Hughesy

Genuinely no idea what he is doing for that second goal. I can't even fathom what he thought he was doing.

Really wanted to give him a bit of time, against all my instincts that he was a terrible choice, but this is just unacceptable. Even the ethos he is trying to implement (only attacking after 6 passes, giving the ball away so we can expose the opposition defence or some such crap) is manifestly wrong.

Same. Honestly the open training sessions were some of my best days out as a kid, getting autographs and photos with the players, it's a massive shame how any sort of connection between players and fans has been lost. Was reading the Martin Hardy book this summer and was looking at one of the open training session photos and was pretty surprised to see an 11 year old me there with my family.

Always thought he had the potential to be pretty good.

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/nov/01/football-heading-brain-damage Recent article on concussion and heading in the Guardian.

I'm not convinced Monk is any near as good as people seem to now think he is to be honest.

Shearer absolutely spot on with his analysis of the Remy incident there.

That should be a penalty.

Do you and Souness often listen to podcasts together? Nah tbh I didn't know that either. - me and Graeme often sit down to listen to podcasts together. He insists on talking through the fucking things, the annoying twat.

Brilliant - really hope he impresses.

Was listening to podcast by Graham Hunter with Graeme Souness and I didn't realise that Hellas Verona won Serie A in 1984-85. For any Italian football experts... how did that happen?

I'd love to be wrong but I can't recall ever seeing a defender as ponderously slow as he looked the first time I saw him. You could well be right - I haven't seen enough of him yet to really judge, but I was expecting something far worse than I saw. Keep hoping that extract in the Michael Calvin book on scouting is correct about Lascelles' potential.

I've been relatively impressed based on his last couple of outings.

For a frame of reference, Defoe scored 18 goals in 29 games for Bournemouth in League 1 at 18.

Isn't that Balanta guy supposed quite highly rated? I am sure I read some articles about him a while ago.

This is another point for me. The last 6 defeats have come against comfortably the worst Sunderland side we've come up against. Arguably the best one that we played against was beaten 5-1. There's absolutely NO excuse like. Course there's not, but there is for this individual game. It's going around in circles like, my two finishing questions are as follows. 1. Can you point to any moment prior to the sending off when we had a clear cut chance at goal? 2. Do you think that pre Ashley/Pardew, a Newcastle team would have conceded a further two goals against that Sunderland team? Or would it have been more likely to fight back for a draw considering the possession we had? 1. I assume this depends on your definition of a clear cut chance, but I would say that Coloccini's 'overhead' kick was a clear cut chance and when the ball was squared back to Perez about 6 yards out but he scuffed it was a clear cut chance. I'd have to rewatch the game to let you if we had any others. I reckon you could throw in Colback's half volley in as well. 2. I am not sure how you answer this question - the teams that Keegan and Robson had were so much better than the one we have now, so there is a much better chance we would have fought back to get a draw, but I am not sure how that is relevant to be honest. I don't mean just Keegan and Robson though, I mean every modern day Newcastle team pre Ashley or even pre Pardew, with the obvious exception of Kinnear. I don't think the team we had under Dalglish (bar the season he finished off), Gullit or Souness would have come back - no. In fact, I am slightly surprised you think they would have done.

This is another point for me. The last 6 defeats have come against comfortably the worst Sunderland side we've come up against. Arguably the best one that we played against was beaten 5-1. There's absolutely NO excuse like. Course there's not, but there is for this individual game. It's going around in circles like, my two finishing questions are as follows. 1. Can you point to any moment prior to the sending off when we had a clear cut chance at goal? 2. Do you think that pre Ashley/Pardew, a Newcastle team would have conceded a further two goals against that Sunderland team? Or would it have been more likely to fight back for a draw considering the possession we had? 1. I assume this depends on your definition of a clear cut chance, but I would say that Coloccini's 'overhead' kick was a clear cut chance and when the ball was squared back to Perez about 6 yards out but he scuffed it was a clear cut chance. I'd have to rewatch the game to let you if we had any others. I reckon you could throw in Colback's half volley in as well. 2. I am not sure how you answer this question - the teams that Keegan and Robson had were so much better than the one we have now, so there is a much better chance we would have fought back to get a draw, but I am not sure how that is relevant to be honest.

We didn't just not come back though, we got f***ing thrashed. Again. I completely fail to understand how you can look at the game and talk about us getting thrashed without looking at the context within which it happened. Would we have been thrashed 3-0 if we had 11 men and they hadn't got a dubious penalty? No. Would we have been thrashed 3-0 if they had got a penalty but we retained 11 men? Highly unlikely. They scored three goals because we unjustly had a man sent off and were trying to chase the game when it was 10 vs 11. It was inevitable that playing with 10 men for 45 mins would lead us conceding more goals.

Don't disagree with quite a lot of what HTT posted, but I'm not entirely certain which players we should actually be targeting if seemingly every player we sign automatically has a bad character.

Personally I think he tried to be too clever and put it in the near post corner rather than the more expected far post.

Incredibly frustrating that he seems to pick up yellows for pretty innocuous challenges. I am sure someone will pick out some examples, but he rarely seems to put in dirty challenges, just niggly ones.

He was given time and space today and still did nothing. They backed off him and he still just played the percentages, passing it sideways and backwards, not really getting involved too much and his touches were in areas where Sunderland knew he couldn't do too much damage. He did get kicked out of the game and that's not his fault. Any injury he's picked up was inflicted by that c*** Cattermole. True - he wasn't great with the ball, but he got himself into the box a few times. I suppose I just didn't find watching him today as painful as I usually do. Still just plain average.

I don't like Colback at all and would really rather he wasn't at the club, but I thought he actually wasn't that bad today.

I am pretty certain we won't go down. Made my mind up on that one in case anyone's interested.