ikri

They didn't work for various reasons. Dalglish had Shearer's injury to deal with in his first full season, but despite doing OK in the FA cup he produced some dreary safety-first style football at times that no one wanted to see. Gullit was a crap manager who could only deal with players as good as he was, he couldn't understand when players didn't know what to do & needed his guidance. When you're managing players like Zola you can get away with it, when you're David Beharall's manager it fails. Worse, after the Gullit disaster the then board were shit scared of appointing another foreign manager, limiting ourselves to British managers who, bar Robson, shouldn't be managing a pub team let alone a Premiership team. Robson did pretty well, once he got rid of Mick Wadsworth. I'd rather forget Souness ever existed. A manager in the same style as Gullit but without the charisma. Total reliance on players knowing what they're doing rather than develop anything resembling tactics or instructions. Brought in his inept mates as coaches, told 3 of our better players that they'd never play for the club again, spent millions on rubbish. Makes Kinnear look competent. Roeder, did great when he had Shearer with him to act as his 2nd in command, but had little support from the players when he took the job on full time. A nice guy, but too weak. Fat Sam came in to show us all these new and amazing training techniques & apparently understood tactics. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the players he had here were totally wrong for his tactics and the players he brought in, bar Beye & Enrique, pretty poor. He played football so negative that he made Dalglish's tactics look exciting. If we'd have been winning games too it wouldn't have mattered, but to play shit football & still lose is unforgivable. For various reasons the proven managers have been garbage & brought in as knee-jerk reactions to deal with some perceived fault from the previous manager's era - players aren''t listening to the manager? bring in that hard nut Souness to sort them, training techniques stuck in the 1800's? bring in Fat Sam & his team, etc. Appointing a proven manager isn't necessarily wrong, but like buying a Chelsea or Man Utd reject you have to ask why aren't they wanted by others?. Get the right manager in, proven or unproven, put the right people around them & give them time to succeed.

I'd thought previously that Whelan would rather eat shit than do business with Ashley, but the Insomnia deal still went ahead so perhaps he would.

I can remember seeing Ameobi take a shot, that's not something I can accuse Smith of

He hasn't looked too bad when I've seen him play, could do with a few games along side a steady striking partner though. There have been a couple of rumours that he's either been injured & no one has thought to mention it or that there's an additional fee to pay should he play a certain number of games. Or, it could just be that his English is crap & JFK has no idea how to communicate with a foreign player other than shouting louder.

Get rid of Wise, he's too much of a divisive figure to keep him on. Replace Wise with Kinnear, thanks for the hard work in keeping us up but he's not good enough to be our long-term manager. Hire a manager/1st team coach who has a clue. Offload the garbage like Smith & Duff

Would love to see Bent here, but never at the expense of losing Martins

6 hours from now we'll see the return of Sibireski Rather him than Smith

50m Norwegian Krone perhaps? Converts to around £5m

Someone will probably leak the real price in the next week or so. We're led to believe that whilst we managed to get £8m for Dyer, it looks like we've got £6m + a player for Insomnia yet we've let Given, who we didn't need to sell, for half what we wanted for him? But he failed the medical? So what, he was still under contract to us & we could easily have told Citeh to fuck off & come back in the summer.

Kick them out of the League Cup Nothing will happen though, we're talking about Spurs. They'll just say "look, we lost the game anyway, it's not like we picked up any points". I doubt the FA will even take any action, even if it is to investigate it. They fucked up so spectacularly with West Ham that if they dock Spurs points then it'll show that they should have done the same to West Ham and they'll end up in court for the next 3 years defending every decision. On the other side, if they investigate and do nothing, or almost nothing, a la West Ham any team that gets relegated will end up in court against the FA for their failure to dock them points. It's lose-lose for the FA, so they'll sit on their hands & ignore the problem until it goes away.

Can't be arsed to go read RTG but are none of them questioning their manager's decision to bring a Newcastle fan on to play up front for them?

Like that one?

Just can't see where we're going to get a goal here :-[

I suspect that if spurs going down looks at all likely 'arry will jump ship. Ask any Southampton fan about his commitment to a tough challenge

The 10m he quoted as saying was available might have been a guess-timate based on player sales. I'd like it to mean there's 18m too, but it's not necessarily so. Didnt Kinnear say that he had £10 plus anything that came in from sales? Kinnear says the first thing that pops into his head at any given moment. Verging on Tourette's tbh.

Just took the bastard out of my fantasy team too

Would rather see him push Duff out of a fourth storey window, but beggars can't be choosers.

Is life imitating Football Manager or has FM become really really accurate about how football transfers work? If life is imitating FM then we should probably offer £5.5m, wait till they raise the price again to £9m then we can offer £2.75m which they'll then accept.

They valued Heskey at £10m, how much did they sell him for again?

Tactics? http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3152/2577903405_8da3ca094b.jpg?v=0

fuck off then you arrogant little waster

yeah but Bruce wants the Newcastle job in the summer so maybe he is just setting up his team early Bruce might agree to sell him but Dave Whelan probably wouldn't sell us a player even with a gun pointed to his head, he really hates Ashley (even more than some posters on here)

Something that we badly badly need atm. If the fee is £3m then it isn't a bad deal. He's experienced as a player and as a captain in a team facing relegation plus he's not Nicky Butt.

Yet another English manager from the old boy network, mates with Sky presenters & the cockney press. Not good enough, never was, never will be. kept a shit team in the PL - check better than JFK - check make it keep us up and we'll talk about a long term deal or something...we're going down with JFK dude It's like asking which is better, cancer or a heart attack.