TheBrownBottle

Apart from the excellent spelling mistake for PNG, wouldn't football supporters in China be more likely to support Charlton or Portsmouth off the back of the Netflix show? I thought glory seekers only wanted to see teams win things ...

The usual thing over here is to get overexcited by pre-season friendly results. Every touring major European club attracts a massive crowd - but it is a training match for them. The idea that CCM are even close to Celtic's standard is laughable tbh. Prime Robbie Fowler doesn't struggle in the A-League. Overweight semi-retired Robbie Fowler picking up a final pay check in the sun does - and Fowler hadn't been close to being a top centre forward for years when he rocked up to North Queensland. It was superannuation league for him - he waddled about, picked up a pay cheque, and spent his afternoons getting pissed in the sun. I personally hate it when the A League brings those sort of players across - it is a joke. Fowler was taking up the place of an Aussie player, and likely commanding as much money as could've paid for all the local junior teams to be funded for the year. I've no interest in watching pisstakers like Fowler stroll about. You're spot on re the reason for the speed of the game - it is a similar tempo to watching Greek or Turkish league football. It is very slow due to the climate and time of year the matches are played. Football is football, so I happily watch it - but Plymouth, Sheff Wed or Ipswich would stroll to the title over here. The average third tier English club has a higher turnover than the richest A League club - Barnsley are effectively bigger than Melbourne City. So they can pay more, and if the player is any good they're likely to be scouted by better sides. Glasgow Celtic's turnover will be greater than all the A League clubs combined - the players they can keep on their books are comfortably out of reach of the wildest dreams of any A League club. Money talks in football, as does geography. I say we just enjoy the ability to watch football in incredible weather and safe, friendly stadia. The quality is shite, but that should never be a good enough reason not to go

No, it’s a million miles below the quality of the SPL or English Second tier. It’s slow and cumbersome, with very little real talent on display. I was at St James’ in the late 80s-early 90s, I’ve seen what shite second tier English football looks like, and it was still light years ahead of the A League Not that it matters, of course - it would be good to see the wee man start tonight Edit: having went to see Gateshead a handful of times in the past, the A League is just about better quality than the fifth tier conference. Third tier English clubs would walk it, though.

The Mackems are as reliable about their away numbers as ancient historians were about the sizes of armies. ‘Darius entered Greece at the head of a million men’; ‘Vercingetorix’s Gauls numbered 330,000’; ‘the Red and White Army took 80,000 down to Rotherham on a weeknight’ Maybe Herodotus was a MLF?

Looks a canny little player, and it'll be interesting to see how he develops - but we shouldn't necessarily be expecting him to pull up trees, he'll need time to develop. It's worth bearing in mind that he doesn't currently start for a shite side in a shite league (and they are, and it is, shite - trust me). Youtube has meant every young player with the ability to dribble looks like a world-beater. I hope the lad doesn't feel overly pressured. Anyhow, I will be N-O's official scout in Parramatta tomorrow as Central Coast are playing my local side, Western Sydney Wanderers. He'll likely get some minutes off the bench so it'll canny to see him in the flesh.

I’m ok with people not giving a shite and I’m ok with people protesting against the ownership. I’ve no time for the rank hypocrisy of swathes of the press, and I do get irritated by a certain type of comment by NUFC supporters re all this. One which goes something like ‘I knew nowt about KSA human rights abuses and don’t care about them now - and anyone who pretends they did is talking shite’. It’s the assumption that everyone has the same interests in what goes on outside of the NE / UK. The first part of that sentence is an honest one - no issues really if someone doesn’t give a shite. Just don’t assume that what might apply to you and your mates applies to everyone else.

96/97 last day was the best day I can remember for everything going right. We could have finished as low as 4th, but hammered Forest 5-0 and ended up 2nd and qualified for the European Cup (Champions League) thanks to Liverpool failing to beat Sheff Wed. The mackems AND the smoggies both could have stayed up, but the smoggies lost at Leeds and the mackems didn't get what they needed at Wimbledon, and Southampton and Coventry did. Mackems and smoggies down, Geordies qualify for Champions League. Bliss

Aye, I agree completely - they'll start picking up points again when Stewart returns. They look every bit the solid mid-table second tier stodge team to me. I've only seen only NUFC season like that before - 90/91 - and that is still my least favourite season for that reason. It was just utter shite. I hope they sit there for many, many more years to come.

Shirt out was de rigueur. One lad I know for a while insisted on bandaging up a hand a la Daveeeeed. This included games of head and volleys

I know it upset many at the time, but that was one of the few sales where I'd have been like Ashley - bundling him into the helicopter and taking Dalglish's stupid offer. Carroll always looked like a 'purple patch' player to me. Difference is I would have reinvested it. Oh, and Botman is a bargain at 35m - what a player.

Yep. Len Shackleton’s autobiography pre-dates Tom Cowie, so his page on directors was only wrong posthumously

The players themselves will have forgotten about it by now. RTG will be preparing to make hooky DVDs of the match

Cue % of merry men of Sherwood who were MLFs. ‘Will Scarlett was caaled that because he was red and white daft marra’

Yep, and he’s doubling down on his incredibly embarrassing take. But I suspect he might be right in what he says - I can picture them scraping a play off win in the next few years and singing about Alex Bass at SJP. There isn’t a collection of supporters so blissfully lacking in self-awareness anywhere else. You have to love them

Me too. I especially liked his pelanty miss in the pizza trophy final

Fuck me ragged The poor fuckers, reduced to this. I wouldn’t even call it desperate, as desperate implies a slither of hope.

Shola is comfortably the best penalty taker I've seen in B&W. Matt Le Tissier is the best I've seen in England. Can't whack Beppe Signori for all-time best penalty taking technique for me.

I remember being desperately jealous of my uncle and his mates when they headed there and to Antwerp - I was still just a bit too young for pubs (being 12 - drinking pints in pubs was still nearly two years away ...) so couldn't go. I was at the home game of course, watching us chuck away a comfortable 3-0 lead. It also seemed to herald a colossal drop off in form (just checked - we won two of the next twelve league games). For those young'uns who haven't yet experienced European football - you'll love every second of it. Don't listen to the wankers who bang on about the UEFA Cup or the new Conference Cup thingamajig being a waste of time. They're not - the entire point of finishing high in the league is to get that reward. Listening to the fans of clubs like West Ham and Wolves and Southampton moaning about it as if it were beneath them ... ludicrous.

Didn't NUFC used to have this? I didn't realise it no longer existed. Fucking Ashley, what a cunt.

It must've been exciting for them - last time I remember our U-21s playing sunderland it was against their first team in an actual competition. Watching them going on like it was an actual derby was one of the best things on Netflix's best comedy show.

I honestly think Willock has been superb this season - yes, we haven't had the return to his goalscoring form, but Joelinton's poor return in that department seems immune from criticism. I don't doubt we'll look to improve of course - but Willock's contribution has been overlooked by many to me. I'm in full agreement with you re getting another CM in - particularly an attacking one like a Maddison type (or Maddison himself). Either that or a holding midfielder with Bruno moved further forward. More generally, we still look massively short on the flanks - yes, Miggy has turned good but we don't know if this is a purple patch or a permanent increase in output. ASM is unreliable and I'm still unsure if he'll commit to Howe's pressing game. Fraser and Murphy are willing but not good enough. I think we're ok at CF for now - Wilson, Isak, Wood (yes, I know) will do for the time being. We desperately need a back-up keeper - either someone up-and-coming or a solid benchwarmer (though Dubravka may now enjoy permanently warming benches, so might end returning to this position). CB looks ok too - I'm happy with Botman, Schaar, Burn, Lascelles as our four main choices. We still look light at FB - particularly LB. So in short - for me the priority would be the same as the end of the summer - another winger and a midfielder first up. If we get one of each in January that would be marvelous.

Decent backup for Miggy I reckon - have a pop at the PL before pissing off to the US Leo

Yeah, that's right. Bloody hell. KK really should have let someone else buy defenders and keepers for him ...

Perhaps, Southgate was better than Peacock, though I suspect if we'd spent it on a GK we'd have been guaranteed it. It's worth remembering that our defence wasn't awful; it was our forwards and midfielders who completely lost form in the second half of the season (Ginola, Beardsley, Lee, Ferdinand, Gillespie - none played particularly well after NYD). Christ, the abuse Barton got that first season or two. He was a waste of that fee (I'm trying to remember - was he a world record fee for a defender, or just for a full back?) - but he's also clearly a top gadgie, so I do feel bad about that.

Yep, they're not getting off that lightly. Sunderland are our rivals - I'm not making the '90s mistake of forgetting them and viewing Man Utd as our new 'real' rivals. Bollocks to that - Man Utd's catalogue of songs when we rock up are basically still their '90s songbook for us; we fell off their radar quickly and only feature in their POV when we play them. Like us singing about West Ham or Nottm Forest or Leeds - we have songs about them, but none which get an airing if we're not playing them. Just because a chasm is opening between us again doesn't mean they're not our rivals - it just happens that our club is becoming massive again, and they're back to the Second Division mid-table doldrums (in my lifetime, sunderland's average position is 25th in the football league - they've spent 20 of my 40 years as a lower league club; for comparison, our average is 14th and we've spent 9 years in the second tier. For those interested, in the PL era our average position is 11th and the mackems 24th). For those who haven't fallen asleep at this point, it is interesting* to note that since the mackems first relegation in 1958 (the year my fatha was born, so quite some time ago - also a reminder that sunderland were once a major club) their average position has been ... 25th. That's unbelievable consistent - they spent 35 of those 64 years outside the top flight. So they haven't even been a first tier club for most of the years my old man has been knocking about. NUFC, if you're curious, averaged 16th and spent only 16 years out of the top flight, exactly a quarter of that time. The point being, of course, that the decade when they were a top flight club obsessed with finishing 17th and beating a shite NUFC is, historically, a peak in most of their lifetimes - they needed a sugar daddy just to do that, willing to pour in millions that he'd eventually lose. For us, we needed to be crippled by a pirate in Westwood or a Dickensian hate figure like Ashley to have our average skewed. *Asterix (the Gaul); this may not necessarily be interesting