pinkeye

When Shelvey is playing Richie looks much better, having said that so does the rest of the team!

A tenner for adults and a quid for kids! As good as free....

Impossible to argue with the context of that article. Newcastle United, for years, has had a losing mentality that has spread from the top of the club downwards. This has resulted in so many long terms supporters and season ticket holders throwing in the towel, myself included. Under Pardew I had simply taken all I could and the effort it took to turn out for a home match was getting ridiculous. I was not enjoying it. Rafa came (and stayed) and I felt some glimmers of hope creeping back into me and I bought a season ticket again, after three years without seeing a single match live. I have the excitement back again, I am not alone (I don't think) when I look towards our bench and see Rafa there and I still cannot believe it fully! He has a huge job on his hands to rebuild a shattered club and to change the mentality of the whole place but, he has the fans on his side and that really has to help a lot. We have a few passengers in the squad and they will be filtered out as we continue to move forward to be replaced by upgrades. Short term, for me, it is great to be enjoying the match again and seeing a few wins and goals. Longer term... who knows. We have potential to be a strong challenger to the top teams. We are not London or Manchester but, we do live in a pretty damn nice part of the country, if we continue to build the club from within the better players will come.

Should have told Sun'lun to name their cost.... Cost of selling Defoe is pretty much certain relegation!

Might want to spell check that mate!

Funny how different people can take a different perspective from the game. I thought his timing for tackles looked very good and his composure on the ball was an asset, I am quite used to seeing Dummet backing off until he has no options left.... yes Gamez was out of position a few times and that is where the lack of pace looked worse but, I thought he looked quite a classy player, was never really worried about him being exposed on the ball. I really didn't notice the lack of a left foot, looked like he had one of each to me from where I was sitting...

Up and until he was stretchered off on Saturday I thought he looked really good.... Slightly lacking in pace when he was turned on ball during the first half but, other than that I thought he looked the real deal. Thoughts?

Been mugged and robbed.... apparently was quite a serious beating he took.

My life long Liverpool supporting mate, actually from Liverpool to add gravitas, told me at the weekend that he really thinks that Rafa has taken to Newcastle in a similar way to how he took to Liverpool. He sees many similarities between the way that Rafa is behaving now to how he did when he started on the long successful road with Liverpool. I told him that my short experience of Rafa has definitely made me understand why they all still seem to hold him in such high regard. Nice!

I can remember them being in the old Division 3 when they were relegated out of the 2nd tier of football.... They were getting 20k plus crowds (amazing for 3rd Division by the way) and humping teams like Man City who were also in that level of football at the time by 7 and 8 goals. I was in school in 6th form so I am thinking early 80's or am I mixing this up with something else that is funny to do with Sun'lun? Sometime back in 1901 they even beat us 9 - 1 but, I cannot remember that one!

Negative 7.....

My Spuds supporting mate going mental tonight about how shite Sissoko is. I honestly think it is funny. The deal of the summer as far as we are concerned. I think we would not have anything like the team spirit that we seem to have right now had Sissoko stayed.

Club expecting minimum 44k crowd tonight. My son is one of the ball boys... he is soooo excited!

Funniest thing is it closed down a while ago and recently reopened as a Brewers Fayre.... Even one of the mackem posters pointed that one out, conveniently ignored!

Absolutely anywhere will be fine in Newcastle, depends what you want out of the day but, bars closer to the ground often do stuff to engage the away fans, I seem to remember that Sam Jacks had an away fans drinking challenge, not sure if that still goes on but, it was always fun and generally ended with vomit.

Yes it was. I updated it to Kuntz. Hence completely different joke.... or maybe 100% plagiarism. Shameless.

Kuntz used to play club football with an Iranian called Karim Bagheri ( at least I wish he did ) Bagheri, Kuntz.... gooooaaallll !!!!

He won't admit to it though. perfect! hahaha

Aye, but it's entirely relevant to the total attendance, which is what the first 2/3s of that article is about. The total attendance figure in the table is the number of people who attended our games divided by the number of games, hence we have an average total attendance of just under 50k people for the time period they took the measurement from. That then translates to a percentage of the total available seats for that same period vs. the amount we sold. It is not just the number of people who came to all of our games added up... I'm not sure what's happening here. The first table - where we're 6th (with 1,146,044) - is the total projected tickets sold for the season. Average seats isn't brought into it. That's what they've based most of the article on. You know what.... you are right. red face! I see what you are saying and what I was saying is slightly different. I was only talking about the average bit while you had the first bit (which was the article headline) in your mind. Sorry mate...

Agree, their attendances are very decent given that they have also had to suffer utter crap on the pitch for decades. However, their average is a little further back down the list as compared to ours, that was never the point. The reason I made the post was that they missed the fact that it was the average attendance which factors in the number of games played, they seemed to think it was just the number of games we play that made us so high up the list....

Aye, but it's entirely relevant to the total attendance, which is what the first 2/3s of that article is about. The total attendance figure in the table is the number of people who attended our games divided by the number of games, hence we have an average total attendance of just under 50k people for the time period they took the measurement from. That then translates to a percentage of the total available seats for that same period vs. the amount we sold. It is not just the number of people who came to all of our games added up...

Not sure if serious... Amount of games we play is irrelevant to the average attendance isn't it? The headline states a fact, in that table we have the 6th highest AVERAGE attendance of all the clubs measured.

I don't think the article from the MAG is embarrassing to be honest, it takes a table that was published showing Europes football teams and their average attendance across the season then, quite rightly, remarks how incredible it is that we achieve such a high rank. The word average is used in the article several times, for any mackems reading that means the total number of seats sold divided by the number of games played. The simple fact that average is overlooked by a few mackem posters who seem to think that we are on that chart only by virtue of the fact that we play more games over a season is what is really embarrassing, for them anyway!

They have picked up on some table about attendances showing that by capacity we are 6th largest, or best attended club in Europe. Could even be the world but, I would settle for Europe. They are justifying it by telling each other that the reason our average attendance is ~49k is simply because we have to play more games in a season than they do. One of the special fella's over there figured out that our, remember, average attendance is 20% higher than it should be because we play 20% more games than they do. Figure that one out if you possibly can.... http://www.readytogo.net/smb/threads/newcastle-united-top-6-in-the-world.1284008/