Ronaldo

The Ox ffs. I've seen him have about 3 good games.

What is Cahill doing?

I keep expecting to see Oguchi Onyewu.

Look at these fools, man. What a bunch of wankers.

Morons.

Far more likeable, that's for sure.

Getting the most expensive side every assembled to draw 3-3 at home to Burnley was pretty neat.

All true. Tired of being reminded of it in this thread as opposed to when I'm watching us play, though.

Let's not go mad.

When he was on the daft Ron Atkinson fly-on-the-wall TV show and was told to piss off from training for doing his hair instead of defending.

Faked an injury? Says who, Derek 'we lie to the fans all the time, mush' Llambias?

Our brand image is hardly good though. You won't get many respectable companies wanting to sit alongside Sports Direct and Wonga. Sports Direct is hardly a pariah brand, although Wonga is definitely shaky ground. But even before Wonga signed up last season we were hardly attracting big bucks in sponsorship deals, and was probablyone of the reasons we ended up with them eventually. I think it's more to do with big companies want to be attached to clubs which are aiming for success and show ambition. With us it's still appears to be the case of survive on the cheap and take what you can above that as a bonus. Sticking with a cheap manager rather than appoint a quality one sends out that signal for sure. Sport Direct is a horrendous brand I'm afraid. It cries out 'stack em high sell em cheap'. It's a bargain basement brand, and it's been plastered all over what was once a great looking ground. The club used to have a fairly good brand image itself tbh, but the Ashley regime have changed that. Even the Puma shirts are cheap template kits with sow on badges as opposed to embroided ones. Look at the state of the club shop. Its basically a Newcastle United version of Sports Direct where everything is crammed in and its 3 t-shirts for a tenner. I haven't been in many other club shops, but I have been in Arsenal's and Chelsea's. Both are pretty classy and the items on sale are desirable and of good quality. Personally, I haven't bought one item of merchandise since the last Adidas top. The whole image of the club is wrong tbh, but what it is is all Ashley knows. His kind of marketing doesn't adapt well to a Premier League football club where you're looking to attract sponsorship and where brand image is important. Brand image isn't really that important to Sports Direct. It's hardly a wonder our commercial revenue has almost halved, and disgracefully so is now even below Sunderland's. No high end brand wants to be associated with us, and whats on the pitch is only a tiny part of it. Good post.

We had about 25 points by the start of January in the relegation season, to be fair. Shay probably didn't expect us to only get another 9 points from then on. The situation with Colo is totally different. We had 20 points from 20 games and had just lost our top scorer when we first heard of his desire to go. Shay wasn't our captain, either, and didn't expect to leave for nowt.

For once, Midds, you're totally wrong.

He's still got my Bob Marley CD collection, though.

Pretty sure Fergie himself said they'd asked about Tiote but weren't interested at £15m. He didn't.

Coming from someone who repeatedly insisted that SAF badly wanted Tiote I find that pretty funny.

The 3-2 against Barca too, obviously. Only game I went to with my grandad.

Nah dude, the lyrics in the Player song are far more appropriate.

Are you talking of Ancelotti? What did he achieve that was different from Mourinho? Their records are quite similar, in my opinion. Ancelotti won the double.

With those players and resources Moyes will have them playing good stuff. And Mourinho, as much I don't like him, often had Chelsea playing football that was easy on the eye.

At least 3 teams capable of winning the league all of whom will likely have the managers and players to play attractive attacking football. If that isn't exciting, what is?

We all know why that is, "Hatem, get back." To be fair, the wonderful chap in your avatar told a far more effective wide player to do the same. You can't just allow your FB to get continually exposed.