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One-paced comedico defender or the new Lilian Thuram? Bassong is unbearable.

Comparing Bilic and Shearer is like comparing Einstein to a monkey. You read any interview with Bilic and he comes across as lucid, thoughtful, independent. Contract that with Shearer's insipid contributions to Match of the Day. The only skill Shearer's ever shown off the football pitch is seamlessly slipping into various old-boys networks.

NUFC debt (pre Ashley) Vs other clubs? Just like Barclays is in a better position liabilities Vs assets wise than some other banks? Everything was and will always be brilliant then! So long as you aren't the worst, what the hell can happen? Probably nothing. Balls to all that fiscal stuff. If recent experience shows anything, it's that nothing goes wrong from taking a gamble.

3 points for a win. That's what I blame it all on. England act like a team of ex-tournament winners – an example would be Italy after the World Cup win (Euro 2008 anyone) – where the team 'picks itself' based on the reputation of the players. The sad part is that England have won balls-all in that time. Absolutely nothing. It defies credibility that we have these sacred cows even though they have provided absolutely no milk. Anyway, three points. The way a league like the Premier League is set up is fundamentally out of goose. If a game is a draw, two pints are awarded; if a game is a win, three points are awarded (in toto, between the teams). Say you are manager x, of team x. Your team is as good as team y. But if you accept that they are equal, and the quite a probable outcome would be a draw*, this means you will gain 1 point. If you can take the draw out of the equation and say that you would win or lose the game, 50-50 chance, your average reward in terms of points is 1.5. It is obviously better for a club team to take risks rather than to minimise them** and play for a close result, which could easily be the disadvantageous draw. Hence we have Lampard and Gerrard, two players who's whole game is about risk. In the case of Gerrard it is the risk he imposes in possession, essentially: showboating, spraying it around with Hollywood passes, and trying stupid long range shots. With Lampard it is rather what he fails to contribute. For sure, he can kick a penalty into a net and arrive late into a box – to good effect – but he offers nothing special in terms of play though the midfield, so it is essentially a gamble that a game will have a situation where he can get involved. As I said, for a club team this is a great deal, because it it better to deviate away from a draw; even if you only have a 50-50 of winning / losing it is far better than a 33 – 33 – 33 of win / lose / draw. Lampard and Gerrard have their uses in a club competition, but in international football points are not the key, winning outright is. The England team is overburdened with these risk players - who have more safety nets at club level than at international - all jammed in a mob in midfield. The ultimate misfortune is that in such a situation, each one is terrified of choking and being the weak link, so they even stop taking risks (their strength) and just sit there like the players in their club squads who's job it is to protect the spaces they leave. It's beyond square pegs in round holes, its like sending three guys with machine guns onto an aeroplane to rescue the hostages, when anyone who's seen Airforce One knows that such a thing is an insane gamble of overkill-type in a pressurised cabin. In a kind of parallel, but absolutely ignoring all of the above – but going on the Olympic semi final yesterday - the best international teams are made of players playing in their own position like Argentina, not those playing on reputation like Brazil. Hell, why do Germany do so well year after year with such god-awful players. *I know that this is taking a liberty with the notion of probability, but cut me some slack. ** Again, I lack statistical thoroughness here.

Close: Heraclitus the Obscure

The reason this conversation will endlessly re-occur is the difference in expectations between fans. If it really was a simple as wanting to support a team in the highest possible league position, we'd just read the league table every Monday and support whoever was at the top. Instead the enjoyment comes from a team doing as well as it can in the given situation which it finds itself in. If possible, I would rather have a team full of likeable players which played varied, attacking football even if this cost a bit of winning efficiency – an Arsenal if you like rather than a Man Utd; a Holland rather than a Germany. Others would seem to favour a 'fantasy football' approach and some big money signings. From my periodic visits to St James' park I know there are occasional fans who's vocalised ambition seems to go no further than a team which will “get stuck in” and “get rid of it man” as they deem appropriate (sadly not abated since Allardyce's failed regime took this as a general policy). Some regulars to hospitality boxes would probably just like the catering to improve. These things are by no means incompossible – there are thousands of different things you might want from the club, and you might want them all at the same time. You might just want one thing, it's just different for everybody. The problem at the moment is that no-one here really knows what to expect from the new NUFC aside from Keegan's tendency to play in his 'style'. Everything off the pitch is a total mystery to us, with no transfer activity beyond the few youngsters brought in, obscurantism over the clubs internal structure and no explication of a strategic plan. In this information gap we have people wildly projecting whatever fantastic, idealised situation they wish for the club onto current events for, sadly, there are no signs coming from the club. Its an empty stage which we set our own dramas into action on. Given the lack of information about the future, one can easily fall into the temptation of revisiting - perhaps a little over-indulgently – the 'certainty' of the past. Hence the end of the Shepherd regime, a time when fans of the club had varied opinions as to how the club was being run, and to what extent it matched with their desires. I think you'd be hard pressed to say that after the years of his control there were no 'trends' which you could point to (it's certainly much easier than it would be to point to any in the short rule of the new regime). Some were happy with the board because they wanted to see a 'local' owner, because there was always a profusion of monies made available, because they believed we were in a periodic downturn and we would work our way back to the form of the better finishes in his reign. Others would point at managerial choices, questionable transfers, or even the underlying fiscal state (and there are certainly fans who enjoy seeing a club as a well run off the pitch almost as much as they do on it) as the one thing they wanted to see in their club (and lacked). Because these will never be the same for us all, the argument will never end. All we are doing is projecting our desire onto the truth. BUT: To toss the cat back towards the pigeons, I think you can apply this analysis to to our old chairman and to our new owner. What do they want from the club, and have they achieved it? I appreciate that there is a distinction between the two roles, but if you looked for the person who had the final decision on 'policy' in the broad sense it would be these two. Caveat: this is, obviously, all opinion (it seems stupid to presage information on a (discussion) board in such terms) and may err toward the outrageous at moments. Shepherd wanted three things from the club: cachet, power, money. I think the former is the most undeniable. Put simply, he was the fat kid at school who wanted to be popular. Newcastle United was the vehicle he used to do this, specifically by tying himself to Shearer, the coolest kid in the playground. His interest in the club has certainly waned now that he is no longer the one associated with its success. The trophy signings, the vanity pieces in the local press (penned by a certain Mr Oliver), he was very much a public face of the club not as a form of PR for the club (in which he was a disaster) but as PR for himself, Barron Freddie of St James', local legend in waiting (if only we could win something). As mentioned in a previous post, he treated the club like a private company who's charter was to boost its leaders stature rather than a public business. In some respect the loyalty of the Newcastle fans and the sheer intensity of our support may be our undoing in this respect. There are a lot of people who would pay serious money to have thousands of people treat them like a king - but I shall get around Mr Ashley later. A smaller corollary to enjoying the goodwill of the citizenry (or wanting to) would be the power afforded by being head of one of Newcastle's most visible corporations. Being Chairman made Freddy important, and that was something he very much wanted. Thirdly we have money. Not being a man of great means in the modern mega-oligarch / franchisee possibly criminal ex-PM mode I wouldn't expect him to have made us Chelsea Mk2, but there are plenty of chairmen who love their clubs enough to give away a significant proportion of their wealth (our 'neighbours' at the more pungent end of the A19 for example). Not so our Mr F. S., whose handsome salary was complemented by that he arranged for his brother and a slew of perks. I could forgive Shepherd the first two if they stood alone, but what I cannot abide is the fact they were coupled with the third. If he was generous to the club, his lack of competence in some areas and his personal desire for aggrandisement would be ameliorated somewhat. Instead we had a situation where he made errors using our money because he was running the club like his own fiefdom. The money of the fans, people who bought tickets, bought merchandise, people who paid sky subscriptions, they were the final backers of the Shepherd regime and they – hell, WE - were the ones he shafted whenever he mismanaged something. I do not say he mismanaged everything, but errors were made. Looking at Ashley we have three things he seems to want from NUFC. The first, just like Shepherd is Cachet. To that I would add enjoyment and respect. Ashley's attempts at being 'the man' are as cringeworthy as Shepherd's: standing with the away fans, wearing a shirt in the boxes, buying rounds of drinks in Blu-Bamboo. You hardly have to page Dr Freud to come to the conclusion that he is desperate to be liked. Why else would he buy Newcastle, a club miles from his home which he had never proclaimed an interest in? Why to have 'the best fans in the would' elevate him to the plane that our living legends stand on: Keegan, Robson, Shearer, Gazza. They say all it takes is one little cup win... When I say he wants enjoyment, I think of it as that of the gambler. The man likes a bet, and his toy up here is probably the ultimate gamble: every match has huge consequences riding on it. He must be dizzy from the sheer adrenaline – or at least he must be since he got Keegan in: who enjoys bets on a 0-0? I would also say that he wants to be respected as a serious businessman. Ashley's whole career is based on taking an undervalued asset and adding to its value. I think this is in conflict with the two above desires: while he wants success and fun, it looks like he isn't willing to throw cash at the problem in the short term. That would destroy his self-image as a shrewd businessman, a wheeler and dealer. Instead he wants to build success gradually. This is also against some of our desires: who wants a billionaire owner who only spends his money on clearing debt? If he can show some ability as a chairman and whatever policy he takes towards making us a 'top x' club, I could forget the ego trip aspect to his chairmanship. If not, I won't see how he's any less of a fat kid than Shepherd. There'd only be one way he could get out of that. I'd love to be won over. But if that doesn't work out Mike, I can be bought if you throw some serious money at it.

The reason Allardyce is an utterly useless manager is that he had no idea how we were going to score goals. The simple fact is that the one skill a great manager has is to be able to abstract from any given team formation an understanding of how the players will link up and score goals. Great teams, teams like Arsenal or Manchester United don't just score a lot of goals, they score a lot of _the same_ goals. Think how many times you see Arsenal players get to the line at the edge of the box, another drops back, they pull it back and score; Wenger knows this will happen, he picks players who can link up like this. Think about how Ferguson picks wingers and full backs who act in concert. How many goals that were exactly the same did they score when Neville would overlap Beckham, take away the full back, and Beckham would cross it from deep to Van Nistelroy? The only goal we can replicate at the moment is the Owen near-post header and that's hardly a winning formula. You can't see how goals are going to happen from pro-zone stats; you might be able to make 70% completion on passes of 5-10 metres, but if a small percentage of these aren't creating chances it's utterly useless. You can kind of see how Bolton had some pretty simple strategies for scoring goals under Big Sam: high ball - knock down to onrushing midfielder, or wingers playing on opposite side to the one their foot preference would suggest cutting in to shoot, but for us he showed no ideas what so ever. The reason Ameobi scored so many goals for us is that he is a player who has an instinctive ability to replicate previously favourable situations. Ameobi-Solano-Dyer on the right hand side of the pitch were great for us, because they knew where each other would be and could interlink. Their short passing was around the edge of the box was hot! They made chances. Bobby Robson was the master of picking teams in which he knew the players would link up. There were routines which were replicated all over the pitch. Shearer-Bellamy, the aforementioned triumvirate, Jenas-Dyer. Even Robert, hardly the most team-minded of players fit into the system because Bobby could see how we'd score goals with the kind of distribution he could produce with his left foot.

Its all about the foreign coach these days I'm afraid. Not because I think that foreign coaches are a priori better than English ones, but because they get a lot more respect from the players. When you're earning 100k a week and you've got Steve Bruce or Alan Curbishley telling you what to do you're going to think “who is this guy to tell me that”, but luckily most footballers are so limited that when you present them with something they're not used to - like a foreign manager - they reset to some kind of default level of minimum respect. I'd go for someone with a bit of gravitas, that's what we've needed for years.