mrmojorisin75

'nuther nine draws between now and the end of the season we might be safe

exactly, perfectly put, pardew's just not good enough

well, it's going to be relatively important given that we've got a squad full of gifted attacking players with technical ability and very few who are suited to closing games out etc.

when, when he finally gets us to safety and keeps us up then he's got another full season to turn it all around and i wouldn't necessarily deny him that myself, as big a critic as i am there are some signs he's developing, maybe, but part of me truly think it's him having no other option than to abandon his plan a due to the fact we're not signing the cloggers he needs for that game...in my heart of hearts i don't believe he believes in free-flowing attacking football and that shines through even with the players he now has at his disposal no-one should ever forget how truly awful he was when his back was against the wall this season because that's what defines him as a manager, not having 4 new quality players handed to him on a plate and then getting them to play some decent football

That is a great way of putting it. That makes no sense at all. As been said in this post coaches/managers has a huge impact in a team in many ways. mrmojorisin75 said it perfect. it's just stating the obvious, like saying great managers will win more games than average ones pardew, as i see it, is responsible for the following (but not limited to this list): all training, prep and tactics team selection formation and tactics come match days decisions he can influence during a game by tactical switches, subs etc. player motivation as i said, not limited to, but these are key things he can influence for me and i'd personally credit him with total success in only one area - man management - which he's been pretty excellent at throughout, the rest of it is massively hit and miss, with the emphasis on miss we'll likely never know the truth about how much say he has in player recruitment but what we know renders that irrelevant really, he's been handed diamonds either way not lumps of coal, he needs to make it work next season...in fact he could really do with making it work fast towards the end of this season or it's ultimately been a bit of a disaster

This blows my fucking mind, bloke at work pipes up with it all the time. 20% for the manager? I Someone else said it I think, even if this was true you can judge a manager by what he does to change things when they're not working. I shouldn't have to explain that any further. Pardew is not a good manager, he's not a terrible one, but he's certainly not good enough for us. Someone should tell Fergie he can have 20% credit for the last 25+ years ffs.

cowardly tactics let them back in the game frankly, this could be used a lot

this is a fucking amazing question actually, worthy of it's own thread imo

we'd be on 24 points, assuming we beat southhampton which would not have been a given, worst case 21 points and villa/saints might have had the boost and points associated with beating us behind them as well so potentially 21 points at the end of february, nothing to worry about before anyone starts of course it's speculation but we're talking about why we felt like relegation was a real possibility back then and here's the answer

like that idea of the season ticket holders names on the shirt, surprised it doesn't get done more often they'd sell shitloads

I think any manager going on that run of 11 defeats in 13 (IAC) is going to be looking fragile from a confidence perspective. Whatever he was trying to achieve with the available group of players just wasn't happening - in November, it was a series of woeful performances. In December, the performances picked up but the results weren't falling our way (contrast to the previous season). Didn't he admit in January that he was glad/relieved to have the injured players back and the new arrivals to boost the squad? The point ref: form sending us down - I've maintained that the 11 in 13 (IAC) was due to the circumstances and misfortune that had occurred in Nov/Dec. I just couldn't imagine, nor foresee that continuing for the next couple of months. Not even a 10% chance (1). pardew talks a lot Stu, probably a quote out there saying how desperate he was for new players to add to the squad as well, maybe when he was blaming everything on the youngsters perhaps? as for the bit in italic i've never argued with you, you're right, where we differ is i didn't see anything in the managers performance during those games to suggest he could break us out of it and i made the reasonable leap that a bad run of 11 in 13 can quite easily become a horrendous run think back to the villa game Stu, we all went into that more or less expecting to lose, had we lost then lost to chelsea and spurs we might well be having a different conversation right now as i personally don't think taylor and cabaye returning would have turned it around alone...it needed something new from the manager imo, or an influx of players....the new players changed everything, without them we could easily and most likely would have been 6-9 points worse off now

sigh indeed

i thought we'd try, but i also thought ashley might continue his policy from the summer of being immovable on fees and that could hurt us as i said, i'd argue it was far from a guarantee we'd get good reinforcements...i didn't and never said it wouldn't happen 100% all of these arguments are what if man, you didn't know we'd sign who we did in january you just chose to be positive...people have done the same on this board and looked foolish in the past, ozziemandias iirc for one

That's nonsense, like. I wasn't, at any point, seriously worried about relegation. As I maintained all along, things were always going to get easier/better when our better players returned. We were also always going to strengthen. Admittedly, I didn't think we'd strenghten quite as well as we have. The mood at matches and amongst my family and friends didn't come close to mirroring the mood on here, so perhaps that helped. I genuinely think that, unless you're cut adrift at the bottom, noone can be certain (a 9 or a 10) that a team is going down at that stage. The season doesn't end in January, as we've seen so many times before. I said 7 or 8 at the turn of the year, and stated why. Without the investment that we couldn't have been sure we were getting due to the owner's iffy record of spending, we would have been much worse off than we are now points wise. Stu, like yourself,a hindsight prophet, stated he was a 1 pre-investment. Absolute lunacy. Eh? Are you being serious, or what? I said all of this at the time. Investment, players returning, the lot. There's no hindsight involved. It's also not lunacy. The fact we're in the positon we are now is a pretty fucking good testament to that. So it was madness for people rightly worried about relegation to vote 9 at Christmas,but not for contrary WUMs to vote 1? You for real ? Eh (again)? I've said why I think it's madness for someone to say 'we're definitely down', five months before the end of the season, when we weren't even in the relegation zone. It wouldn't have been so mad if we'd been in QPR's position, but even they had a chance of getting out of it. What all the 'contrary WUM' shit is, other than childish, I don't know. Did I gain this title just by having a different opinion to the majority? And yet isn't madness to say we definitely wouldn't ? Even in the current positivity, it would be so. Why can't you see that ? Because it's not 'madness', man! I don't think anyone could be 'certain' that we'd have definitely stayed up or went down, there are just too many variables (and Joe Kinnear is still alive). It was a controversial opinion, grounded in experience of what's went before and a lack of melodrama. Things were always going to pick up, we had two of our best players to come back and we had new players to come in. We had far worse teams below us without these plus points to look forward to. It was a rough time, and a terrible run of form. At no point were we in the relegation zone, though. So to vote 1 or 10 ,definitely up or down is a tad bonkers then......you are actually agreeing with me ffs. Am I fuck. Honestly, this is just pointless. You're just going to keep shifting it. I'm entitled to my opinion, which I'm not using to be a WUM. I don't claim that it's the definitive opinion on the subject. TBF to Inochi he's been propagating this opinion for a while RE: relegation/Pards stuff to a response of a fair bit of flak. It's hardly reactionist drivel after the event has happened. I know Inochi has been consistent with his opinion,and hasn't shied away ,unlike others who now share a similar opinion, during the lower times. The point really is about the scale of the poll. It's not about the scale of the poll at all. I've never argued the scale. It's about negative, defeatist, melodramatic predictions. Claptrap. It wasn't any of those things when Pardew somehow manufactured defeat from the jaws of victory against Reading. It was reality. And thankfully Ashley did something about it. That's all there is to it. Ah, man. You can't tell me I'm wrong when things are working out nearly exactly as I thought they would. I've given my reasons why I think it is, so many times. Supporting my argument, you know? I'm also pretty confident that my words are expressing my opinion too as, well, they're my words from my head. bold seems to be the crux of the issue, especially the new players coming in...what the likes of myself and incognito are saying is that on form, without the new players (which were far from a guarantee) we were in danger of going down stu was arguing the returning players may have saved us anyway and pushing cisse into the middle, i'd argue back to that and say HBA still hasn't played and cisse hasn't been prolific despite having better players around him all points to us struggling rather than the opposite i'm afraid, IF the new players hadn't come in oh and that doesn't take into account how fragile pardew was looking in every respect EDIT: also the other teams down there have more or less been picking up points slowly with the exception of QPR, evidence of that is that we've won 3 games recently and still aren't that far away

so yesterday pardew's previous record (our current manager) was irrelevant to our form and chances of staying up, but today you're wheeling out previous relegation as evidence that we wouldn't go down? have a fucking word man, one is much more relevant to this season than the other given the amount of players left in the squad since the last relegation

how can anyone think that'd work with 50,000 people about the place man

http://i49.tinypic.com/241p760.jpg saw that and thought lindsey lohan has really let herself go now

one thing i'd love to know about pardew sunday being a prime example where we fuck a team for 30+ minutes through good football and pull a lead back...they then come out, sit back and allow the opposition to roll over them and equalise...is this specific manager instructions or is it the players themselves who lack confidence? mag i work with is insistent it must be the players themselves but i just don't buy it...even if he's not openly instructing them to do it surely his default position to be overly cautious has rubbed off on them over the last couple of years? funny, as we were arguing about it and i was saying he's overly negative pardew subbed cabaye for perch when it was 3-2 "i can't explain that" was the response

no it includes when cabaye was playing like his head was at arsenal for the first half of the season, and tiote playing like an utter disgrace to football for 90% of his time on the pitch

what incognito said

saying fuck all in case someone drags up a post i probably said we're down unless we ditch pardew...i honestly felt something needed to change or we were fucked, well it did change, he was given 3 new players who have virtually transformed the entire outlook of the team unlike Stu i didn't believe ashley would back him but he did thank fuck...personally i can't credit pardew with a great deal in this mini-turnaround, he's just got better players now

that'll do i thought we were in trouble for a while there myself like

Cabaye - I'm a massive fan of his, think he's been the best thing under the Ashley regime to happen for the club (left Champs League footy to sign onto the NUFC project - speaks volumes for me). Given that he'd been struggling with the groin injury from French duty (iirc) - they finally had to operate on him. For all your talk of him not being in form pre-injury, I think the team's performances after his absence says it all - even when he's not playing all that well (by his own standards) he's our most influential player. I'll accept that having his best mate in the team has boosted his morale a bit. Pardew - yup, you don't like him. Not sure what relevance his WHU situation has for us. It's 10 years on, different team, different circumstances (nae shopping at Iceland). More recently, he's also presided over our best defensive start to a season. I agree that he was starting to get a bit desperate but only because he'd realised that his 'squad' players were such a big drop off from the first XI - half of which sat out injured during that run (which was all competitions, remember). I think he, along with the fans, underestimated HBA's injury and that last season's good run/confidence allowed a number of 'squad' players to overperform. You can't underestimate mental strength when it comes to the pinnacle of professional sports - the athletes are all within a few % of each other physically, it's the ones who can deal with adversity who get the rewards. so, my intial point was that without the reinforcements he received in january, given we were in a horrific run, i believed we might very well go down and that to say we were a 1 the entire time was madness i've seen nothing to change that opinion...bear in mind it's almost march and HBA isn't back yet so if we'd not signed new players you're essentially saying that cabaye would have had to single-handedly turn it all around himself? he's good, but i don't think he's that good

hard to look past this tbh, mackem at work reckons if they don't get some points on the board soon they might be fucked though with their run-in