Paully

South Shields made it 32 in a row with a 4-0 win over Marske tonight - hat-trick for Finnigan!

That ball by Messi - fuck me!

1-0 Juve

Higuain sitter after 2 mins

Tony Adams' press conference is an absolute cringe fest! He's going to kick their arses He said the the team is too foreign He's going try his best to keep the ball out of one end and stick it in the other He said some comment about a Chinese team as well which I missed! Ha ha what a pleb!

People are really predicting 3-0 and 3-1 losses?! Home win and Wolves will do us a favour in the 5pm match! I think we'll go the rest of the season unbeaten possibly winning all five!

Are Newcastle the Championship's biggest scalp? Aston Villa are according to Steve Bruce http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/newcastle-championships-biggest-scalp-aston-12877048#ICID=ios_ChronicleNewsApp_AppShare_Click_Other

Nope, it's the palace fans singing "we want you to stay". That was their reply to the Arsenal fans who also sang 'you're not fit to wear the shirt"!

"Arsene Wenger, we want you to go"!

Arsenal TV should be decent later!

Good job Cabaye was off there - crackers to not square it!

Townsend is torturing Arsenal - we'd be up now if we had of signed him in January!

https://www.facebook.com/turnipheadpic/posts/1863048227267969 Some great photos there!

http://www.true-faith.co.uk/thru-black-white-eyes-eyes-on-the-prize-9apr2017/ I do despair however at some of the comments I read about performances via social media and sometimes I wonder if I should heed the advice of some mates and just ignore it completely and withdraw from it as it all appears to be extreme, knee-jerk, flamboyant expressions of joy or unhappiness which verge on the bi-polar. I’ll put my cards on the table. I regard the presence of Rafa Benitez as one of the single best things that has happened to Newcastle United in my life-time. In terms of prestige and achievement in the game, he is the best manager we have ever had. That is not to diminish the great achievements of Joe Harvey, Kevin Keegan and Sir Bobby Robson but take your Black & White goggles off and Senor Benitez is on a completely different level to those marvellous club servants. Without Benitez we might be looking at a position similar to Aston Villa or worse. Probably worse. Instead, we are looking at a return to the Premier League. Let’s put a few things into perspective. On Wednesday night Rafa brought on Sammy Ameobi as a substitute. Now, I’d have loved Sammy to have been a success at United but clearly that is just not going to be the case and he has hardly covered himself in glory with loan spells at Cardiff and Bolton. Yet, such are the resources available to Rafa that he’s getting a run-out in an absolutely vital promotion game in front of over 48,000 at St James’ Park. That is part of the legacy Rafa has inherited at United. Let’s not forget, our club remains in the recovery position after years of mismanagement, stagnation and decline. Rafa is the best chance of a half decent future at United but he isn’t a magician. He will make mistakes but what he has achieved in one transfer window has been nothing short of miraculous even if the style of football is somewhat functional. It is achieving the results we need. The quality of club Rafa inherited means he is being forced to use players like Anita and Goufrann who will be released on free transfers at the end of the season and who I’d wager will not find Premier League clubs to play for next season. Rafa coaches the players every day. He knows what they are capable of and that is why it is only desperation that brings Mbemba into the side who has not inspired confidence at all. Mitrovich finds his way back into the first team blocked by a 34-year-old striker, Daryl Murphy for whom the Championship is his level. According to a now invisible section of our support, Mitro started the season “on fire” but has hardly lived up to the billing of his fan club and who would argue he has what it takes to get us the goals to get us back into the Premier League? He’s had numerous opportunities and the stakes are just too high to continue to play the Serb because he doesn’t work hard enough, isn’t tough enough to dominate defenders and whose finishing is appalling. I hear calls for Rafa to play two up top in what can only mean a 4-4-2 formation and despair at the lack of appreciation for how much the game has moved on from that and the absence of players the manager has at his disposal to make that happen. Gayle and who? Murphy? Lacks the mobility and pace or endurance it seems to play a full game. Mitro? Lacks everything. The kind of club Rafa inherited has absolutely nothing coming through the academy the manager could put into the team. Frankly, this jam tomorrow I constantly hear about prospects from the Academy is wearing a bit thin. Big questions need to be asked about the whole purpose of the academy because Paul Dummett aside I’m struggling to see what it has produced in a very long while. It is an area that Rafa will need to address because no-one else at the club has had any positive impact upon it at all if the measure is in graduates to the first team squad. Rafa has a small squad but it is one where Haris Vuckic and Curtis Goode have been on the books for years and look as close to a first team call up in 2017 as they did three years ago. They are nowhere near but the long term deals they are on mean we are stuck with them. These are the cards the manager has been dealt. Tiote was on the books until February and contributed zip. Big money but produced nothing for our just and righteous cause and stunk the place out for years with his face tripping him and wanting out for a big pay-day from some mugs who will put up with his nonsense. What has been evident from this campaign is how inexperienced this team is, the nous it lacks at times and the edge it has missing to get us out of difficult spots. We don’t have the players to run the clock down in the last moments of games and it took Rafa to tell, to even push Lascelles to talking to the referee on Wednesday night when Stroud had his brain fart. Imagine Chris Hughton having to tell a Kevin Nolan, Joey Barton et al to get in front of the referee and point out the error of his ways in similar circumstances? No, me neither. What I observe on match-days is a manager working his nuts off, wringing everything he possibly can from his players to get Newcastle United promoted. He is the leader and it’s a quality we seem to lack on the park at the moment. I do detect a fragility about the team and that is why they need us more than ever to get the club over the line and back to the Premier League because the consequences of that not happening could be absolutely catastrophic for Newcastle United for years to come. Some in our support need to wake up and smell the coffee. We will be promoted. It isn’t a piece of piss but you know one of the best seasons I’ve ever had following United was in the 83/84 season with Kevin Keegan, Chris Waddle, Peter Beardsley, Terry McDermott and Glenn Roeder in the team. We finished third that season. But we went up. It was a fantastic season of some of the most memorable football I’ve ever seen. But we were third. Rafa’s team is doing better than that with players who aren’t as good as that team or the one of 92/93 or 09/10 and in a division which is much tougher. There are five games remaining. Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the football club we all love and drag us over the promotion line.

THE JOURNEYMAN North East’s non-League boom shows no sign of slowing Gregor Robertson visits North Shields Gregor Robertson April 10 2017, 12:01am, The Times The derby clash attracted a sellout crowd of 1,500 on SaturdayCRAIG CONNOR/NORTH NEWS AND PICTURES ‘The Morgue” is filling up nicely before the Ebac Northern League Division One top-of-the-table clash on Saturday, anticipation gently simmering in a part of the country where fervour and football go hand in hand. “I feel like a kid waiting for Santa,” Sean Redford, the North Shields club secretary, says. He is a burly man with tattoos and cropped hair, hawking cans of beer from an ice bucket under a gazebo. South Shields are in town, rivals from the other side of the tunnel at the mouth of the River Tyne, and the undercurrent of both clubs’ association with the two behemoths of northeast football — Newcastle United to the north, Sunderland to the south — is never far away. “I haven’t slept a wink,” Redford says. Welcome to “El Working Clasico”. In all likelihood, like me, you had never heard of this game, played at tier nine of the English football pyramid. Yet it is a game with a rich heritage stretching back more than a century. In the middle decades of the 20th century the derby regularly drew crowds of more than 10,000. Supporters of a certain age remember “packed ferries” crossing the river in the days before the Tyne tunnel was built. South Shields spent the 1920s as high as the Second Division of the Football League. In 1960, North Shields finished three points behind Peterborough United at the top of the Midland Counties League and Peterborough were elected to the Fourth Division. As chairman Alan Matthews, 68, proudly told me, North Shields are the only club to have won the FA Amateur Cup, the FA Vase and the European Amateur Cup. Mike Taylor, the North Shields treasurer, tells me how he hurried his newlywed back from their honeymoon in Jersey to see that FA Amateur Cup final, in 1969. “We got the shuttle bus straight to Wembley from Heathrow,” he says. “I didn’t mention it till the day before we got married. But I’d already bought the tickets.” More recently, however, both have endured periods exiled from their homes, there have been financial troubles and they have flirted with extinction. “Both clubs have found themselves down and out, but we’ve fought back,” Matthews says. The depression that has enveloped football in the northeast for much of the past decade, punctuated by the occasional season filled with the hope that comes with promotion, has, it seems, been to the benefit of the non-League scene. A growing disconnect between supporters and elite clubs, and the cost of supporting them, is also contributing to greater numbers passing through the gates further down the pyramid. “It costs you something in the region of £100 to go and see Newcastle,” Paul Jackson, North Shields’ groundsman, says. “North Shields, for example, is £6 to get in, a pint is £2 in the clubhouse, and a Bovril’s 80p.” South Shields recently became the tenth FA Vase finalist in the past nine years to have come from this part of the country, but their recent revival is down to local businessman Geoff Thompson — the “Abramovich of the Northern League,” Jackson says. Two years ago, South Shields were playing their home games 20 miles south in Peterlee, watched by 40 or 50 supporters, as they were unable to pay the lease on their ground at Filtrona Park. In 2015, Thompson bought the club and ground, which he renamed Mariners Park, and has invested a seven-figure sum with the aim of one day reaching the National League. His star signing was Julio Arca, now 36, who of course played more than 300 league games for Sunderland and Middlesbrough. He was forced to retire through injury in 2013, but 18 months later, he began playing Sunday league football, with a friend, for Willow Pond FC. A call from South Shields outlined their ambitions and piqued Arca’s interest. When the Argentinian signed in 2015, gates of about 300 instantly doubled. This season their attendances have averaged 1,250; last month, when South Shields sealed their forthcoming trip to Wembley in the FA Vase, almost 3,500 fans flocked to Mariners Park. “I didn’t know much about the Northern League, to be honest,” Arca says, “but we have some great players who have played at different levels, some abroad. “The crowds have been rising and it’s great to see the passion of the fans; to see so many people come to watch football at this level.” Foley, left, struck the only goal of the game to send South Shields top of the tableCRAIG CONNOR/NORTH NEWS AND PICTURES As the sun streams down on the Daren Persson Stadium (the funeral director’s sponsorship led to the ground’s moniker), the slightly bemusing North Shields “Ultras” stand on the grassy bank they label the “Curva Nord”, with their St George’s flags tied to the fencing, enjoying the freedom of being allowed to knock back a few cans of beer while watching the game. Their songs would not be to everyone’s taste, I’m sure, and I would not have fancied being the referee or linesman, but the atmosphere among the 1,500 capacity crowd was largely good-natured throughout. South Shields’ 1-0 win seals a second consecutive promotion and is their 31st consecutive victory, breaking the unofficial world record set by East Kilbride of the Lowland League, which joint-manager, Graham Fenton, saw as a “distraction”. The Mariners’ financial muscle was evident most in a dangerous front three that included David Foley, 29, whose swerving, dipping 25-yard strike midway through the first half settled this game. North Shields rallied when Arca was shown a second yellow card, but South Shields stood firm to go above their rivals on goal difference with two games in hand. Without the funds to meet the additional travel costs in the Evo-Stik League, North Shields did not apply to be promoted, and their title challenge was left in tatters. Fenton controversially crossed from North to South Shields last summer, but he is also remembered in these parts for scoring twice for Blackburn Rovers against his boyhood club, Newcastle United, as a substitute in a 2-1 win at Ewood Park in 1996. Those goals effectively ended Newcastle’s Premier League title bid and his win against his former club on Saturday came exactly 21 years later. He feels that the Premier League he once played in has now “lost touch with reality”. “I think a lot of people around the area have fallen out of love with the Premier League,” Fenton tells me on the pitch after the game. “I get disheartened when I see things like players driving into the stadium without signing autographs for the people who’re paying their wages. I think it’s a huge mistake. I understand they’re blown up to be superstars now, there’s the TV money and what have you, but you should have that relationship with the fans.” For Matthews, this game is just one thread in the rich fabric of non-League football. “At grassroots level, every club has their own group of supporters and committee men, who don’t take any money, who do everything for nothing, simply for the benefit of the club; we’re just one of many hundreds throughout the country,” he says. “It’s wonderful.” In a nutshell Nickname The Robins Club crest The three crowns represent three ancient kings buried at Tynemouth Priory and the ship, pitman and seaman represent the area’s industries, hence the motto “Messis ab altis”: harvest of the deep Ground/Capacity Daren Persson Stadium, or “The Morgue”, 1,500 (100 seated). Ticket prices: Adults: £6; Concessions: £3 Price of a programme Robins, 38 pages, £1.50 Price of a pie £1 Price of a pint £2 a can Weirdest thing in the club shop No shop, but hats, badges, strips and scarves for sale One for the future Curtis Coppen, 22, a defender or midfielder, has trial at Jamie Vardy’s V9 Academy at Etihad Stadium this summer Record signing Paid £3,000 on several occasions in the past Highest league finish Midland League runners-up, 1959/60 Moment in history Defeated Sutton United 2-1 in front of 47,000 fans at Wembley to lift the FA Amateur Cup in 1969 Greatest player Frank Brennan, former Scotland and Newcastle defender, played in late Fifties and early Sixties, before managing the club Greatest manager In 1968/69, Brennan led them to a quadruple of Northern League and Cup, FA Amateur Cup and Anglo-Italian Cup Celebrity fan Ray Laidlaw, drummer for folk rock band Lindisfarne, had a spell as press officer in the Nineties

Aye I thought that - Vardy 11s and Mahrez 18s!

Well done to South Shields!

Zlatan and Rom - 15/1 Man Utd and Everton 9/5 I can't wait for 1-0 Sunderland!

There is no home and away ends in the Northern League. Stand where you want. Ha ha aye I thought it was odd but the lad who told me thinks they have an allocated area of 400!

Rafa Benitez to make separate visit to memorial for the 96 at Hillsborough ahead of Newcastle game http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/rafa-benitez-make-separate-visit-12864407#ICID=ios_ChronicleNewsApp_AppShare_Click_Other

Handball shout against Dunk in the box - blatant pen if it had been one of our players!

A few South Shields fans I know reckon that many of them have got home end tickets for tomorrow so I definitely think that it'll be a bit lively!

Diego https://www.facebook.com/paddypower/videos/10155267976574914/

0-4 Brighton to drop points tonight too!