brummie

For fuck's sake, I come on here to read about Newcastle and all I get is Spurs this Spurs fucking that.

I was listening to TalkSport on the way home, and Danny Kelly was hosting a phone-in on whether football should be there for Gazza and what the sport should do to help him. I couldn't help but wonder what Danny Kelly and his showbiz mates Chris Evans and Danny Baker were doing to help him at the moment, given that they did their utmost to appear in the media out on the piss with Gazza for most of the 1990s.

Better deal for Villa if true. Surely Barry is worth more than £10million? Load of shite this story. I know the fee we're going to tell them we want has been decided (not playing the ITK card, but don't ask, I can't divulge) and it is a much bigger package than that.

I think Sidwell is a more than decent player, to be fair. I'd be happy if we bought him - not as a replacement for Barry per se, but as we need strength in depth in a lot of areas, including midfield.

Going back to the original post, about Barry going to Liverpool. To be entirely honest, given the choice, I'd rather he stayed. Mainly because if the chasing pack flog their better players to the Sky 4 whenever they come knocking, not a lot will change. However, having said that, I've said this for ages now - some of you will recall it - Barry has had at best half a season this year, at very best. He went missing for a considerable length of time. He's an excellent player, but if you asked me who our three most influential players have been this season, I'd say Young, Laursen and Bouma, not Barry. I reckon he'll go, and I reckon he'll regret it in the long term, but maybe that's wishful thinking. We'll buy someone to replace him and move on. We'll have even more money to spend (although to be fair, the right players as part of the deal would solve a lot of our problems), and we've got some really excellent prospects in the youth team (Bannan, Forrester, Delfouneso) so things will still look pretty bright.

I'm as cynical as they get, but i can't fault the new regime, they've been very classy in everything they've done so far. After the Ellis years it has been incredibly refreshing.

Give a man a fish He eats for a day Teach him how to fish He eats forever. Arrested Development, 1993.

It wasn't the club who handed the shirts out. It was Olof Mellberg in his last game, he bought 3200 of them and gave one to every Villa fan at Upton Park, paid for them himself, with Mellberg - Thanks For Your Support on the back.

Arr.

Crouch is too tall to wear vertical stripes. He should really join QPR or Celtic. /Gok_wan

kung po prawn chicken chow mein great leap forward ROOOOOONEEEEEYYYYY!!!!!

I'm getting to the point now where I think the BBC should be prohibited from doing football coverage. As should Sky and ITV. Esp ITV. I may get some big fuck off satellite dish and watch all my football with chinese commentary.

That'll be another 2m, you goatee wearing fat cunt.

Good. I don't fancy seeing that peanut headed cocksucker Gerrard urging him to join Liverpool in the morning.

Agreed, I think different players want different things. Some will want to feel wanted, some will just want money, others will want a lifestyle which fits whatever circumstances they have at the time. A player who is married with no kids might want London, a player with kids might want something away from a city where his kids can get out and about. Then there are the distorting factors. I once saw Paul Merson on SSN, and they were talking about Boro. They asked him why a certain player (dont remember who) had gone to Boro and he said "for the same reason anyone goes to Boro - the money. I know that's why I went there". England's starting striker in their last friendly plays for Portsmouth, having moved there from Spurs this season. If it were as simple as "X > Y" then who on earth would go to Pompey? Personally, I think London is one of the biggest distorting factors, especially for foreign players. If Spurs, Newcastle, Villa, Everton were all in the same place, there's no real reason to expect Modric to opt for Spurs out of that choice, but he's a 22 year old Croatian given the chance to move to a country where he probably only knows other footballers, and has never lived before. The fact that one club is in a city which is one of three or four global "megacities" is going to have a massive influece. There are plenty of other factors like this which attract players to clubs and put them off others.

This "Player X would choose club Y over club Z" argument is flawed, anyway. The fact is that outside the top four, there really aren't a lot of defining factors between clubs, certainly not in the second tranche. Big clubs of tradition - Newcastle, Everton, Villa, Spurs; clubs with a bit of nouveau wad : Man City, Portsmouth, West Ham; clubs where they pay way over the odds to get decent players: Boro; clubs where the wife won't let the player go because she doesn't fancy the shopping: Sunderland, Boro, Reading ..... you could put together a whole list of parameters these days. The fact is that if they're not in the Champions League, there's really not a lot to distinguish between clubs these days, and the "X is a bigger club than Y" argument doesn't work like it might have done 20 years ago.

He's a prince amongst men.

Gerrard is a fucking cunt full stop. I hate few people in football as much as I hate that peanut headed cocksucker.

Exactly. It is only May FFS. Who gives a fuck what Spurs do, leave them to it. I'm sure we were having this exact same conversation this time last summer and look how that panned out. People need to chill. Same thing happening with our fans.

That Guzan is the one who was joining us before the Home Office refused us a work permit on account of us not being in the Sky4

Barry and Gerrard combining brilliantly there. Exactly what I didn't want to see. FUCK YOU, ENGLAND, FUCK YOU

All this "not good enough to get us to the next level" stuff is odd. Surely one prerequisite to get to the next level (incidentally, what is 'the next level'?) is to have decent depth of squad. Not every player Newcastle sign is going to be an obvious 'next leveller' - strength in depth is just as important as quality in the first eleven, surely? (Obviously, the above in no way reflects the way I responded when we signed Knight and Harewood last year , but MON was right and I was wrong).

Where are they putting away fans now?

What a piss take. My ST at Villa is £510 next year, and that is the most expensive ticket in the house (other than the corporate nonsense), up only 35 quid on last year. We've capped ST numbers at 26,000 apparently, which seems a bit low, but Lerner doesn't want to exclude those who can't afford to pay for the whole season (although, on the other hand, selling tickets for individual games makes you more money per match than STs do). Two years on, and I can't fault Lerner for a single thing. He's been the absolute best he could have been.

How is Manchester central for the whole of England? Correct, Birmingham would be the perfect location apart from the fact it is a proper nightmare to get in and out of. The site they wanted to build it on was at the NEC. Right next to the M42, a few miles from the M6, and about five miles from the M40. Access would have been a piece of piss. Well, relatively speaking.