Wallsendmag

Holy f*ck, what a shower of sh*t. Picking the best of the two would be like choosing between finding blood in your stool or a lump in your sac. Utter dross. "Best league in the world" I was just thinking that before I scrolled down to your post What 2 absolutely abysmal lineups there. It'll be an absolute sh*tfest there today.

Still enough there to beat Rotherham but, with the 2 week break in mind, I would like to have seen him go full strength and go into the break full of confidence. If results go in our favour we could go top and as a side note there's nowt worse than stewing on a loss during the International break.

Love Rafa but can't understand his persistence with Diame/Gayle up top. Bizarre playing either Diame or Colback after their performances during the week. They should have both been "rotated".

I think most neutrals would tbh. At least there's a chance of a football match breaking out at some point during the Wolves match.

Don't expect him to get another rest until Preston in the cup. He's crucial to how we play and I expect Benitez will have his fitness coaches working on him to improve his conditioning to enable him to play in the vast majority of games.

Back to the Football and I reckon these are nailed on to win today. It's the first day of October, a time they always get their first win on the board and they are playing very poor opposition. Thanks to the 11,000 free tickets issued they'll have a big crowd urging them on. Expect them to win 2-0. I've even put them on my coupon.

We fell to pieces when he came on for the last 15 mins against Villa. I'd still put him in ahead of Colback but clearly Shelvey and Hayden is our best central midfield pairing.

They were around £27m in the last set of accounts which is fairly impressive. Obviously not at the levels of the big London clubs or Man Utd and Liverpool though. As a comparison Sunderlands were £10.7m so we made almost 3 times as much as they did on gate receipts despite our crowds only being around 8,000 higher. It's one of the reasons they'll be screwed if they ever get relegated. They have a mountain of debt and TV money is their only decent income stream. We let ourselves down with corporate, commercial and advertising revenue which is nowhere near as high as it should be.

Surely he won't start again tomorrow after his "performance" on Wednesday.

Aye that as well!

Didn't realise these are bottom of the league with the worst defence. For some reason I assumed they were having a canny season! Rafa should start with 2 up front and go for the jugular.

I just can't believe that in this day and age a professional footballer, playing at this level, can look so petrified whenever he has the ball at his feet.

Newcastle fans comparing it to the rest of the championship arent much better to be fair Aye, Newcastle have a bigger average attendance than f***ing Bristol City. Amazing That's what I'm on about. Wow we've got big attendances, we do also give away a hell lot of tickets for cheap. Love how so called Newcastle fans try to slate the club or its fans at every opportunity. Our tickets are actually amongst the most expensive in the division. Huddersfield for example charge a flat rate of £189 for adult season tickets. Mine cost £520 for a seat behind the goal (Gallowgate end). A mate at work pays over £700 for his ST in the Milburn Stand.

Alreet, Tony Gale. Nowt to do with that. Rafa's just far, far more comfortable setting a team up to soak up pressure and counter. Nah, the crowd do expect us to dick every team at home with ease like. Many home games you been to this season?

We hand out around 200-300 free tickets per match to the NUFC foundation. It's a good cause and they even do it for sold out games such as Huddersfield and Wolves this season, so a lot of the time it's for seats that could have been sold. Sunderland hand out circa 10k free tickets to avoid their pink stadium looking deserted then they'll all patting each other on the back saying how great they are because their crowds are so good. Fact is any club could do what they do if they were desperate enough.

They have. Hopefully they all get to see another demoralising defeat but I've got an awful feeling they'll win tomorrow.

TBF 43,000 is a great number considering the crap they'll be subjected to come match day. Problem is people compare them to us, and they will never win that battle unless the are suddenly challenging for champions league and we are fighting to stay in the Championship. Compared to other clubs in the PL it's very favourable. Do you seriously believe 5,000 more of them have "paid" to watch tomorrow's match compared to last week's game when they lost a 2 goal lead to Crystal Palace? They've dished out even more free tickets to avoid having swaithes of empty seats which they can get away with in a league where tv income is everything. However it's not sustainable if they were relegated and we're reliant on gate receipts to pay the bills. If they go down they're screwed.

They've sold around 32k for tomorrow's match and the remaining tickets which will take the crowd over the 43k mark have been handed out for free to the University, local schools, colleges and businesses. Basically they've handed out even more freebies than they did for the Crystal Palace match to avoid what would have been a sub 35k crowd. I know this to be a fact although it's hardly difficult to work out that 5,000 more people wouldn't buy tickets for this fixture after what happened last Saturday when they threw away a 2 goal lead to a very poor side. Basically tomorrow's crowd will be 32,000ish plus how many free tickets they have dished out.

Should be a formality looking at both teams but it won't be. Got a feeling it's going to finish 2-2.

But I thought 50,000 screaming jawdees was an exaggeration by the magedia? It kills them that we've not only stuck by our club after relegation but actually increased crowds because they know that if the roles had been reversed and they'd gone down they'd have deserted in their droves and gone down the route Aston Villa have and had to mothball parts of their stadium.

Celtic aren't historically a particularly well supported club. This massive support is a bit of a myth. Their historical average attendance throughout their history is around 26,000 which makes them the 11th best supported club in the UK. In the years Rangers were out of the SPL they rarely attracted more than 30k to their home games and we're reduced to fiddling their attendance figures to make it still look like they were getting 45k+ when at times it was only half that. Something that was exposed by the Daily Record a few years ago. It also needs to be remembered that their fanbase has been largely built by success and their numbers are swelled by glory hunters from across Scotland and beyond. If they played in England and went 10-20 years without winning anything a lot of those would stop attending games. Yes, they're a big club but nowhere near as big as they're made out to be. They're not even the biggest club in their own city.

That sounds remarkably illegal. aye, absolute weapons grade horse-s**** from Stfiler like. He's right. The match in question was against Charlton Athletic at the SoS in 2003. They scored 3 own goals in the first half hour and were 3-0 down and 1000s of them tried to leave but they refused to open the big exit gates to let them out and made them stay until the 60 odd minute mark before allowing them to leave. Chris Kamara was doing the match on soccer Saturday and couldn't speak for laughing. They ended up losing the match 3-1 and finished the season bottom of the league with a miserly 19 points.

The points return from that awkward looking September now looks pretty good. Now we've got to go and win the games in October that we expect to be winning.

I'd agree with that. Richie is a class act but because of the position Shelvey plays in nearly everything we do as an attacking force wither starts or goes through him.

Our most important player and someone who I don't think will be rotated too many times. Colback was fairly anonymous last night which made his performance even more impressive as he was needing to cover more ground than he would have liked at times. I'd imagine he prefers Hayden beside him and hopefully Rafa will try Diame alongside him as well in the future because he's a waste of a shirt playing in his current position.