oldtype

Testing out Gouffran in the middle?

Sammy again

People are afraid to close him down for obvious reasons. If he can get a good distribution game going he'll be an asset.

Another one of those 'almost' passes from Sammy

Kinda wish we'd started Bigi instead of Anita. Anita is starting every game and Bigi needs some game time.

A yard onside

Yeah, I'm encouraged that he tried that pass even if it didn't come off. Wasn't that far off too.

Sammy doing alright today

Allowed myself thirty seconds to be sure that he wasn't offside before I celebrated that

Some pretty decent stuff sporadically but we're so terrible inside their box.

pahpis pls

Almost scored from corner there

Golden opportunity, miskicks, bounces back to him, miskicks again.

Cisse

He's not an obviously horrific appointment like Di Canio was or McLiesh would have been so that alone is disappointing.

Would love it if our youngsters gave us something to be happy about. When you're mediocre with no hope of salvation you really need some developing youth team products to get behind.

I certainly wouldn't have backed Moyes after finishing 17th. I highly doubt his teams looked like playing good football when they were getting beaten week-in week-out either. Maybe it's not beyond the realm of possibility that Pardew could somehow improve with all the experience and stability he's getting. I suppose our best option at this point is prayer

I assume we'll be throwing in the kids in the early rounds and we'll start taking it somewhat seriously if we end up in the quarters or so. That's what almost every club does but it's been articulated in an extremely unfortunate manner, which is just about par for the course for our management. Hardly worth killing yourself over.

I'd rather not. Each managerial sacking and appointment brings the significant chance for complete collapse and relegation, as opposed to the reasonably safe and unexciting shitness that we have right now. (Yes, we almost went down last season but the fact that we didn't in the end despite being abject for the majority of the season just reinforces my belief that it's extremely hard to go down without some sort of structural collapse at the upper levels of the club.) I'd rather circle the drain and hope we'll be relieved of our current predicament in the near future than take the chance of getting sucked in.

Asking me? As a manager not really. Like the guy though, loved our Championship season but he had arguably the best squad that has ever played Championship football. Under him in the Premiership we relied a lot on long balls from the likes of Barton into Andy Carroll and then Nolan being in the right place. It was no better football than the stuff people have been unhappy with under Pardew. When Pardew came in he had no Carroll, and he got some results with people like Best and Lovenkrands in the side, I'm not at all sure Hughton would have done that tbh. Rightly or wrongly I feel Pardew is a better man manager as well. We don't know all that goes on behind the scenes so I freely admit that's speculation. Aye, the mackems and Villa games were f***ing rotten, scoring a goal then trying to score another, then another. Where do people get this absolute rubbish? As for Pardew coming in with no Carroll, I must have blanked out that Liverpool game. Dear me. Loved those games. But there were some shockers as well and there was plenty of grumbling on here after some rank performances under Hughton. And yes we've had shockers under Pardew but FFS it hasn't all been shyte. Was it just the one game Pardew had with Carroll? Poor performances were to be expected, we'd just been promoted and spent almost nothing! It's been largely s****. I haven't enjoyed three games in the last eighteen months, and even when we finished fifth, other than half a dozen games the football stank to high heaven. I hardly think you can class a 3-1 defeat to West Brom alongside 0-3 and 0-6. "Shockers" doesn't begin to cover what Pardew has put us through. I'd love to know what it is about the man that has so many defending him even now. He's utterly detestable as a man and as a manager. How is last season less worthy of the sack to you than Hughton's four months was? Fair enough - your enjoyment is beyond debate in that no one can tell you otherwise. You go to more games than I do but I've enjoyed more of the football I've seen than you have, I probably am more easily pleased. I don't think anyone on here is especially pro Pardew (Brett is close though), I think the most anyone would say is that he's a bang average manager. The argument centres on who would replace him if we did sack him, and would it be another bang average manager or a less than bang average manager. The Sunderland betting list is a decent starting point (although it contains a few non starters to be fair). Debates on the merits of the likes of MON, McLaren etc over Pardew are pointless imo. I would support sacking Pardew if I knew we would find an undisputable upgrade. I am not convinced our owner knows enough about the game or enough people in the game to do that. In a rather large set of average to poor English managers that are essentially indistinguishable from each other ability wise, Pardew is the one who's capable (or desperate, if you want to see it that way) of working with the ownership without throwing his toys out the pram. I'll take that for now given that my expectations for the club under this regime are close to nil.

Pardew is a problem but he's a symptom not the cause. Sacking him might actually do more harm than good at this point, as we'd probably just end up with a) another one of Ashley's acquaintances who's willing to do what the job requires (probably just Joe Kinnear) b) a vaguely competent manager who would be smart enough to eventually realize that he doesn't need to work for complete lunatics, in which case we're back to the old revolving door of sackings and hires until we revert back to a). In a perverse way, as the club is currently constructed Pardew is the perfect manager for us.

Surely it can't be that Qatar is bribing key officials at various organizations to get their agenda through. I mean, they've never done anything like that before, right?

I've seen the "starts out shit but comes good, guess who wins again" story way too many times at this point to write him off. Do wish we had competition in that position though.

Sort of genuinely gutted about this now. He's been my single biggest source of entertainment this season so far.

Derby coinciding with "new manager bounce"