dcmk

We have no right hand side. Lovenkrands has been invisible, 'vali looks woeful, Nolan can't play in 442 and Harewood looks like he cant be fucked. Great stuff

When i receive wages in about 2 weeks time, i will get on this

'You do the math'

Brilliant isn't he? Reminds me of Dyer as a wing back, brilliant at getting forward, produces from that position against poor sides, but is s**** at defending. Liverpool probably paid treble his value in the summer. and has been one of their best players.

Forgot about Defoe. Still think Bent is overrated, he's got a cheek complaining he's not in the squad. well id be pissed off if i was not in the squad and i was scoring regularly while someone who ain't even starting for his club and scores once in a blue moon is ahead of me, wouldnt you? Scoring regularly is a bit of an overstatement, should we just pick every English player who scores the most in between international breaks? Bent is on a good scoring run at the moment but he's not a top striker. Check his record.. he is a 1 goal in 2 games striker his entire career. Show me someone in the England squad who betters his.

Fixed. I take it your not a fan of Moat's takeover bid. What would you prefer to happen?

I saw the highlights of the goals. As I said, which you can't seem to comprehend, if a keeper is exposed loads he's obviously going to make more mistakes. His constant defense of Colo is essentially the same as what you wrote but with 'midfield', 'butt', 'nolan' in his post instead.

well.. what problems did they cause? We realised we had a incompetent owner.. so he wanted to leave? you are blaming us for that?? Well in no particular order.. MA tried to sell the club, but his asking price was too high. He appointed JFK He didnt strengthen in January. The structure of the club was never clear. He sold our most valuable players. He had no contingency plan. He filled valuable positions like DoF with people with no experience. What did the fans do?

The match day thread during a game is a perfect example of why this is a terrible idea.

Well I certainly question this short sighted honour and principle. Misplaced righteousness it might be with Keegan. I guess he was only looking out for number one instead of the short term sporting future of the club and its fans. I'd argue stronger principles might have seen him fight our corner given that he knew first hand how ridiculous the regime was being. Did you know SBR got money out of the club through compensation? Did he care about the short term sporting future of the club or its fans in doing that? Nope, he was looking out for number one instead huh?

Access to massive funds is what i said was required, Target of the mega rich is also what I said... It was a genuine question. Man City, Chelsea, who else has a mega rich owner or is being targeted by them? Only one i can think of is the Russian at Arsenal who is slowly buying up shares

A team with that amount of quality in front of goal, cant be so easily written off imo.

I wish Barca would grab another mind.

It's making me worry, im not watching the match.. I hope that Almeria aren't posing any kind of threat. I have a lot of money on Barca.

Run across the football pitch naked?

A full time manager?

I would have Keegan back. He was doing a good job, in a clear structure, with an owner who understands what is required to run a football club he will do well.

It is absolutely clear that Keegan did not willingly drop his claim for the other £23 million. He attempted to overturn the clause in his contract that specified his compensation at £2 million. When his claim for that was dismissed, he accepted that there was no point in carrying on. The tribunal actually went on to say that even if they had been asked to pronounce on the question of damages to his reputation and future earnings, he would not have been given anything. If he had been 'happy to accept the £2 million', he wouldn't have launched the other parts of the claim in the first place. A lot of posters seem to think that just because Ashley and co have been criticised, that Keegan is completely in the right, not just in law, but in moral terms. As far as I'm concerned, he's won 1 out of 3 of his legal battles, and lost the moral ground completely. I tell you, quite honestly, I was surprised by what has emerged. It was looking like the only player that could possibly have been foisted on him against his wishes was Gonzalez, but like many people I couldn't quite believe that Keegan would resign over that one loan signing. I thought that maybe there had to be something dodgy about Xisco's arrival or maybe one or two of the others - that Keegan had perhaps bitten his tongue over a number of weeks and then finally cracked. If many others on here were to be honest, they'd admit to that as well. It now appears that he was involved in all the other incomings and it all rested on the one minor instance, where I suspect Wise and co had lost patience with the bloke and acted in haste and in temper. I also didn't believe the £25 million story when it hit the papers. I didn't think it was a smear from the club, but I thought it was just a wild piece of tabloid speculation. I thought it was a ridiculous amount to claim and again I think if many people on here were being honest they would admit that they were harbouring the same doubts. Both elements of the story have turned out to be true and I'm a bit disgusted. My regard for the bloke, never high at the start, has gone down even further, if that's possible. I strongly suspect that, deep down, many of those who have supported Keegan throughout all this have also had their confidence dented, whether they are prepared to admit it to themselves or not. Wrong

Eh? There's a massive f***ing section about how it wasn't made clear to Keegan that he wouldn't be in charge of signings. That's the basis of the entire outcome, that Keegan took the job in good faith and was repeatedly misled. Not only that, the club were deliberately lying to the fans (that includes you, I think) and not telling Keegan the 'real' position. If it wasn't clear -- and it clearly wasn't -- he should have acted on his misgivings and said no before all this bollocks started. That's what I wish he'd done. As for being lied to, when have we not been? Freddie was hardly the paragon of Truth and Honesty. KK's told a few porkies in his time, too. It hardly changes anyone's opinion of Ashley, does it? We know he's crap. Wow your argument has been reduced to '..well everybody lies'. Just give up, its sad that you can't even admit that Keegan was right to walk out. His contract of employment was trampled over, and he still had hope of a return. Until the 'final final straw' when they basically said 'fuck you will have no say what so ever if you come back'

Don't bother quoting parts of it then, to back up your statement. A manager refuses to use YouTube, a manager who was told he has the final say and didn't, a manager who didn't give up hope of coming back to the club - until NUFC statement saying he will not have final say if he were to return... ..soft in the head aye.

Not supporting a club because of a single person. That is pretty small minded.

Mm, I really cant stand our owner.

Hah signing players based on YouTube, what utter cretins

Apologies to go back to this post, but only just updating myself on this thread. Aside from this being a rather patronising post (look at me, i'm a cynic, i know better than you,but one day you'll learn young padowan) can I ask who the people you fell in love with at Newcastle are, Bob? Not to touch a sensitive area, but i'm guessing you are older than a lot on here, but unless you're over 50 I doubt you have many memories of us winning anything more meaningful than the first (second) division under Keegan and even if over 50, to have allowed yourself to only fall in love with one Newcastle team / manager must be a pretty depressing state of affairs for a big football fan, i'd honestly question why you even bother. To further your analogy and make it slightly more specific as one of the comments on the discussed article did, I'd rather have f***ed Cheryl Cole in the face a few times and have the photos to prove it, even if that meant getting dumped for Ashley fricking Cole and humiliated. As your analogy feels pretty much like one tired cliche, here's another - better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. If someone told me we could have one trophy but none of the Keegan years I know which I would choose. Do you think being a Portsmouth fan and having won an FA Cup against Cardiff would make you feel more excited about the game than watching our team in the 90s? I suppose I took the risk of being patronising, but I was irritated by what I felt was a silly article and the way lots of people were reacting to it. Loving and losing and not loving at all aren't the only options. That's the point. The winning mentality combines passion with the ability to think clearly, remain focused and remain strong when things are going against you. Another problem with falling in love is that you can lose sight of reality. That's what seems to happen with a lot of supporters of Keegan. An issue with our club is this tendency to indulge in hero-worship. At times, it feels like a substitute for success, or at least it acts like a block to it. Ok, they're all fair points, but my original question still stands - who are those, in your time as a Newcastle fan, you have really loved? I can see how it gets annoying with the 'keegan can do no wrong' argument (although i think all but the most blinkered accept this isn't the case), but aren't you at risk of going too far the other way, into the realms of a bit of a misery guts? For anyone between the ages of 20 - 45 I'm going to stick my neck on the line and say the time Keegan was at Newcastle as manager (first time) was their best time as a toon fan. Regardless of title losses, mental breakdowns, walk outs, etc. they were our best times as Newcastle fans. He is the man most responsible for those great times. It's irrelevant whether someone else could have done better with the resources he had at the time, they didn't as they weren't here and we didn't want anyone else here. Yes, recent happenings have tarnished that, but that doesn't stop the fact that what he did was something pretty spectacular. So by all means, hate him for what he's done now (i certainly don't, but that's a different argument) but please don't try and take away from what he did to this club in the early / mid nineties. It was a special time in a lot of people's lives because of what he did. That's not sentimentality from a personal perspective, it's a fact. I'm still passionate about our club, and football in general. At times it feels more like an obsession than love, but the desire is still there. I've loved watching certain players in action - Tony Green, Gazza, Rob Lee, Beardsley, Bellamy and Shearer (before his decline) are particular favourites. I don't know if you're any the wiser there. I'm aware that I was pissing on people's parade a bit with my take on the Caulkin article and that's why I might have seemed a misery. Maybe I should have let it pass but there was something there that really annoyed me. I enjoyed the Keegan rise to the top just like everyone else. I think I enjoyed Sir Bob's upward charge more because I really felt the team was over-achieving, but yeah, of course there were good times with KK. Keegan's not without his qualities - he showed drive and passion and that was important in energising the whole club and persuading players to join. He wouldn't have done it without the heavy financial backing, but yes overall of course it was an achievement. But we didn't win any major trophies, and Keegan hasn't done so throughout his managerial career, which has been very stop-start. I don't think that's bad luck. I think there are certain qualities which the real winners have that Keegan lacks. That's all I was saying. I've posted a lot in this thread and I don't want to be repeating myself, but I'll give you a concrete example of what I think separates the Fergusons of this world from the Keegans. It was 1992 when Ferguson had his first real tilt at the title. There was a neck and neck race with Leeds that year, and Man U just lost out, somewhat undeservedly. Now at that time there was real pressure on the Man U manager. They hadn't won the league since 1967, and a string of managers since Matt Busby had tried and failed. It's a bit like Liverpool now, only worse. Ferguson's master stroke was that in the following close season, he bought precisely nobody. The expectation was that he would do what previous Man U managers had done and try and get in those extra one or two players who would supposedly make the difference. Instead, he gave his players the message that they were good enough and so they were able to move forward from failure. That took both guts and brains, because if they'd failed again, everyone would have been pointing at Ferguson's inaction and blaming that. Halfway through the season, he spent a modest £2million on a certain Frenchman who hadn't held down a regular place at Leeds and who had a reputation for indiscipline. It was completely unexpected and regarded as a risk. Again, Ferguson wasn't afraid and backed his own judgement. How did Keegan respond to failure? He went and spent a world record fee on the England centre forward. Shearer was a very good player but scoring wasn't the problem and the money could have been spent somewhere else. He compounded the error by taking the No 9 shirt from last season's leading goalscorer. Halfway through the season, he lost heart and walked. Basically, Ferguson faced up to failure and kept a cool head. Keegan had the stuffing knocked out of him and his nerve and judgement followed. I don't know if you saw that recent 'Time of our Lives' programme with Ginola, Howey and Bez, but what came across was their anger and frustration at Keegan's failure to push on from 2nd place. The mark of the winner is the ability to respond and learn from a setback. What utter bullshit.