merlin

With some of the fans' views on here, it is clear that Ashley will be here for years and NUFC will be non-entities for that time. Perhaps another Derby hammering might cause the thick scales to drop from some people's eyes.....

You must be joking - like everyone else that leaves he will be asked to sign some sort of 'confidentiality' agreement in which he guarantees NOT to give confidential info or bad-mouth the club... He will do that just to get away...

Looking at some of the postings on this thread(which defy belief...but then, maybe not..!)Ashley can sleep comfortably in his bed knowing that he can screw around 50% of fans over time after time and they will still bend over and hand over their dosh to watch him selling any player that is either ambitious or has proved himself whilst the Ashleyites will have to watch another(hopefully)promising signing develop and then follow the rest out of SJP. Can you see any other scenario..? Too many have been brainwashed into thinking NUFC are a second-rate club and that thinking has become fact.

Your problem with Cabaye and not the club then? Or PSG's mind fuckery with Cabaye? PSG didn't need to do anything to unsettle Cabaye - Ashley, Pardew and NUFC in general did that themselves when they failed to strengthen the side after finishing 5th 2 seasons ago...last season merely confirmed his view that the club weren't going anywhere.

Yes - all in a very good nutshell Wally. Nothing will change while Ashley owns the club ; by your username I reckon you must be one of the older fans like Big Geordie, Mick and myself...we've seen it all before under McKeag & Co but thought those days were gone.KK stated on ESPN that whilst Ashley is at SJP he has no interest in the club and many older fans now share his opinion. If performances fall off until the end of the season more will follow because the club is taking their money and laughing at them whilst selling the best players.

He's got two and half years left on his contract man The ball is/was firmly in our court, if we don't play him he doesn't go to the world cup so he would have had no choice but to keep up the same level that he has shown this season. He has been such a f***ing important player for us since arriving, that's what pisses me off the most about how obvious it has been that Ashley just wants to cash in. You are overestimating cabayes value then.He is our f***ing important player and seems to worth that much because we set up the whole team around him. We could also do the same to hatem and he can play like a 40m player too. It is just like Carroll under Hughton. Cabaye, as a 28 yrs old player with 2 yrs remaining, worth 15m max to me. You may disagree though So you would never have signed Van Persie for Man U...? A certain Alex Ferguson thinks differently.

I can understand the frustration, it is always disappointing to lose popular and instrumental players. I can't however understand how people didn't see this coming. The Mackem game wasn't put here by the club, its sods law. The possibility of someone getting sold in the build up to the game was always a possibility from when the fixture list was released. Also what the hell does it matter whether we say no-one leaves, we don't dictate when another club bids for our players and the club have stated constantly that every player has his price. If anything PSG and the club have done the right thing by getting this done with days left in the window, rather than on Friday, which would have been easy. We also have been backed into a bit of a corner by being offered over 3 times his value come the end of the season when he can buy out his contract. This is the nature of the transfer window. Yes its reasonable to be upset, but lets be rationale rather than laying the hate on the board. No one is expected to leave the club doesn't mean no-one will leave the club. It means no-one is forcing a move and we don't want anyone to leave. Some deals make sense for the better of the club. This is one of them. Yes then there is the can of worms about reinvesting this money or not.. and while Carroll has not been replaced like for like the money has brought us some really influential players. Hello Alan...!

I see you left the small matter of the derby out of that little scenario for the rest of the season. Not too confident then? Sunderland are only two points from safety btw, I wouldn't write them off just yet. They've got a decent haul of points since Poyet took over, not to mention some great cup results as compared to your managerial hero. Poyet is having a canny honeymoon, it goes back over 3 years as a manager against us and in that time he's guided his lesser teams to beat us 3 times. As for what he's rumoured to have done on a dressing room floor, isn't Pardew rumoured to have done things that he shouldn't have done? Having said that, I think we'll get one over him next week as we have a far superior team. Desperation stuff to drag up Poyet's supposed misbehaviour in the Dressing Room when trying to compare him favourably to Pardew ; facts are facts, he has done us several times with supposed 'inferior' sides and he had a decent record at Brighton ; his team are still in 2 cups(where are NUFC?)and only need a few results to get out of the drop zone. Pardew has been a manager far longer and his track record shows mediocre performances at 4 clubs. When Pardew inspires NUFC to a 5-1 win next Saturday, people can start singing his praises. Don't hold your breath with this one.....

There's always someone who will post this as we near the end of each transfer window....great stuff, the Ashley Dr Goebbels machine is running perfectly... Also - have you never heard of the saying 'Don't count your chickens..'. We are not at the 31st until Friday so you can't even make this point yet....

Are you suggesting we did the dirty on Cabaye so that nobody would offer anything for him and we get to keep an unhappy player? Sounds about as plausible as some of the other ludicrous conspiracies demonising the club on here. The club don't need to have anyone demonising them on here or anywhere else - they make a first class job of demonising themselves at just about every turn....

No - it means that any offer around 21m will get him...

14m for Cabaye is a joke...they must be either trying it on - just as NUFC do when attempting to buy a player - or they are just trying to unsettle Cabaye in the belief he doesn't really want to go anywhere else. They'll be back...and maybe others too in due course.

The time to build a team around him was at the end of the 2012 season, when he might have still believed he had joined a team going places. Two years on and with a gormless manager still trying to figure out how to work out a style of football to take advantage of technically adept footballers, he's probably had enough. Pardew and Kinnear are going to be here for the next 12 months at least. So if Cabaye is going we might as well get a good fee for him and hope it's spent on a worthy successor. Exactly this...on the button.

Basically this - they took a huge gamble in replacing Di Canio so quickly and it has paid off for them...Poyet certainly has got Johnson playing much better than he has been and they are getting results after coming from behind, always a sign of a team with some spirit of togetherness. NUFC sides under Pardew have been mainly negative and over-cautious until recently. Under the current regime, if any of our young fans want a trip to Wembley, they will either have to volunteer to be ball boys or get a ticket for an England game because they won't be seeing NUFC there any time soon.... Anyone whingeing about the Mackems on radio etc are merely making fools of themselves and providing ammunition for their fans to have a go at us...it seems to me that more of our fans should be attacking the people who are to blame for our mediocrity, esp in Cup competitions, than having a go at Sunderland reaching a Cup Final. The blame lies at our own doorstep. As for what happens on the day...by every measure you can name, they should get tanked but that is what we older fans thought in 1973 when they reached the FAC final against Leeds...Leeds were, if anything, even more of a dominant side in the First Div then as City are in the PL now(without having foreign players)and we all thought they'd stuff the Mackems ; not so, Montgomery played out of his skin and Porterfield got the winning goal. City have already lost to them once..... Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself.....

At least we could have a bit of optimism that we'll try to challenge for something instead of going through the motions of staying in the division and nothing else, obviously that could turn to s*** knowing our luck. ....and is a comparison with Hull or Cardiff how we want to see our club...??

Ashley basically wants his cake and to eat it as well...

We can put it down to a lack of ambition, that's why he wants to move on. This - 100%

Yes, I know all this BG, but unlike you, I have my doubts as to whether Cabaye will still be here in February....if he is, fair enough, we need him but the main issue is, as you say, that Ashley lacks any ambition for the club and this means more mediocrity for the fans. I have to disagree about Cabaye not getting a regular place at one of the top clubs...if he went to Man U I reckon he would be in every week unless he lost form and with the competition and expectancy top clubs have of their players, there would be more pressure on him to maintain a standard of performance necessary to keep being selected. He clearly now views us as a stepping stone but I don't believe he came with that intention or he wouldn't have tried to persuade Debuchy to come as well ; he thought we might be a big club going places but he knows better now...!!

Are these people the yardstick you think we should be using...??

People forget that Pardew is the second longest serving manager in the PL and has been here for 3 years,,,that IS years in my book and even under Hughton I don't think we passed and moved to such good effect as we did yesterday. That doesn't mean I think we are Real Madrid...or even close - we are used to crap football....

As HTT says, the side played some of the best football seen from a Newcastle team for years in the first half ; we should have been 4 up by the time they got what should have been a consolation goal just before HT but the lack of a decent second striker(plus Pardew's penchant for playing 1 up front) cost us a comfortable lead. W Ham's goal, coming as it did right on HT, could have been very costly and I thought it was a sloppy one to concede with Krul slow to react to the situation - he is not having too great a time of it lately. As most of us would have expected, Pardew resorted back to type in the second half, subbing Anita(who has been invaluable to us)for the footballing equivalent of a turning Queen Mary, Shola and we started to surrender the m/f to W Ham with the result that we got drawn into the usual game of ping pong...which you would expect from the 2 managers in charge of the sides. Needless to say, we once again had to endure a tense second half until Cabaye, who was superb and must have added a few million to his transfer fee, put the game out of their reach with a brilliant free kick. I am convinced that after the bullocking Pardew received last summer from the Fat man, he has been forced to allow others on the staff - and maybe even the players - to change the style of play and this shows when he retreats once again into his shell by putting us in defence mode as soon as we get ahead in the first half and tries to hold out for 45 mins. W Ham were as bad a side as we have played all season, perhaps even worse than Palace and we should have been able to win this match by at least 3 goals after the start we had...their defence was absolutely rocking after we went 2 up and we failed to kill the game off when we should have had a very comfortable second half. The fact that a club of our size is contemplating the likely departure of Cabaye and the fact that Shola still gets into the side instead of being in the lower reaches of the Championship is an indictment of the people running NUFC as is the fact that many fans believe we couldn't get a better manager than Pardew. Delighted by the first half performance - esp by Cabaye's display overall - but not happy with the second half, or the subbing of Anita. Can you imagine how we would fare if Remy, Cabaye and Tiote were removed from the side...? Don't think it couldn't happen, the more goals Remy gets, the less likely he is to join us on a permanent basis and Cabaye and Tiote are both saleable items who Ashley wouldn't hesitate to cash in on. A nervous 2 weeks lie ahead...

Don't tell them that - they might just be tempted....

He should be in the side WITH Tiote and Cabaye and we need a better wide player than Sissoko...he loses the ball too much and if we had a decent winger, that would complete our m/f.

Anita being subbed for Shola is beyond a joke and reinforces what a crap manager Pardew is. Anita has been a mainstay of the side this season and largely responsible for better results AND performances because he is that rare midfielder that every decent side needs....intelligent, skilful, perceptive and full of movement. His presence has released Tiote and Cabaye to do what they are good at and he keeps us moving forward. To a manager like Pardew, whose natural tendency is to shut up shop when a goal ahead, Anita is expendable because he is the type of player who doesn't create aggro when he is pi--ed about so Pardew can bring in his little pet static CF so the team can start punting long balls up to him(which he usually loses of course). Anita would be in my team every time unless he lost form drastically or was injured...if he was sold, our performances would drop off immediately, certainly in the watchability of the football..

Pretty much. Think about how f---ked we'd be if Man U came in with a double bid for him and Tiote of around 40m.... Ashley would snap their hands off and they would transform Man U's season... Oh, wait....the move would transform ours too...but 'every player has his prices...innit..??'