afar

http://icnewcastle.icnetwork.co.uk/newcastleunited/sundaysun/tm_headline=mike-ashley-is-warned-no-more-transfers&method=full&objectid=24477810&siteid=61634-name_page.html That's another thoroughly depressing article. According to them, the moat deal is unlikely and Ashley will take the club off the market on Friday (how many times has that been said).

It's all very distracting though and takes the fans focus and anger off the pressing problem which is lack of squad depth.

Hes only just signed for them. Well I would just like him to get injured then for the rest of the season, because Cardiff are looking good right now, along with boro and West Brom too.

I'd sooner we brough Chopra back than Beckford tbh. If nothing else it would hurt one of our rivals chances, seems like he's pivotal to Cardiff. I'm sure if we showed an interest in him, he'd begin to engineer a move.

Don't disagree he was a nice bloke and showed passion and also not the only one to underperform, but at the end of the day he didn't give us anywhere near the value for money we thought we were getting when we signed him, so I'm more than happy to see him drain resources of some other club rather than ours.

I'm not getting carried away with any of this to be honest. All I care about is the fact that we are 13 days away from the end of the transfer window and we have no manager and show a loss of 10 players from last year's already thin squad with one short term loanee brought in. Unless we get more players in and fast we need to pray for miracles on the injury front.

10 out now and 1 loanee in, 13 days left, we need to get a move on.

Just read quotes from Hughton on nufc.com. Doesn't sound very encouraging at all.

This and the Leicester home game are important must wins for us, as we have IMO two of the toughest away days of the season happening either side of them.

Lets hope this one finally goes through. I know it cuts our squad still further but it's a fantastic offer for a player that's been living off his past reputation for years, bleeding the club dry with his salary and is going to be worth next to nothing in a year's time. Before the crap with Ashley selling up started, I'm pretty sure Duff would have been on most people's lists as deadwood we needed to clear out. For me he'll always be remembered as the person who scroed the goal that sent us down. Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out Damien, you'll not be missed.

I've said all summer that I don't buy into this "The championship is a tough league" crap. The league is fill with dross, that's clear to see from not just the start we've made but also from the other two relegated clubs. We took 10 pts out of 12 from those two last year and there should be nothing for us to fear anywhere else. The gap is so wide between the Prem and CCC it's ridiculously hard for promoted teams to do well unless they invest seriously, this works in reverse too, on paper we were too good to go down, despite what we all think of the squad it was never a relegation squad. The only thing that will stop us going straight back up IMO, is ourselves or more appropriately Mike Ashley, we need to fill out the already thin squad which has be dessimated, we need a proper manager and we need a a resolution to the ownership. If we solve all three of those, there's more than enough quality in our squad for this division.

One of my least favourite players to play for the club in recent times, I hope Obrien gets nowhere near a return here. If we get Sol in then I think our policy needs to switch to young and hungry, we've got enough experience in the squad.

NVM, they've updated their website. It's being shown at 9.30 EST for those of us over here.

According to their schedule the game was supposed to be on right now. But they've switched it to some moscow derby crap. Anyone know when or if they are going to play our game ? The fuckers !

I was looking for a post I made in this thread around page 150 or so, that I predicted we would get to page 440 before being sold, I thought I was just being my usual miserable b****** but guess I was being a tad optimisitic there. I gave up my search, since I've posted so much crap between then and now. 454 actually. http://www.newcastle-online.org/nufcforum/index.php/topic,62360.msg1895784.html#msg1895784 OMFG I'm a miserable old twat.

I was looking for a post I made in this thread around page 150 or so, that I predicted we would get to page 440 before being sold, I thought I was just being my usual miserable bastard but guess I was being a tad optimisitic there. I gave up my search, since I've posted so much crap between then and now.

He has an emotional attachment to the club That will do for me tbh The Glazers borrowed money to buy Man Utd and Liverpools owners borrowed the money too...don't see any harm in this...can't do us anymore harm than has already been done by Ashley They both had world renown products and already sucessful teams behind them. That's a world away from what we have. It will take considerable funds to repair the damage to the squad. It will take considerable funds to pay off his debt. Where's that money coming from ? The Business lost money and a lot of it last year. The only way he can pay off his debts is to sell more assets. The hope is Shearer will find gems, that we can flog for more cash because there are not too many assets left atm. He has to make money in the short term to pay off the loan he's took on, he's got to do that with an ailing business who's never managed to turn a profit in recent memory.

Better than nothing. Let's not forget that for all his faults (and don't get me wrong, there are f***ing MANY of course), so far the Taylor sale, the Duff sale, the Jonas sale, the taking the club off the market, the appointment of O'Leary, the non-appointment of O'Leary and the appointment of Kinnear are only rumours too. Yet everyone seems to be taking those as certainties. Hope for what though, this guy doesn't have the money, do we really want to return to the pre Hall days where we were run by little two bit local businessmen who had no ambition and no idea how to run a football club. I'm not saying Ashley has any either and that Moat is not an improvement on him but it's hardly heralding the dawn of a great new age at the club.

Why is anyone even remotely excited about this. If it's true and I think by now we can only really assume it's not. It talks about a man who clearly hasn't got the funds, trying to borrow the money to buy the club. TBH can't see this guy being any better than Ashley.

Not really - we have been losing £20 to £30 million a year and, in the best case, your maths just gets us back to that position, it doesn't show a way of getting back to break even. In truth there probably is no easy way back to break even - as the buyers doing their due diligence will have realised. They predicted a loss of 7 million for this year, when we were back in the prem, not 20 million, that was the actual loss for the previous year. I guess due to the fact that most of our recent transfer windows have seen us make a profit therefore the ones we owed on like Luque, Duff, Owen etc were coming towards the end of there payments, while those we sold Dyer, Parker, Milner et al, would still be bringing in the money. Their prediction of loss is more accruate gauge than the previous year's loss as that situation changes all the time. I'm not saying we don't have a shortfall still of around 20 million, that could be made up from the drop in attendaces and marketing of the club, it's just not as attractive to corporates and sponsors as it was in the Prem days. But what I am saying is that the loss in TV renvenue from dropping down a division has largely be negated already and if a buyer is prepared to take a chance and fund a promotion push, they could be sitting pretty.

That's about the first time anything out of his mouth has been treu and thus far it's only half truth as we've yet to people the new players come in.

He's going to go through this every year until he sells the club, he realises that he made a mistake in buying us but is not prepared to cut his losses unless he gets a sweet deal, even in a depressed economy. I fully expect an announcement within a month or so that he's going to give it one more try, only to put the club up for sale yet again in January or at the end of the season. I am fully confident to make the statement that we will not be sold this year.

Did a quick sum of the finances as I assume they are: We've made 20 - 21 million from the Sale of Beye, Bassong and Martins. Working on the assumption that the following salaries are close to being right we've saved another 20.6 million a year. Owen 110k pw Viduka 75k Beye 50k Martins 60k Cacapa 30k Nacho 30k Loven 30k Bassong 6k Edgar 6k The drop in TV revenue between Prem and CCC is 42 million. So we are just about there. Of course the caveat is that the transfer fees will not be paid up front but over a number of years. From a financial point of view though the shortfall will be the loss in matchday reveenue from lower crowds, corporates and sponsorship. If we start to do well and look good for promotion though, the crowds will come back and the revenue will still be there. 1 or 2 more sales and Ashley may well be in a strong position as long as crowds stay around 30k. The problem though will be finding 20 million plus next season to fill the gap assuming we don't go up.

They tend to get pretty good info tbh, given that David Craig is lodged firmly up Derek Llambias' arse. They don't really need good info tbh. I'm sure most of us knew this was bulshit from the start, and whichever names are bandied about it will come back to good old Joe in the end. If it was bullshit from the start, why would anyone word it 'no longer in contention'? Wouldn't 'never been approached' be more suitable? It's similar to bidding £4m for Stephen Mbia in the January transfer window, then buying Kevin Nolan instead. Benefit of hindsight. Nolan was quality at Bolton and Mbia is unproven. We made the wrong deal but it never seemed like that at the time. Nolan had one or two decent seasons at Bolton. The Bolton fans were glad to see him go and he'd been on the decline for a few years, this was common knowledge amongst anyone who had just a passing interest in football. It was a bad signing simple as that, no hindsight needed at all. That's not to say that Mbia was a sure thing, but I would have to a chance on him way before spending silly money on a has been that really never was.

I wouldn't sell Taylor for less than 10 million tbh. I rate him higher than most on here probably but I don't see the need to let a young lad with a lot of potential go on and fulfill that elsewhere. Ashley however is deep in the asset striping mode so, I suspect we may have seen Taylor's last game for the club, at the hawthrons. Who the fuck we play in the middle of the defence is a mystery now.