Ellis H

"I'm not convinced any of them would do a better job than Howe, but they also probably wouldn't completely fuck it up?" Brilliant. I'm now fully Howe Out.

He says the same things every window. Even when we were famously bidding loads for Guehi he'd say at the same time we haven't got any money. I assume it's him trying to keep prices down on the off chance that we try and sign someone.

He said "we can't sign players who don't exist" in the press conference which says a lot.

Spending £100million on Elanga and Ramsey will earn you pelters tbf. Plenty predicted as much in the summer.

"The key thing for us to consider is business now versus business in the summer, value for money now versus value for money in the summer and signing the right player," Howe said. "Because if you sign the wrong player, you're carrying that then for a three, four, five-year contract." "All together we want to find the right solutions, but they have to be the right solutions. The worst thing we could do is bring the wrong players into the football club. That would cause harm for a long time, so it’s always about the right players." "When asked what the ‘right player’ is for Newcastle, Howe added: “The right player is multi-factored, really. “It's the right age, the right deal as in transfer fee, the right wages, then the right player to actually come into your squad, the right positional need. “There's loads of things. If one of those things is not right, especially financially for us, it puts us in a difficult situation." There's 3 quotes and plenty more if I had time. Nothing necessarily wrong with this attitude if it's balanced out with some cheaper, calculated gambles. He wants "guarantees" and is happy to pay the extra for them then will talk about PSR restricting us and having a small squad. "The worst thing we could do is bring the wrong players into the football club".

Howe is the kind of person to go to buy a telly online and listen to the 1 bad rewiew out of thousands. He's the most glass half empty manager I've ever seen in terms of transfers.

Superb job. Couldn't realistically ask for more.

Fixtures are only part of the bigger picture. Liverpool are 17th and had Bournemouth, Burnley, Arsenal, Fulham and Leeds after spending countless billions in the Summer. Man City in 15th also spend billions in most windows and neither of them lost their 20+ goal talisman in the summer. Quite the opposite in one hilarious, heartwarming case.

He's following instructions. If we know anything about Howe it's that he's absolutely meticulous about that.

Apparently that's Gordon's pass map Vs Wolves. Can anyone confirm that?

We're in by far the best place we've been in for 30 years and some people are absolutely gagging for us to lose. At what point are you not a fan/supporter anymore?

They've only beaten us at SJP twice in the Premier League. Last time was in 2005 in one of the most self destructive games I've ever seen. Played 28, won 18, drawn 8 and lost 2.

Again, you're totally dismissing the input Howe has had and/or needs to have which is complete bias. Howe gets all the credit for improving players but takes no share of the responsibility when they are playing badly? Suppose Gordon just needs to "pull his finger out!" or something the same way Howe needed to simply "sort it out!" recently.

On him being a dangerous player, he managed 12 goals and 16 assists in 23/24 and he got either a goal or an assist in 16 of 18 home games. He has now not scored an open play goal in the league for over a year. It's easy to forget how good he was because he's been so average for ages now. Getting him back to those levels consistently solves so many problems for us.

No need to change anything. Just maybe work out how to get one of our most dangerous players to not be largely underwhelming for 18 months. If that's not possible we need to either play him less or sell him. He's showing in the CL we are a much better team with him on top form and it's Howe's job to get him there regularly. If Howe takes no responsibility at all for his drop off then Gordon must be even more disliked than I realised.

Howe has had no influence at all on the last 18 months of Gordon's poor performances? Biased rubbish, I'm afraid. If he wasn't following instructions he'd be rotting in the reserves. He starts most games for a reason.

6 wins 2 draws 2 defeats since Sunderland.

It can be both.

You think he's just not trying then? Howe has gotten barely anything out of him for about 18 months now. There's been zero evolution of Gordon's overall game or role in the team for a very long time. If Howe is giving him instructions that he's ignoring he wouldn't be in the team. It just looks to me like he's gotten stale here and needs something new to reinvigorate him. If Howe could do it he probably would have by now.

It's possible Howe has taken him as far as he can and a move could help him, and us, get to the next level. A new manager with new ideas is probably what he needs at this point, maybe even going abroad as his options in England would be limited. He's only 24 so there's still loads of potential in him but his potential here looks quite severely capped under a manager who openly admits to not having a plan B.

Howe is an extremely glass half empty person when it comes to transfers. His constant talk of "the right player" is fine but there has to be flexibility as spending absolutely loads on "the right player" is no guarantee as we're finding out and has a far bigger impact on PSR than a few cheapish prospects ever will. A couple of calculated gambles won't bankrupt us (or hamstring us for 5 years, like he implied this morning). They might turn out to be brilliant and actually save/earn us a boatload of money in the future. That would obviously depend on him giving them game time of course which is a related yet entirely different subject.

Our last 4 DOF's have been Kinnear, Ashworth, Mitchell and Wilson so it's fair to say we haven't seen how effective this position can be yet.

Best/worst one I've seen "Commentating on the Argentina–Romania match in the 1994 FIFA World Cup, Hansen said that "the Argentine defender warrants shooting for a mistake like that". The previous day, Colombian defender Andrés Escobar had been shot dead, a killing widely attributed to punishment for an own goal Escobar scored in Colombia's 2–1 loss to the United States earlier in the same tournament. The BBC issued a public apology for Hansen's poor choice of words."

Somebody in a recent press conference said we'd won 29 games in 2025, which is the most in a calendar year since 1995. 3 out of 3 in 2026.

A 3 hour game isn't ideal given the schedule but it's 5 wins, 1 draw and 1 defeat since the Mackems.