TheBrownBottle

Billy Shitehurst was the first NUFC no.9 I ever saw. All uphill from there Pingel is almost impossible to put into words. I’m not even sure grainy VHS tape from that season would really cover it, as TV footage never really shows a player’s performance in the way that watching in the flesh does. He was hopeless on the ball, but he may actually be the worst footballer in history off the ball. Poor fucker was absolutely clueless

Yep, even in the doldrums of the old second division after relegation in 88/89 we had good centre forwards - NUFC generally does. Makes the worst ones look ten times worse - if Pingel had been a centre half, he might only be in the worst five …

Frank Pingel was absolutely fucking horrific. Ball just seemed to bounce off him. I’ve never seen a more lost-looking player on a football pitch.

I suspect any Mag whose memories stretch back to the late ‘70s would have a very different XI. Mine stretches to the mid-late ‘80s and I’m not sure if there’d be many post-‘92. Fumaca was everyone’s favourite joke, but didn’t play enough times to cement his place. Pretty much any XI which could be named over the last 30 years would beat the worst side fielded from ‘88-‘92. Bad signings, on the other, would be pretty much entirely post-‘92 …

Love Willock, me. I still think if he can refind his shooting boots he’s an England squad regular.

The glossy stuff won’t be him - but I can’t imagine a social media handler firing off that reply to NUFC360.

Yep, right bunch of cunts was my memory.

It’s not reflective of my experiences with actual red scousers, either. Always had decent crack with them. The plastics tend to be massive weapons, though.

1 Mackems 2 Leeds 3 Man Utd I’m still a mag of my generation, I think - young’uns will no doubt have other preferences. I always enjoyed the pisstaking with the smoggies - but it always felt like they disliked us far more than we disliked them. Of course, running the gauntlet outside the Riverside was never fun …

Hang on - you’ve just described the current CL …

KSA’s league would still need to justify the expenditure in some way or form. Paying 10x what European clubs will play to persuade a player to sign isn’t sustainable, as the revenue streams won’t ever exist to meet that. So it becomes a case of how long the KSA govt wants to prop this up. Maybe that is forever; I doubt it, though.

Still think the worst group is the dream group tbh

I have to say, tried watching the first episode on Dailymotion. Turned it off after about 25 mins, didn’t think much of it. I’m actually glad that it’s clearly just a load of fluff and not a proper documentary - the best football documentaries are often to the detriment of the participants. Feels like an extended version of the stuff you’d find on the club website.

KSA literally does not have a codified penal system. The police and the judiciary get to decide if something is a ‘crime’, and how that ‘crime’ should be punished. And of course it’s a dictatorship, so you’re not getting a vote to change it. I personally find pampered people in the west desperately trying to make equivalences tiresome. I can’t imagine a system more open to human rights abuses than that in KSA.

The first European Cup winners I can definitely remember are Porto in 1987. Steaua Bucharest won it the year before. PSV won it a year later, Red Star won it four years later, Marseille won it six years later. That’s the strongest argument I can give that the ‘Champions League’ has damaged European club football.

Honestly, if the US Treasury buys us then it is relevant. But until they do, it is whatabouttery

Boooo! Hiss!

Does SJP still suffer from the 'giant European Cup pitchside advertising' that it used to all those years ago? We had reduced capacity in the CL games as the first row or so of the East Stand, Leazes & Gallowgate had their view blocked by giant gaudy adverstisements

Get them educated

Apart from Joseph Swan inventing the incandescent light bulb - as if Caicedo would have developed the same way under Bruce …

Get. Their. Attention.

‘I thought ASM would fetch £30m at least’. I mean, there’s your problem. He didn’t.

Yep, that’s just the ticket. Getting out of it would mean getting results in those games - and getting knocked out would still have seen us play the biggest names in football

I’ll admit I can rant about this, but the notion of genuine competition has been gnawed away at since the early ‘90s. It’s probably not a coincidence that the PL breakaway and UEFA’s restructuring of the European Cup into the ‘Champions League’ occurred in 1992. I still call it the European Cup, tbh. ‘Premier League’ doesn’t exactly settle well with me either. I’m a curmudgeonly bastard.

Doesn’t it feel really weird being a week away from the end of the window, knowing that the club’s business is basically done and we’re all happy with what has been done? I quite like this - I forgot how long it’s been since I’ve been able to think that. The last time I could, I was a young man - now I’m middle aged. Christ.