ikri

Garbage really, the defence is the best we've had for years. The problem is, and has been since SBR left, the midfield is incapable of retaining or winning the ball. So even when we're in possession we've got to expect that at any moment the ball is going to come flying back towards our defence. At some point concentration breaks, a player stumbles, a pass is misplaced and the opposition is through. Why did we have a more successful defence when we had players like Dabizas, O'Brien, Hughes, etc.? Because we had a good midfield.

What do you think of a manager who wins 4 titles with 2 different clubs and 3 manager of the year awards ?

It's like seeing advice on fire fighting from an arsonist.

I'm pretty sure it was mentioned that their wage bill was something like 90% of their turnover last season. Even with UEFA cup football this season & the sales of a couple of players all they've really done is pay off some of their debts, they need to either massively increase their turnover or ditch half their squad to reach some kind of equilibrium. They've been wanting to build a new stadium for a while now, but with little or no space in Portsmouth available to do so & very few investors around these days willing to lend them £250m they've not really got any chance of that happening any time soon. Pompey's owner can't easily reach into his own pockets to fund the club since a lot of questions get asked about where the money is coming from, the father of the Pompey's owner gave an interview not too long ago where he said that it was he, not his son, that actually owned Pompey. If that were true, the "fit and proper person" test that the FA use on club owners might actually have to be applied since Arcadi Gaydamak (Alexandre Gaydamak's father) is an international fugitive, wanted on two charges for illegal arms dealing and tax evasion.

QFE

I don't remember it being anywhere near this bad under Robson or Keegan (1st time around). Kadar's injury is a freak occurrence, a broken bone from an impact during a match unlike most of our other injuries this season that have occurred in training. It's those training injuries that we need to get a handle on, figure out why they're happening on such a regular basis.

Exactly what I was talking about. The problem with Joe Kinnear is that I don't have much faith in him to bridge the divide. He could probably organise a good knees up though. FFS is it 1999 all over again? British players & foreign players forming cliques, a clueless manager & Sunderland the next home game. I'm starting to think that I might turn up to the Sunderland game to find that Ruud Gullit is stood in the dugout & has left Alan Shearer on the bench.

Are we actually cursed?

Sell them or simply take them on a "special training course" in the middle of the Otterburn ranges during a live fire exercise. Whichever is easier.

If that Hotel/Casino project that had been mentioned had gone ahead he might have been able to shore things up for another 12-18 months, but even that's unlikely considering the credit problems the developers would have come up against due to events since that project was mentioned.

Even without the additional loan repayments, the club is still losing money.

Possibly the best Newcastle player I've ever seen (maybe Gazza, maybe Pedro), his vision & awareness of what was going on around him was incredible. It always pisses me off when people go on about how great the current england midfielders & strikers are since none of them could hold a candle to Beardsley's talents.

What's that now? 3 or 4 charges hanging over him? Can we just ban him from the dugout for the remainder of the season & force the club to go out & hire a manager with an ounce of sense?

Were those the same American investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars in Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme?

So the purpose of the banner is now to antagonise fellow supporters?

Who to? And for what price? He is not going to sell the club at a loss, it's a completely unrealistic expectation, no one is going to sell an asset for a loss if they can avoid it. The club need much better communication with the fans. If NUSC didn't have such an anti-Ashley stance they would be the perfect group for this, a group of supporters who would be able to tell the board how unhappy the fans are. Protesting against the managing director (who has a much greater input on the day-to-day mismanaging of the club) makes sense. Protesting against the clueless fuckwit of a manager makes sense. Protesting to make Ashley sell the club at a loss is a waste of time.

QFE If you don't score you don't win. We should have had the game tied up by half time but our forwards are fucking pathetic.

best description ive heard for him is that hes a viagra manager - capable of keeping you up for a short time but long term use is not advised He is incapable of taking us forward

Yes & No. He was sat in the stands wearing the shirt with the number 17 (his lucky number) that also happened to be Alan Smith's number.

Would an Abramovich count as a miracle? The dominoes would have to fall in reverse order. The club probably needs someone from the North East. Don't think a billionaire Russian, Thai, Arab, American is going to do it. Some previously unnoticed Newcastle supporting billionaire? Whilst the club would probably benefit from a new owner coming in & wiping the slate clean the idea of a Geordie Abramovich is fanciful. The club has been up for sale since September but he hasn't appeared yet, prior to that the Hall family were apparently willing to sell their share for about 3 years before Ashley bought them out and yet the Geordie Abramovich didn't appear then. What about a consortium of local businessmen/women? We'd need to find a group of people locally willing to invest a minimum of £250m. That's going to be a decent sized group of people & you'd then be left with all the other issues; once the club has been bought who is going to dip into their pockets again to buy some more players? who is going to be responsible for the day-to-day running of the club? what happens if one or more of the investors suddenly decide they want their money back? Foreign investors? Arab billionaires, etc.? They'll have no greater feeling for the club or city than Ashley and there's no guarantee that they'll want a Man City style plaything instead of trying to make some money from us. New ownership would be nice, but it's completely unrealistic at this moment.

He set the team out to play some really fucking dreary football that no one wanted to watch. If we'd have been winning games whilst playing badly it would have been excused, but to play badly and consistently lose games that could or should have been won had we actually tried to win & not simply edge a draw is what caused his failure here. His tactics. His ideas on how the game should be played. He's the only one to blame for his own failures.

Might just be £5m up front with another £Xm over a couple of years and/or depending on appearances, etc.

mackems.gif Couldn't make it up. Anyone know what Andoni Goikoetxea is doing these days?

There's a danger that we might lose even more players to injury & fuck up a few more results and end up relegated. The danger with West Ham & Portsmouth is that they might go bankrupt and cease to exist as football league clubs.