oldtype

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.

One thing's for sure, our approach to transfers isn't going to change any time soon (and rightly so in many regards), so with the mega cash bonanza next season he'll be able to claw that back much more quickly than up to this point. If we stay up. I'm with you on the transfers, i think we go about it the right way to an extent. But you mustn't refuse to buy to the detriment of the team, like we did in the summer. I think this is where their lack of football knowledge kicks in, any fool knew we needed more players, all we got was some nonsense about purple players. Such non football speak from non football men. I'm hoping they learn from each mistake. Every plane crash stops a hundred more, to steal a strange fact that floats about in my brain. It's not "lack of football knowledge." Just a different set of priorities.

Thankfully not even bothered.

I'm not even worried about transfers. It's who we'll actually appoint that scares me shitless. This board's record with appointing actual managers is, in order, Kevin Keegan, Joe Kinnear, Alan Shearer, and Alan Pardew. There are few things I fear more than letting them pick another manager.

Time for people to think of alternatives as there's every chance we'll get nothing at Norwich either. I'd like Martinez, but I don't see us spending much so I've already given a cheap alternative in the other thread. Who else is a candidate? I don't know the foreign market very well. Realistically we're looking at the list of unattached managers. We won't spend money for a manager and based on track record and the board's personality I highly doubt we'd go foreign. People like Mark Hughes, Shearer(), Owen Coyle, Alan Curbishley, Roberto Di Matteo, Gordon Strachan...

My head still says it's the wrong decision, but I really just can't take it anymore. He has the next match and that's it as far as I'm concerned. Not that my opinion matters.

Embarrassing shit. I'm normally rational to a fault but I don't know how much of this I can take to be honest.

Blaming Pardew is much more productive than turning against Sammy for playing badly at age 20 in a struggling team.