oldtype

I'd rather have a kid playing than Smith, Butt, Duff or Barton. This. That lot have neither skill, nor pace, nor fitness. I'm going to assume most of the youngsters have two of those characteristics, and you can bet they'd give it 100%. And if we play youngsters, it will no doubt help in recruiting better ones. Who wants to go to a team that never, ever plays its youth? Pim Verbeek (Australian NT manager) came out and said yesterday he wants Troisi to be involved this year in WC qualifying as he believes he is good enough. The current Aus NT would thump the current bunch of s**** running about in black and white. He advised Troisi to leave NUFC because while he should be getting a run here, he isn't. Verbeek is no bum and has a more successful record than most of our recent managerial incumbents. Verbeek isn't just going on reputation, he's had him out for a couple of training camps already. I understand putting the old crapsters out in the really hard games we've had recently. But in these games against opposition players of lower skill there is no reason not to go youth. Put simply, its fear and cowardice from Keegan if he persists with those 4. Every NUFC fan can see they aren't up to it, he can too, he needs to show some balls and drop them. Wouldn't necessarily trust Verbeek's word as gospel mind. Besides that, have you not considered that as s*** as Duff and Smith are, a random youngster shoved into that position would be infinitely more s***? The gap between reserve team and first team football is light years, which is why sane managers such as Keegan don't throw a kid into the deep end and expect them to preform. It's far more likely that a youngster will simply crumble under the pressure and pace than play better than 6~7 year Premiership veterans, no matter how s*** they might be. Our reserve team drew with Whitely Bay ffs, you expect the likes of Lua Lua and Troisi to make magic against Birmingham City? It'll just be Matty Pattison all over again (and from what I can tell, he's far better than either of those two seeing as how he's doing decently in the Championship. I could maybe see playing Carroll ahead of Smith, although even that's a stretch. The others shouldn't be starting, or playing at all for that matter, until we're either surely up or surely down. People need to recognize that fielding a team that's made up of about 50% reserves players in the midst of a relegation battle is JUST ABOUT THE WORST IDEA EVER.

Seconded. And people really shouldn't use words that they have no idea how to spell.

http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/2809/oldboardjx7.jpg Would this be an acceptable conclusion to the argument?

brilliant

I am positve that Drogba is sending replica shirts to kids in civil war torn Ivory Coast. Drogba has used his publicity at Chelsea to become a peace broker of sorts. He was successful in getting international games staged in the Rebel capital and that went a long way to opening up a way to peace. It was a funny article but a bit mischievous indeed, Drogba does a ridiculous amount for kids in the Ivory Coast f****** pricks who write s*** like this. It's clear Drogba has never given a rat's arse about his popularity with the Chelsea fans. Anyone remember him squaring up to that prick after his goal against Arsenal in 05-06 To be fair, the article does point out that if all he wanted to do was send shirts home, he could ask the club and get them for free.

Where's this from?

Would be pretty surprised if he played for us again

After getting raped by Man Utd and facing a relegation dogfight, he finds time to fish for a contract for his pal. Good to see he has his priorities sorted. Kind of hard to say that your best mate's a useless piece of shit when asked by a journalist, isn't it.

Can we have some of their points? Please? sigh.

I think we'll win. Surely the players know that they'll not walk off the pitch, or walk anywhere else ever again for that matter, if we get relegated by Sunderland at home.

Invariably works very, very hard every game and seems to care a lot but unfortunately never produces any end product. The Alan Smith of the wing?

Very true. If we manage to stay up.... who on earth would sign Alan Smith ? Us to go down, Reading to stay up and sign Alan Smith. Nah, Coppell's smarter than that.

mackems.gif mackems.gif mackems.gif Jesus.

Very true. If we manage to stay up.... who on earth would sign Alan Smith ? If we go down, who on earth would sign Alan Smith. If anything, the s**** are likely to linger (Butt, Barton, Taylor, Duff), with the potentially exciting and decent players f****** off (Martins, N'Zgobia and err that's it). I actually find this very likely tbh. Relgation would probably mean we would lose most of our servicable players (Given, Milner, Zog, Martins, Faye, Beye, Taylor, Owen) to mid-table teams and some borderline ones (Duff, Viduka) to newly promoted sides (with the likes of Enrique and Emre probably f****** off to some foreign team.) What we'd be left with is the likes of Smith, Barton, and Butt who realize that they'll probably never get a contract at a Premiership side again and decide to stay along and be passengers. We could very much be facing our first season in the Championship with the very worst of this year's crop along with a mix of newly-purchased dross and kids from the Reserves. And Shola Ameobi. Not a comforting thought.

A stroke is not brought on by typing swearwords. You are one of them that takes the written word literally, yes? A stroke also wouldn't be bought on by someone being as genuinely angry as you assume i was. Anger is not even recognised as a minor or even registered cause of strokes. are you sure that's my problem

I'll not have a stroke, not yet anyway. Not you, 'was talking about NM. ...Not that I'd want you to have a stroke either mate.

yeah, he's shit, nobody's disagreeing with you. try not to have a stroke like.

Depends what you mean by average. He's not a Premiership player in a month of Sundays. I actually think he's a better-than-average player considering his work rate, physicality, decent all-around technique etc. Purely based on aggregate individual ability he's probably better than the average Premiership player. He just doesn't have a position. He can't play as a striker because Ferguson's failed experiment and a career-threatening injury completely ruined his goal-scoring instinct, can't play as an attacking midfielder because he doesn't have the vision, and can't play as a hard-tackling defensive midfielder because he was never properly programmed with the requisite defensive skillset. If he wants to be a valuable asset to any Premiership side, his best bet is to stay at Striker and train intensively in shooting so he can get that spark back. For now, he's a classic example of "jack of all trades, master of none." so very, very full of s***. Let me pull one from the NE5 playbook. " mackems.gif"

I'm going to throw up if Smith starts ahead of Oba again next week. Surely Keegan can't be THAT near-sighted.

Roeder thought Duff was better than N'Zogbia when he clearly wasn't. N'Zogbia was absolutely shockingly bad for every minute that Roeder put him on the pitch. In the first game after being dropped for the Irish oxygen thief, he came on and ran 50 yards to set up the winner. How rubbish. Then he got dropped again. Dig up posts from a year ago. I don't recall that particular match but the general consensus was that Zog was s***. People liked Milner better FFS. And he was, because he was too busy throwing a hissy fit about not wanting to be here instead of playing. Kind of like what he's doing right now. You'd struggle to fit in more nonsense in a post. Not really.

Roeder thought Duff was better than N'Zogbia when he clearly wasn't. N'Zogbia was absolutely shockingly bad for every minute that Roeder put him on the pitch. In the first game after being dropped for the Irish oxygen thief, he came on and ran 50 yards to set up the winner. How rubbish. Then he got dropped again. Dig up posts from a year ago. I don't recall that particular match but the general consensus was that Zog was shit. People liked Milner better FFS. And he was, because he was too busy throwing a hissy fit about not wanting to be here instead of playing. Kind of like what he's doing right now.

Roeder thought Duff was better than N'Zogbia when he clearly wasn't. N'Zogbia was absolutely shockingly bad for every minute that Roeder put him on the pitch.

The only selection I recall Roeder getting shit over was starting Parker over Butt when Parker was fit. In retrospect, was that such a bad idea? Okay, never mind about Souness. Stress playing Yahtzee with my memory.

I still love the man to bits, and I think we're playing somewhat better football than under Allardyce, but his team selections have been completely indefensible. Say what you want about Souness and Roeder, but they always picked the best team available. Big Sam's selections were completely s***, but at least there was some rhyme or reason to them if you buyed into his footballing philosophy. Keegan's selections on the other hand simply defy reason. There is simply no human reason whatsoever to be picking Butt over Geremi, Duff over Zog, or Smith over Martins. Picking Smith in the midfield and starting Duff up front alongside owen has to rank up there with the worst of Big Sam's tinkering. I simply can't believe Keegan can actually be this inept. There has to be some sort of other factor going on behind the scenes. Perhaps the rumors of "plays if fit" clauses in contracts are true. Perhaps Keegan gets along too well with some of these players and that's influencing his selections (notice how every example in the above paragraph is an English/Irish player starting over a more deserving foreign one.) Whatever it is, it has to stop and it has to stop now. What gives me hope is that he eventually did figure out that we needed to play Enrique, but it took him a long time to figure that out. Hopefully he'll sort out the other things before we're in an irrecoverable position. Either that, Glen Roeder will be having a laugh when he brings Norwich to SJP next year.

None of these players will probably be playing if we go down. Actually, Alan Smith may somehow find a way to still be starting every week. Ass.