Stottie

Rafa must have done a rough blueprint for club development with the consortium, a five year plan or whatever. With Rafa being Rafa, I bet it goes way beyond back of an envelope level. Since we are in a relegation battle thanks to a very porous defence. that has to take precedence now. The only silver lining is that the reserves, academy, training facilities, etc., mostly stuff that is investment in returns that will always come later, can all start now.

Then you have to wonder why Emery joined Arsenal with their owners and the tasteless way Wenger was pushed out. I wonder if Conte knows how much debt Spurs have on the stadium or what "vision" thought Poch wasn't good enough.

We may screw this up, it's nufc after all, but Balague is wrong if he is suggesting Citeh were completely professional behind the scenes from the get go. The best DOF at that time would never have paid that much for Roque Santa Cruz, or bought him in the first place with options their money gave them. That was all on Hughes, who they kept too long anyway.

Anyone who signs David Luiz will have Schar straight back in the team. No more Cabbageball!

Chuffed to bits about this. Huge upgrade on Bruce and Jones. The Europa League is no pushover and is simply undervalued by the English media. 10 wins and a few draws and we'll stay up. Appointing Emery is a big step toward it happening.

A quite good park-the-megabus for 65 minutes against a weakened Chelsea with no Lukaku, who'd also gone to penalties on Tuesday. Completely hopeless once it was 0-1. No energy, application, or change in tactics. It still looked 5-3-2 after the subs. A waste, because had it finished say 0-2 with a bit of resistance and a decent chance or two, you could have said we'd put up a fight and come out with positives. As it was, all we achieved was "bend don't break", followed by collapse. The system doesn't work and needs a complete overhaul. I don't get the "what did you expect?" type derision, because Graeme Jones arrived at the club with universal hype as a brilliant coach and was involved in the England setup. Whatever his real ability, that was very poor yesterday and last week, and he needs replacing pronto. As a personal gripe, I cannot remember Fraser doing anything especially positive in these two games, and that means we are effectively playing only two attacking players.

That flag is quality. I don't like the drummy Blaydon Races, but you can't have everything.

On the deflected shot that hit the post at 0-0, you can see him watch the ball and then rush to get up after its rebounded out. In a scramble about a twenty minutes later, he gets up in a panic, slips, and their second goes in with him squirming on the ground. The third was on him and he was lucky to not get a second yellow. The game was already gone, but that would have finished it had it not been.

With a step up in opponents, we're looking at 15% possession.

Wat?!

Signing from potential relegation rivals is two birds with one stone, but risks the deals being protracted, and we'll need to get people in quickly. First of all, we need a new manager in quickly to start deBrucing the players we have. Many of them are underperforming.

Ward Prowse ticks a lot of boxes, one of which is set pieces, a relatively easy way to score when you have a whole team to rebuild. I suspect dead balls are a factor in Ritchie getting picked in spite of many defensive mistakes. Get him in on day one!

I didn't watch the game or even the highlights yet, but a Rafa team conceding 4 goals in 12 minutes plus stoppage time is very uncharacteristic for him. Rondon sounds like he's getting stick, but he didn't score in his first six appearances for us. It's still early days there.

Decent and arguably good point, which stops the rot, and it was rot, after last week. We battled to the end and could've sneaked it. We didn't give up any massive chances to suggest Palace deserved the game on anything more than simple possession. Our goal came from the individual brilliance of Callum Wilson, but let's not kid ourselves. That's how the best teams win a lot of their games. We made sensible substitutions at a sensible time, for the first time in two seasons. A winnable fixture has gone to waste I suppose, but we need genuine positives at a moment and there were some of them there. Not the false positives Bruce would talk about to take the heat off himself after yet another defeat. Jones has inherited a dispirited and unfit squad, so it will take time to turn things around.

Blatant foul, so well done VAR. As we were.

Double positive change at 66 minutes. Bruce might have done it, but I can't ever remember recently.

Weak as piss. Easily outmuscled on the edge by someone falling over, no pressure to stop an average cross, and Darlow just ball watches it.

Shit game. We look more organized but Palace have only scored one first half goal at home this season and there's been no Zaha today. They've scored five in four in the second half. Regardless of possession, so long as it's tied, we've got the striker most likely to score off one chance.

Some terrible passes to nobody, but the lads seem to be in roughly the right place when they have the ball. That alone is a big improvement.

18 gone and looking more organized. No easy ball for them so far.

That is the dumbest thing anyone has said in years. It is also insulting to his own club Arsenal, because he's overlooked their legend Herbert Chapman, widely credited as an all-time great tactical innovator. Read those Jonathan Wilson books for more info. Even in recent times, to suggest those four managers are in the same league as Clough/Taylor and Paisley is complete nonsense.

A suitable response to fans of other clubs saying Bruce was good enough would be to ask them how many games NUFC have played in the Champions League and Europa League, the new formats that is, not the old European Cup or UEFA. 99% of them will have no idea that the answer is 38 (24 CL plus 14 Europa), which is more than Everton or Leicester. Would a manager putting those teams into a relegation battle after 100M of spend be acceptable? If we are now a rollover joke club, it is only because shit managers like Bruce employed by a shit owner called Ashley have turned us into one.

Bruce came in on a wave of "I'm a Geordie" and then fed into stereotypes held elsewhere of us fans being deluded, just to save his own neck. Ashley himself said the same thing, that "I'm not rich enough to compete with Man City" interview, as if any of us expected that, but he was an outsider. I do not want to get deeply into the psyche of Northern working-class areas, but its a given that you do not slag your own. Bruce also claimed his hands were tied in spite of getting way more money in transfers than Rafa ever did. Rafa had to play a season with Joselu, a Stoke reject, and then wheeler-deal to get Rondon in on loan. Bruce shipped out our best defender and then played Matt Ritchie and Jacob Murphy as full backs with actual full backs on the bench. We have had several very poor managers over the past twenty odd years, but Bruce is also up there amongst the most unlikable. Right next to Kinnear and Souness for me. I'm old enough to remember Souness as a domineering midfielder, a fantastic been-there, done-that footballer, and Kinnear knocked it out of the park with the "c#nt" press conference, a real-life voyage into the surreal, so I probably dislike Bruce more than both of them. Pardew had some rogue charm about him, shagging players' wives and "the King eats your dinner" malarky, and Carver was clearly a drowning man out of his depth, but I really stuggle to find anything redeeming about Bruce. He's fake twat who winds me up. Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of Howay Five Oh, our greatest result in modern times, and as a pundit at that game, supposed Newcastle fan Steve Bruce could not have looked any unhappier. I seem to remember his half time analysis focusing on Man U not getting a penalty.

Echoes of that glorious Bowie song in Extras!

#BIGGER CANS