at feet. The one hope I have for him in this team is that he's a classic "confidence player", and his all-round play will improve considerably when he's playing with confidence (i.e. scoring goals).

Aye, but the Blackburn one started the ball rolling in terms of being viewed as genuine first team material in Pardew's eyes (or so it seemed).

On a slightly seperate note, I'm also a tad worried that Pardew might actually coach the flair out of Ben Arfa. Although that seems unthinkable right now given the season he's just had and his natural ability, it has happened to players in the past - I think a prime example of this was Damien Duff under Jose Mourinho. The Duff Chelsea signed from Blackburn was a completely different animal to the one we signed from Chelsea, and the change was entirely due to him being moulded into an "ideal" team player who played it safe rather than took risks. Whilst it's good to have a solid team where players fulfill their responsibilities and opposition fullbacks don't have free reign to maraud forward, I hope Pardew doesn't over-do it and accepts that there are limits to the amount of energy Ben Arfa has and where he's most useful, as there were quite a few games at the back end of last season where Ben Arfa didn't do anything other than fulfill his defensive obligations as a right winger (and looked like he didn't have the energy to burst past players as a result of all that backtracking - though maybe that was down to fitness/not being used to playing this type of role before). The underlying point to this is whether Pardew can really expect the best of both worlds, especially in a flat 4-4-2 where Ben Arfa will be forced to do a considerable amount of back-tracking. Jonas for example looks useless going forward on the wings these days because he's doing so much going the other way. Truth be told I'm not confident that Hatem has the physical strength of say a Messi/C.Ronaldo to do what Pardew wants and be insanely amazing going forward every game. Though laying the challenge publicly is a good thing.

He is an amazingly talented player who has shown in the past to be quite a problem character, Pardew has regularly set him challenges that he has taken on and excelled at. I have complete faith that Pardew knows what he is doing and will get the very best out of Ben Arfa, he also knows how to stick his arm round a player and show they are loved which is something HBA also needs. Imo they are a perfect match for each other which is going to benefit us greatly. I'm still a bit cynical when it comes to Pardew's handling of Ben Arfa. Part of me thinks he did a great job in getting a troublesome solo flair player on the road to recovery and integrated into a hard working team, and that his plan to incite a response from Ben Arfa was one of pure genuis. The other part thinks he was simply lucky that Ben Arfa was at a stage of his career/life where he decided to not throw the toys out of the pram and make the necessary changes (including scoring wonder goals to force his way into the team). Reason being we've had defensive minded managers before who've shown a similar lack of appetite for "flair" players (Dalglish with Ginola, Souness with Robert, JFK with N'Zogbia) and because those players failed to "respond" the club/team lost out on exciting attacking ability that it failed to replace it for some time - the correct/better management was that of Sir Bobby/Keegan, i.e. to work with the flair and bring the best out of it rather than attempt to mould it into something else. Hence, part of me is still a tad uncomfortable with what Pardew has potentially done here, even if the end result is (at this point in time) excellent.

£5m That's what we signed Santon for. Insanity.

Game over. Damn.

Lawro what a cunt

Xavi, big game player.

Xavi bossing this so far.