oldtype

Agreed. Hope there's a contingency plan. I'm normally optimistic about things but our record with contingency plans is pretty abysmal.

Me too, I stopped investing too much emotional capital in players a long time ago, fuck him if he doesn't want to come here and fuck any of our players who want to leave. There'll always be 11 lads in black and white shirts............they'll probably just be a bit crapper then we've been used to Are you sure? You'd think most of us would be used to some pretty bad crap

Absolutely. You knew wobbly wouldn't let it drop though given the comments about it being 'difficult' for QPR to get him even after Remy had refused the meet. To be honest it's really not the fault of the player that signs for the club that offers them ridiculous money. It's the fault of the club. Assuming we haven't offered an insultingly low amount (you'd suspect we'd offer similar to what Ba was earning...), you can't blame the club for not competing with the offer of a club like QPR. They've blown their cash injection in as blaze a fashion as Man City have, just not as much. Sorry, that post was unclear. I mean, it's the fault of QPR and clubs like them for offering wages that are (hopefully) unsustainable for them and inflate he market to the detriment of all clubs. It's not the player's fault for signing a contract that gives them more security.

7 points is not going to persuade many players over an extra 20/30/40k a week. Let's not pretend he wasn't coming here primarily so he could double his wages. It's not just about 7 points, it's that we finished 5th last season, would be anyone's bet to finish higher next season, have a better team and are all around a club players are much more likely to be proud to play for than QPR. You could make the opposite argument. For all we know QPR will spend 50 million every year for the next five years and will be fighting for Champions League places. Meh, they probably will.

Absolutely. You knew wobbly wouldn't let it drop though given the comments about it being 'difficult' for QPR to get him even after Remy had refused the meet. To be honest it's really not the fault of the player that signs for the club that offers them ridiculous money. It's the fault of the club that offers that wage in the first place.

This club. Not really much we can do if QPR have decided to offer infinite money at the last minute.

How long since we made a 'double signing'?

Even if Coloccini stays things will not be right in the camp. I know I'm basically going from a 1 to a 7~8 in the space of a day here, but we feel like team that's going to be relegated.

Perhaps it's something like a close loved one back home being terminally ill or something? Seems like the most intuitive explanation.

I understand what you're saying but it's like looking at a car from 50 yards away and saying it looks fine to me. It's only when you get up close and look under the hood that you see the real problems. Playing poor formations and making crazy substitutions aren't something that can be explained by inexperience. It's a failure to read the game which is more worrying. I haven't even touched on playing a style which is not suited to the players we have, but on that maybe you could argue he doesn't have good enough players yet. Again, not something I accept, as for me there's been no sign after a year that we've even attempted to coach a more fluid passing style. We'll see. But you learn. Reading of the game can be improved, so can substitutions. I'm pretty sure Fellaini scored something like 15 goals playing behind the striker in his 2nd season. Tim Cahill came back and played that role for the followed 2 season despite not scoring for long stretches. Moyes only brought Fellaini back into that position after they lost the FA Cup semi-final. He's got it together now. I'm sure Pardew will improve with time. Time i'm sure he'll get if we avoid relegation this year. How do you learn common sense? Basic things like when you are losing you bring on a forward, not another defensive midfielder. Or when you are up against a side with very attacking left flank players, you don't put a centre forward in there up against them? Sorry, I'd love to believe, but I just don't see it. First, the part in bold is completely untrue. Second, the manger has access to more information than any of us will ever be privy to. When he makes selections that seem crazy to us it may just be because there are other reasons we're not aware of. Regardless of whether he's incompetent relative to others in his trade, Alan Pardew knows infinitely more about football, tactics, and the personality, form, and physical state of every single one of our players than all of us. So when doesn't do something that seems obvious perhaps it's not as obvious as you think. (That said, the manager also has the weakness of being personally connected to the situation, which means he may make bad decisions based on things like personalities, friendships, or pride. I often find that it's much easier to explain puzzling tactical decisions in these terms rather than "he's an idiot.")

For those of you who remember him, "People's Rooney" has left Germany for the Korean League.

Why can Turkish clubs pay him so much money anyway?

I honestly believe that you could take any manager of reasonable intelligence and just flat out refuse to sack them for several years, and they'd turn out to be decent just as a function of experience and knowing the club better than anyone else. This is, of course, assuming that you don't get relegated in the mean time. Aside from a few genius-level exceptions like Mourinho, I just don't think there's a whole lot of difference in aptitude for the vast majority of professional managers. The ones who survive longer in the game whom we tend to think of as "decent managers" are just the ones who produce better short-term results. If it were up to me, the only cases where I would sack a manager would be completely losing the dressing room (Souness), complete inability to work with management (in which case they'll probably just walk anyway), or blatant insanity (Kinnear).

If there's one thing I trust this regime on, it's that they're too tight to spend lots of money on someone who isn't fairly likely to be decent.

This is why Nixon doesn't need to post here anymore. He's big time now so people will just quote his tweets

Should we arrange a Skype call or something?

Come on all you people actually living in Newcastle, surely going and camping out the airport and SJP is a more productive use of your time.

Surely they wouldn't make something up about him actually being here. Too easy to disprove.

My mind reached into the past to retrieve the miniscule amount of French I learned in high school just so I could read that article and be excited.

Disco has got it right. The main thing is sponsorship deals. Loads of gigantic companies lining up around here to associate themselves with Man U or Liverpool. I shudder to think of how much money Man U makes off their sponsorship deals with Kumho Tire or the Seoul Municipal Government. (Was quite happy to see the back of the idiot mayor who sanctioned that.) Chelsea's shirt sponsorship deal with Samsung is another good example. Sewelly's point about merchandise selling well in the more developed Asian countries is also true. We're not all third-world wearers of fake shirts

I think statements like this are utterly pointless. Well, that's my dose of unnecessary hostility sorted

There's plenty of money to be had in Asia, it's just that Man U and to a lesser extent Arsenal and Liverpool have already laid claim to most of it. Despite being glory hunters, most Asian fans aren't going to suddenly change allegiance just because Newcastle just bought the latest Asian star.

I think a lot of managers who could have been good or even great fall through the cracks because they aren't given enough time. Very few of the "great" managers of our time go to a club and produce instant results. Most of them had a period where someone took chance on them through tough times and they had the opportunity to really put their stamp on a club as a long term project. This sort of experience allowed them to achieve their full potential as managers. I think a big part of becoming a good manager is experience rather than natural ability, and you're obviously deprived of much of the experience you need to improve your managing when you're just sacked a the first sign of weakness and bouncing from failure to failure, eventually washing out of the game. Not necessary saying that Pardew is one of these people, but it is true in principle.

Where was that post I made ages ago? Oh yes, here it is. Do agree that we need to look at the Asian markets more. There are established internationals here that would move to ANY Premiership club that would give them a chance for next to nothing.