Paully

His numerous digs about us and Rafa last season is my reasoning!

Lovely!

I fancy us to give them a good going over - 4-0! I can't stand that Wagner wanker either!

100%! I used to just view the Football and Chat forums but as you say, it's fine just looking at the unread or create a subscribed list on discussions!

This!

Superbly put that!

Hatem Ben Arfa is out of favour at PSG... an all too familiar scenario http://dailym.ai/2u3hGmE

Rafa Benítez: Have I enjoyed this season? No, but I am pleased with my work Rafa Benítez tells George Caulkin he has been writing coaching reports since he was 12 and aims to keep Newcastle up on a limited budget George Caulkin, Northern Sports Correspondent March 20 2018, 12:01am, The Times Benítez is more accustomed to challenging for trophies than battling relegationSERENA TAYLOR/GETTY IMAGES He is in shorts and cap on the training pitch. “Passes, more pressing,” Rafa Benítez barks. He is working on Newcastle United’s defensive shape, repeating drills so that good habits become ingrained. He beckons his players into a circle, his foot on the ball, and begins asking questions. “It’s what I try to do,” he says later. “I’m 100 per cent convinced they will improve if they think. If they think, they learn.” If anything can encapsulate Benítez’s philosophy, it is this. All managers must be motivators, psychologists and politicians, but the Spaniard prods intellect as well as stirring blood. “I was a PE teacher,” he says. “You can give orders. Or you can say, ‘Listen, we have these problems, so give me a solution,’ and they have to think about it. Some only realise they were learning when you leave or they retire, but if they understand, they become better players.” Benítez obsesses over minutiae, searching for the smallest advantage. “You’re trying for perfection,” he says. “You know it’s impossible, but you try. The other day, Stevie G [steven Gerrard] was on TV talking about a game: ‘Ah, Rafa always said that little details can make a massive difference’. So he heard. Maybe he didn’t realise when he was playing, but now he’s a commentator. And it’s true.” At St James’ Park, he has a dual challenge and it is unfamiliar, discomforting. “What my teams usually do is compete, with the chance to win,” Benítez says. “When I say win, I don’t just mean games, I mean trophies.” With Newcastle, it is about avoiding relegation, pushing players to overachieve, one eye on goal difference. Beyond that, it is about persuading a dysfunctional ownership that the best way of saving money is by investing it. For now, he is doing what he does, doing what he is. Without a Premier League game until a pivotal meeting at home to Huddersfield Town on March 31, Newcastle decamped to Alicante last week, for a little sun and fresh scenery, training at La Finca resort. For all that this has been a season of stress — he feels a heavy duty to the supporters who adore him — Benítez is in his element, coaching and cajoling. He has done it since he was a child. “When I was 12, my team won the championship for schools in Madrid,” Benítez says. “At 13, I went to Real Madrid and started taking notes. I was giving marks to my team-mates after every game, writing down the top scorers. I still have those notebooks at home somewhere. I have all the training sessions of my players. Benítez’s intensity has not slackened at a club without a trophy since 1955 “I have my old computers, the Commodore 64 I used to work on. I used MS-DOS, then BASIC, but I also learnt you have to be careful with computers. They give you too much information. The one thing I don’t want to do is lose the feeling. Because I played football, I know how you feel when you make a mistake. I can hear when you are kicking the ball properly or not, just from the sound. I like to see players, watch them. That human part is crucial.” His methodology works. He won La Liga (twice) and the Uefa Cup with Valencia, the FA Cup and Champions League at Liverpool, the Europa League with Chelsea, the Coppa Italia with Napoli. He has twice been named Uefa’s manager of the year. At 57, he is at a club with an allergy to tangible success — no domestic silverware since 1955 — but the intensity has not slackened. He gives all that he has. “I don’t want to say I’m always working, because then it’s, ‘Oh, Rafa is just football,’ ” Benítez says, but he undermines his own reticence. His day at Newcastle’s Longbenton training ground begins at 7.30am and can end at 8pm. And when he returns to his apartment? “I watch games,” he says. Anything else? “Films. I can be on the computer — we have software now where we can watch any game, any time — and see someone punching someone or jumping in the background. I can concentrate on both things. Or I go and see my family in Liverpool.” Does he switch off there? “My daughter is always saying, ‘Why did you do this?’ or is telling me about my system or tactics,” he says. Merseyside digs deep into Benítez’s being, but Newcastle has touched him too. He joined the club in March 2016, citing their stature and potential as they slumped towards relegation and is loved for it, a relationship crystallised when he agreed to stay. It does not make it easy. “Have I enjoyed being Newcastle manager? I enjoy it when we are winning,” he says. “I like to do things well and when you see something is right, I’m really proud. But it’s difficult to enjoy it when you are suffering all the time because you have to win and then you lose. Have I enjoyed this season? No, but maybe the word ‘enjoyment’ is different in English. I’m really pleased with my job. I like it. But enjoyment is when you score eight goals in the Champions League against Besiktas.” Love is a burden and a privilege. “When you know the fans are against you, it’s not the same passion,” he says. “When they support me in the way they’re supporting me here, you feel this responsibility. I am really proud of that. I try to focus during games — doing my job properly is the best thing I can do for them — but sometimes when they sing my name, I have to wave. “Everybody expects me to be right every time. I’m not, but I try to do my best, to make sure I make less mistakes, to be sure this team will stay up. I sleep, but I feel this support and I feel this responsibility. Not just for the games and the performances, but every decision. Sometimes you want to improve things and sometimes you cannot.” It is more complicated when you “don’t have all the tools”, he says. This is another Newcastle theme. For three transfer windows in succession, Benítez’s advice has been shunned and although the team were promoted as champions and have since found momentum — they are 13th in the Premier League, four points clear of the bottom three — trust is fragile, clouded by the prospect of a takeover. It is not the behaviour of the club he hoped he was joining. His players might be learning, but what about Mike Ashley, the club’s owner. “We have to change things,” Benítez says. “I came here with the idea to compete and to create a strong team and a strong club, to compete every year. What we have to do if we stay up is improve. The way Newcastle were doing things before I arrived doesn’t mean they were right, because they were going down. Now we have had the chance to go up we cannot make the same mistakes again. “When I said I wanted to stay I could see the potential for this club to be in the top 10 or even higher, but it depends on consistency. You have to have a structure. Everybody has to be organised. Can we win trophies? We would need time, but you never know in the cups. To compete and be capable of winning something, you need to have the plan and the process. Everything has to be . . . not settled down, that’s not the right phrase, but more clear.” He has a year left on his contract. In the middle of January, the very moment Benítez was pushing to strengthen his squad, Ashley and Lee Charnley, the managing director, asked him to consider an extension. The timing was baffling. It is not a priority. “No,” Benítez says. “The main thing is Huddersfield. The job is not done.” Communication with Ashley has tailed away. “Our talking in January was fine but I have contact with Lee. He’s the link,” he says. The frustration — for Benítez, for the fans — is that Newcastle could be more than they are, more ambitious, more dynamic. There was a glimpse of it in their win over Manchester United last month, but that was a glorious exception. “It was the atmosphere,” he says. “Everything around the game was what you were expecting from this club in the Premier League. That was a good example. It’s what you want players to be saying when they come to St James’ — ‘Wow, very intimidating.’ It’s something I think we can replicate week in, week out — if we stay in the Premier League.” There is a beat, a pause. “At the moment, it is difficult,” he says. It is a long way from perfection, but Benítez will keep coaching, keep obsessing, keep asking questions, until there are no more questions left to ask. It is who he is.

Tottenham's fixture list now looks like this: Sun 01.04.2018 Chelsea (a) Sat 07.04.2018 Stoke City (a) Sat 14.04.2018 Manchester City (h) Sat 21.04.2018 (or 22) Manchester United (h) FAC Mon 30.04.2018 Watford (h) Sat 05.05.2018 West Bromwich Albion (a) Sun 13.05.2018 Leicester City (h) ?? ??.??.2018 Newcastle (h) ?? ??.??.2018 Brighton (a)

What a man! Give him a contract for life!

The media may want to write more about their plight, but that would require readers/viewers to have an interest... which they don't. They'll disappear with a whimper and 95% of the football world won't even notice. But, you know, 6 in a row marra #The Magedia!

Just the link alone. No one else in the nation gives a flying f*** about them being completely f***ed because they're not a big club. But...but...6 in a row. Some quality comments!

It's incredible that they're only five points off safety!

http://www.football365.com/news/premier-league-winners-and-losers-95 Alan Pardew Pardew’s greatest trick is making you believe that this West Brom situation was already a lost cause when he arrived. Such is his emphatic under-performance since joining the club, you might assume that three-quarters of the ship was already underwater, and the rest was sinking fast. That’s actually completely untrue. Pardew was appointed on November 29 with West Brom outside the relegation zone and with 24 league games remaining in their season. The greatest damnation of his reign is that the three clubs below West Brom and in the bottom three on November 29 are all now outside it. Pardew was supposed to transform the mood, and on that score he can at least claim success: Under Tony Pulis, monotony and tedium reigned; now the only talk is of disaster. Pardew’s record of eight points from a possible 51 is sensationally bad. This is the realm of the over-promoted and inexperienced, the Terry Connors, Ricky Sbragias and Steve Wigleys of this unforgiving world. Pardew has won one of his 17 league matches. Pitiful. Pardew’s biggest failure lies in his inability to maintain morale even when West Brom have taken a step in the right direction. His entire managerial ethos surrounds the generating and cherishing of high team spirit, but that has been absent. Take the lead against Leicester; lose. Take the lead against Bournemouth; lose. Take the lead against Southampton; lose. Take the lead against West Ham; lose. In their last 10 league games, Pardew’s West Brom have scored the first goal of the game six times and yet somehow managed to take just four points from those games. That’s relegation confirmed in one statistic. Pardew has now won seven of his last 55 Premier League matches with two different clubs. He should now be finished as a Premier League manager, and would be were it not for the unfathomable lingering goodwill that comes with ‘knowing the league’. A plea to owners of struggling Premier League clubs in this and any other season: experience of failure is less useful that inexperience.

0 Rafa's teams always finish the season strong! I can see us getting four or five wins out of the last eight!

Not even worth mentioning in the league table now!

I’ve just watched 15 minutes of it on SSN - he has completely lost it!

Spurs away will surely be Wednesday 17th April, won't it? As you can't play PL matches on the same night as CL week nights?!

Hopefully they get past Milan in the Europa cos the QF 2nd leg is the Thursday before this so if they could be away in Kiev or somewhere similar, that would be marvellous . Away to Moscow will do nicely. Was just posting that - magic!

Those extra officials near the goal are a complete joke! Welbeck should be punished for that blatant cheating!

If he scores one goal off his helmet that gets us a point which keeps us up then he will be a great singing! I really like him as player and I feel sorry for him that he was injured when he signed and still is (well done Mike for wasting another full window!) as I've read some of our idiots giving him stick for it!

Jake Livermore :lol: :lol:

I feel sorry for him as he deserves it but I couldn't give a rat's arse about England at present as it's all about us staying up so I'm pleased that he's staying with us and working under Rafa!

"A Sunderland fan makes a deal with the devil to beat Newcastle six in a row" - fucking hell man :lol: :lol: