Hughesy

I am still not convinced that Cisse misses that many more chances than most strikers to be honest.

Where...?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2313324/Tottenham-fans-celebrate-beating-Arsenal-shoes-chant.html

This is one of the things that p*ss me off, honestly our attacks are far too slow. Yep - I don't think I have seen a time move the ball across the pitch slower.

Ray Houghton?

Isn't the point of sport to try and do better than 'average'? Yep - I would agree. Hence why I said I hope we are always aiming to do better than 8th. I suppose what I am getting at is that we don't really have a history of being a consistent top 8 club and therefore any expectation that we should be doing better than that is possibly unrealistic. No more unrealistic than Swansea or Wigan being in the Premier League at all but I doubt they'd keep their manager if he suddenly took them down two divisions and tried to claim that's where they're meant to be. Spurs have been a mid-table side nearly my entire life but they've seen the big time once and now won't accept that again. We on the other hand continue to treat fifth place like some sort of magical achievement that we can never aspire to again. It's ludicrous. I don't think anyone is treating 5th place as something we can never aspire to again. I just don't know whether it is something that we can expect to achieve on a regular basis. I think above 5th place would be a magical achievement though...

Isn't the point of sport to try and do better than 'average'? Yep - I would agree. Hence why I said I hope we are always aiming to get as high up the table as possible. I suppose what I am getting at is that we don't really have a history of being a consistent top 8 club at any time in our history and therefore any expectation that we should be doing better than that is possibly unrealistic. Especially given who we are competing against.

Quick caveat - I hope we always aiming to get as high up the table as possible. But, for those people who think that finishing 8th isn't good enough - what is our 'average' placing in all our years in the top division? I would be surprised if we have actually finished in the top 8 as many times as you would think. I can't, however, be bothered to trawl through every league table to find out. Wikipedia tells me that in the all time Premiership table, we are 8th.

I mentioned him earlier - someone said that he is leaving at the end of the season.

Yeah - I don't particularly want Martinez either.

Exactly, every time the goal-line technology debate comes up I raise this argument. The goal line is the least of our worries. True. I think there should be video review for every big decision, so goals/red cards/penalties. I agree to a certain extent, but was discussing this the other day in relation to how far you take it. Do you review every single offside decision given or just ones that lead to a goal being allowed/disallowed? Do you review every single phase of play before a goal? Say, for example, the ball is played over the top and Cisse would be one on one with the keeper, but Cisse is incorrectly flagged offside - do you review that kind of decision? If you do review it and realise that Cisse wasn't offside, how do you rectify it? You can't recreate the exact scenario..

In fairness, it was fairly clear that there was some sort of conversation between Taylor and Mbiwa (possibly at Pardew's instigation) that they should switch when it came to Graham. They just didn't seem to follow up on it particularly well.

Debuchy was probably our best player yesterday.

Yeah - at least it would be entertaining! Would be interesting to see what attacking coaches like that could do with our players. Continuing the football 'hipster' trend - the other option would be Dragan Stojkovic. Is he the one Wenger wanted as successor? Manager of some J-League club I think. Edit: http://espnfc.com/news/story/_/id/876897/arsene-wenger-lines-up-dragan-stojkovic-as-arsenal-successor?cc=4716 Yeah - that's him. Read an article on him in the Blizzard a while back and he seems pretty good.

Yeah - at least it would be entertaining! Would be interesting to see what attacking coaches like that could do with our players. Continuing the football 'hipster' trend - the other option would be Dragan Stojkovic.

You need to remove those specs you borrowed from Pardew - they were by far the more dangerous side and could easily have scored more ; Taylor lucky to escape a pen award for shirt-pulling in the box for starters... We were second best in every department bar goalkeeper, mainly due to Pardew's lousy selections and hopeless, outdated tactics. Whilst he remains at the club, there will be more days like these..... Fair enough - was at the game with my dad who has wanted Pardew out from the start (even after last season) and he agreed/brought it up so I don't think 'Pards specs' are really relevant. Obviously saw the game completely differently. If Cisse's goal stood and we went into the last 25-30 mins at 1-1 (having been on the ascendancy), I can't see us losing that game.

Let's get him in then - at least we would have an interesting formation to analyse.

I mentioned him on an earlier page, but what is Bielsa's situation at Bilbao? I assume he is wildly unrealistic, but I was wondering whether he will be staying on after season and how long his contract is etc?

Is he really missing too many chances? Isn't a good conversion rate for strikers about 20% (I suppose you can't judge whether one chance is harder than another etc)?

Keegan used to practice 5-aside football just to get movement and one touch passing instilled in the team. It was old fashioned, but still light years ahead of what Pardew does IMO. i said this exact thing yesterday about 20 mins into the game...if pardew can do nothing else he needs to have them playing 5-a-side for a couple of hours every day so they can learn to pass to each other, how to make space for a pass when it's tight...football basics really I'd agree with that. Would probably insist on a one touch five aside game and no balls above head height.

I haven't been on the forum since the game so haven't really followed what has been said previously. Aside from whether Pardew should still be our manager and general anger at our performances this season as a whole, I genuinely don't think that 3-0 was a fair reflection of the game. If Cisse's goal has stood, I am fairly certain that we would have won that game. I fully expect to have a load of people asking if I was at a different game etc etc, but I stand by the fact that our performance did not merit a 3-0 defeat. Thought it was interesting to see that the Sunderland players that seemed most keen on 'taunting' the NUFC fans were Johnson and Colback. Didn't see what Graham was doing...

Jesus, I didn't even think he was that bad yesterday...

Bielsa, Zemen, Laudrup or Jol. All unrealistic but I can dream.

No doubt already been mentioned but there must be a way that a song can be made up for him to sussudio by Phil Collins? Surely?

Spot on.