Impossibly Daft

Haha, no, a mate of mine is a Newcastle fan (hence why I bother keeping a vague eye on here) and went to that game at Derby; I'd been dragging him along to some absolutely dogshite games that season and he reckoned it was worse than any of them. I get it. But for someone just looking at things from a distance it didn't look so bad, what 13th or 14th?

Brutal.

It's in response to someone claiming that Wijnaldum, Shelvey, Sissoko will be the best midfield in the league now they've got a proper manager to motivate them, and Dummett is a cracking player that will fix all the defensive issues Most of the comments since McClaren was sacked are along the lines of "Can't see Benitez fixing that defence so quickly". there's one guy who doesn't rate Benitez, one optimist and one who thinks Allardyce was given too much stick, hardly all the "big I am".

Redknapp won't save us - relegations with Southampton and QPR. Redknapp was brought in to save Southampton and got them relegated. Also relegated QPR. Agree. Also Pearson would be a disaster as well. Never lost a relegation battle as manager and has done some really good rebuilding jobs? Rodgers or Moyes could be better, but he's no Sherwood or Redknapp.

When I read that, I assumed I was reading the thread of those comics, but nope.

I dunno, they're definitely on track for top half but it would take some awful form from Southampton, Liverpool and West Ham for them to get top 6. I think they'll end up about 8th.

It'll be Redknapp or Curbishley. None of the above, It'll be Joe f***ing Kinnear. Happend before! Or Lawrie Sanchez. Tim Sherwood, surely?

You can swap, but I've got a feeling you can't do it before the penalty is taken (unless the keeper is injured or sent off)

I dunno, I imagine he'd want to bring in Shakespeare and Walsh which would probably cost a fortune. Like someone else mentioned, more like Tim Sherwood. Pearson is rather average at Premier League level (though I think his strengths are the right ones for the job) but if you got Walsh then I think it could be a much better option than some bigger names - if anyone's going to be able to say to Ashley "give me control of transfers and you'll get so much resale value you'll rub your dick raw every time you turn on Sky Sports News" and get listened to, it's him.

Thought he was very good myself considering the intensity of the game. Not perfect but you never can be as a referee. He had a good first half but went to pieces in the second. The sending off was a really soft letter-of-the-law one, fine, but if you're going to be firm with second yellows then you need to be consistent - Arsenal got a free pass with that the whole second half and Cocquelin should blatantly have had one for randomly trying to start a fight with Mahrez when he was being subbed - you can't out of nowhere run twenty yards, push someone then grab them by the shirt and not get a booking. Nah, he's the only player who isn't that intense on defense or closing down. I'd have thought going 3-5-1 would have been a better shape though.

The Sunshine Monster Mascot in the style of that Paul Jewell photo is giving me horrendous flashbacks

Lawro is a braindead twat but why not be sympathetic to McLaren? The poor guy comes in to what he thinks is going to be a straightforward job (objective: do less shit than Carver. That's a piece of piss on paper) only to find things rotten to the core. I've been in a similar position and it's an awful situation to be in.

It's an escape from the hype train but It's only fun when you're winning, or at least have a promising team and the novelty's not worn off. The trying is a good point, but there's no guarantee that it would be a major revolution; the championship and league one are rammed full of shitwad players strolling around because they used to play in the Premier League y'know. Is it worth the risk? Probably.

My point was a bit muddled by all the rambling about how truly awful those teams were, sorry. What I meant was - Looking at a team that bottomed out before Ashley's initial spin wore off and saying 'hey, it'd be more fun than this crap' when looking at the fun recovery misses out that there was some truly bad stuff to wade through between relegation and the turning point.

You're cherry picking timeframes. Between relegation from the Premiership in 04 through to relegation to League 1 in 08 was dismal beyond recognition. It started with a central defensive partnership of a 39 year old Keown and nearly as old Dabizas and spiralled down through the likes of Craig Levein's cut price SPL junk like Mayberry, Devries and Rab sodding Douglas into sewage like Andy Johnson, Josh Low and Elvis Hammond (ankle), a striker who had more years of life than goals at the senior level, while being in his mid to late 20s, whose skills were primarily running very fast in a straight line, being offside and missing games due to suspicious ankle injuries. There were some mediocre to moderately talented players: solid defensive cloggers like McAuley, Johansson and Kisnorbo, Fryatt as a talented but overweight and inconsistent young striker and a youth team that had a very promising set of players. Then one got his leg snapped in a preseason friendly, then got rushed back from it too soon and snapped it again, and was never the same since. At the time, Leicester were one of a short list of teams never to have been outside the top two divisions, so these were pretty much the worst teams ever (other than a few similarly awful years in the late 80s to very early 90s). The money was getting tighter, the players shiter, and it all looked pretty hopeless. Then, Milan Mandaric bought the team. The next season was the most ludicrous thing imaginable. Six managers, eight rightbacks (of which I remember games where we were having 5 of them in the starting line up), Oakley and Howard from that awful Derby side as the January panic buys, dodge as hell Willie McKay players on a rotation through Rangers and Portsmouth and a right back who'd had an impressive World Cup for Iran but didn't speak English and disappeared off the face of the earth after a couple of games. A random midfielder from the Dutch second tire who barely seemed to exist. Gary Megson as a positive. The biggest positive was Marton Fulop on loan (RIP), then Keane wouldn't extend it. Clive Clarke looked okay on loan, then had a heart attack. Then Ian Holloway showed up, signed a couple of Hungarian wingers who looked fantastic for one game then disinterested and pathetic from then on out. There was a game around Bonfire night at Colchester, at their shitty old Layer Road ground where everyone just stopped watching the game and started watching the fireworks display that you could see going on in a nearby park. The last day of the season was against Stoke. They needed something to go up, we needed to match Southampton's result. Nobody had any balls. We went down and inflicted Stoke on the Premier League. It changed after that. It easily could have been the same story as Forest, Leeds, the Sheffields but Mandaric got a proper management team, let them repair all the malaise and decay that had built up and have most of the control over transfers. King and Gradel came into the first team and along with a smart blend of the stronger parts of the previous seasons panic buys, a bunch of premier league reserve loaners, freebies like Lloyd Dyer, Bruno Berner and Chris Powell and €1m Bulgarian international Aleksandr Tunchev, a Premier League standard centreback who pissed all over the division without ever getting out of first gear (until an ACL snapped and he never really got going again) and was the only signing I've seen that has been WTF is a good way that I can remember, other than Cambiasso. From there, sure, getting back into the championship was fun and The Championship was fun when going for promotion. But not being able to stay up in '04 doomed the club to four years of utter turd before things changed and the Championship and League One are littered with the husks of Premier League teams whose rebuild wasn't so successful. Getting Ashley out is probably worth a bit of difficulty but don't count on things changing the moment the playoffs get missed.

s*** like this f***ing terrifies me man Why? He's won all three relegation battles in his career, rebuilt a complete mess at Leicester very successfully twice with fairly limited funds along with laying the groundwork for that Hull team that came up the other year, won promotion, has a reputation for building teams with excellent team spirit and character and has a team (assuming they could be talked into leaving Leicester) whose record on transfers is superb. A little conservative with subs and has had a couple of slightly iffy runs but no more than anyone else. His relationships with the media are about as healthy as Joe Kinnear's, but in terms of getting the job done there's far worse out there. Doubt there'd be much chance though as it would probably cost too much to bring in Shakespeare and Walsh, and it would mean signing a wider range of bargain basement players.

Sven? You seriously think a feel-good chequebook manager with an addiction to playing strikers on the left wing, whose last job in English football was a mid-table showing in the Championship with a huge budget is the man for the job?

While the latter is obviously true, that we don't have any of those things, we're not better than 6-7 teams in the league, on paper or otherwise. Nonsense!! Our first team squad is full of international footballers from non-pisspot footballing nations - 5 dutch internationals, 1 Senegal international, a French international, a Serbian international and probably a couple more i've forgotten. On paper we are comfortably better than Bournemouth, Norwich, Sunderland, Leicester, West Brom and Watford. That's 6 teams and you could argue that we have a better squad than Villa as well. The Newcastle squad has enough quality to be better than Sunderland, Villa, Norwich and Bournemouth. WBA and Watford are more cohesive even if not as talented man-for-man, and while I'm rather biased, there's no way it's a better squad than Leicester; sure, last season's squad had plenty of more-than-the-sum-of-their-parts players like Dean Hammond getting games, but also the likes of Cambiasso, Mahrez, Huth in January etc. Albrighton was good last year (just didn't get so much game time) and even at Villa, he'd got the highest chances-created-per-minute stats in the league one year; not a flashy player, but effective. Most of the additions have been quality like Fuchs and Kante. If measuring by number of internationals, I don't think it's that different, 15 players have international caps (albeit Morgan for Jamaica and a couple of practically one-cap-wonders like Huth and DeLaet) and both Fuchs and Inler are international captains. In a combined squad: Krul and Schmeichel are about on par. I'd want Janmaat and Wijnaldum (the kind of player that's missing; Okazaki was clearly intended to be a Vardy replacement rather than alongside him) in the starting lineup and in the wider squad I'd want Mitrovic or Perez for Kramaric. To me it's a team that on paper is probably about 10th and is over-performing vs. a team that's about 15th on paper and under-performing.

I can understand why after spending £54m they might be a little hesistant to take a throw-money-at-it approach. The killer isn't the money, it's the obsession with resale value without realising that throwing a bunch of randoms together equals rubbish form and worthless players.