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4 Years Ago Today....


Thespence

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I'd seriously open a four(teen) pack if I heard that some deadly bad news had hit Souness.

 

A grade A cunt of the highest order. The ONLY manager (or player) that I knew would be a disaster from day one. I suspected quite a few where not good enough but have always given them a chance.

 

I also knew Allardyce was completely the wrong man for the club mind, but I see what you're saying.

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To this day it's still one of the worst football football decisions i've ever seen.

That one appointment set us back years and in my opinion was the catalyst for everything that has happened since.

 

Imagine if we'd appointed Martin O Neill at that point. How different things could've been.

 

That said, I was in favour of the Allardyce appointment at the time and that proved to be another unmitigated disaster

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That said, I was in favour of the Allardyce appointment at the time and that proved to be another unmitigated disaster

 

 

Just out of interest, why? It seemed he was exactly the wrong man for a club with a recent history of good football and some success, I was amazed he was given the job - it felt like I didn't know the club at all anymore.

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I think that he knew that he'd fucked it all up months before he was sacked, but he hung on for months under the knowledge that when he was finally sacked he'd get a massive payoff.

 

Whereas Gullit walked when he realised he wasn't up to the job, Souness just saw £ signs.

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That said, I was in favour of the Allardyce appointment at the time and that proved to be another unmitigated disaster

 

 

Just out of interest, why? It seemed he was exactly the wrong man for a club with a recent history of good football and some success, I was amazed he was given the job - it felt like I didn't know the club at all anymore.

 

God only knows. I suppose it was because he was in some way proven and seemed primed to step up to a bigger job at a bigger club.

Although the majority of the football he has overseen has been total garbage there were flashes of good stuff at times when players like Jay Jay Okacha and Youri Djorkaeff were playing.

I think I just believed the hype and was ready for someone who actually seemed to know what they were doing after witnessing the Roeder and Souness debacles.

It became very clear very quickly what a one dimensional clueless fuckwit he really was.

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Like Dalglish he attempted to completely dismantle something which only needed tinkering with & got it completely wrong in the process.

 

 

that has been happening far too often at this club.

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Like Dalglish he attempted to completely dismantle something which only needed tinkering with & got it completely wrong in the process.

 

 

that has been happening far too often at this club.

albert was knackered,as were howey and ferdinand,ginola wanted away,beardsley was getting past it,gillespie was getting sussed...the team dalglish inerited needed more than tinkering.
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The man was a plumb.  I knew from the moment he arrived that he would fucking ruin us big time.

 

The best way for a manager to gain respect and have discipline is for the players to beleive in what the managers says.

 

Souness and Dean Saunders.

 

Pair of useless cunts.

 

Of course it wasn't there fault.  Anyone heard that interview with Souness on Irish radio?

 

 

 

 

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Like Dalglish he attempted to completely dismantle something which only needed tinkering with & got it completely wrong in the process.

 

 

that has been happening far too often at this club.

albert was knackered,as were howey and ferdinand,ginola wanted away,beardsley was getting past it,gillespie was getting sussed...the team dalglish inerited needed more than tinkering.

 

Ferdinand didn't want away at all. He found out that the club wanted to cash in on him, so felt unwanted.

 

Les Ferdinand left Newcastle United for the last time on Friday bewildered at the manner of his departure - but not shocked to be offered an open door to the southbound A1.
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Benni McCarthy said he left Blackburn because he wasn't able to play the kind of football he wanted to play. Not the first player to leave a club because of Allardyce.

Although he went about it the wrong way by missing training and generally acting like an arse, I think there'd be a lot more respect in the game if more players exhibited this sort of honesty.  I'd much rather a player said 'my game doesn't suit this type of play' or 'i'd prefer to be playing elsewhere because i'm not enjoying my football here.'  Sadly most footballers don't have the intelligence or social skills to handle themselves with decorum and will. instead, throw hissy fits like young children.

 

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Like Dalglish he attempted to completely dismantle something which only needed tinkering with & got it completely wrong in the process.

 

 

that has been happening far too often at this club.

albert was knackered,as were howey and ferdinand,ginola wanted away,beardsley was getting past it,gillespie was getting sussed...the team dalglish inerited needed more than tinkering.

 

Ferdinand didn't want away at all. He found out that the club wanted to cash in on him, so felt unwanted.

 

Les Ferdinand left Newcastle United for the last time on Friday bewildered at the manner of his departure - but not shocked to be offered an open door to the southbound A1.

no...ferdinand was knackered. he'd started getting the back injuries that would stop him being the player he had been and we remember and from playing regulalrly.

 

(i should have put a full stop after his name.)

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He should never have been sacked because he shouldn't have been here in the first place.

He was brought in to bring discpline, the problem was, the owners and the players were misbehaving.

 

I've said it before, our appointments under Hall/Shepherd tended to be reactionary to say the least.

 

Dalglish - wanted a more pragmatic approach as Keegan's team was perceived to be too cavalier.

Gullit - enough of that now, doesn't work and the fans hate it.  Give us sexy football.

Robson - Gullit didn't understand Newcastle's heritage, get a Geordie in (admittedly a Geordie who was a top class coach and in between jobs).

Souness - Robson too soft, let's get a renowned hard man in to bang heads together.

Roeder - was just a soft and easy option really, reasons aren't as clear or bland as with the others.

Allardyce - issues with injuries / players not being as good on the pitch as on paper.  Get in the sports science nut with a reputation for making a team more than the sum of its parts, don't care if the football's shit.

 

For the record I wasn't against the appointments of the first 3, and the most reactionary appointment was clearly Souness, easily.

The problem was that each manager we appointed was the opposite to the one before, absolutely mental strategy from the board.

 

This supposed point is massively overplayed, it's really just a cute parlour trick. If you take any 2 managers (any 2 people even) there's always something different you can pick out and say look they're the opposite of each other. Of course managerial appointments after a sacking are somewhat reactionary, if they weren't what's the point of sacking the old manager to replace him with someone the same. Obviously one of the attributes you will look for in a new manager is what you think was wrong with the one you got rid of.

 

Dalglish wasn't a reactionary appointment, it was an appointment made on merit of someone who had a different style to Keegan.

Robson wasn't a reactionary appointment, it was an appointment made on merit of someone who had a different style to Gullit.

Roeder wasn't a reactionary appointment, it was a temporary appointment made through lack of being able to find anyone suitable (in the eyes of the board) at the time.

Allardyce wasn't a reactionary appointment, it was an appointment made on merit of someone who had a different style to Roeder.

 

You can disagree with the choice of people or if their qualifications for the job were satisfactory, but they weren't appointments made because they were exact opposites of their predecessors as is made out.

 

 

At the time Robson was sacked and for years before there was an awful lot of whining going on while we were finishing up the top end of the table and playing in the Champions League about how we were the "laughing stock of football" (it's the permanent state of every club on the planet) because of the way a few of the players were behaving off the field. There was definitely pressure building up from supporters to do something about it so it was obviously a factor in choosing a new manager (although Souness wasn't the first choice and the others who turned it down weren't as extreme as him). I thought it was a terrible appointment myself from day 1, but there were a lot of people at the time who were happy with it from the discipline point of view alone.

 

Also, I don't want to be a Souness apologist, but he didn't do half the damage to the club that's attributed to him. He set us back a couple of years but no more than that, and certainly nothing terminal. Of his signings, really only Boumsong, Luque and Owen turned out to be bad for the money paid. Boumsong was expensive for a defender but he had a pedigree and had already looked decent in a British league. He was a better risk than Coloccini for example. He started off well too, but it all went a bit shit (didn't he have a load of personal problems with his kid and his wife being seriously ill and living in France?). Owen's leg breaks massively affected the view of his time here and can't be blamed on Souness. The less said about Luque the better like. Of his sales, although it was a big one, only Bellamy was a real loss (I was pissed off at the time but hindsight showed that Robert was finished anyway).

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UV, so do you agree that they were appointed because they were totally different to their predecessors? Or do you think that they were appointed on merit and the difference was a coincidence?

 

You can't on one hand say that appointing the opposite was correct because nobody would replace a manager with someone the same, and then on the other hand say that they didn't employ them because they were different.

 

What I would say is that the managers were chosen based on a very simplistic view of what was going wrong, and generally took things too far to the other extreme.

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uv...what about the appointmant of roeder full time ? and you could put gullit into your list.

I addressed Roeder. I think he was always just a temporary appointment until someone better could be found. Allardyce :doh:

 

Gullit and Souness were somewhat reactionary appointments to the major perceived flaws of the team at the time. 2 out of 6 doesn't make it a policy.

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I think the biggest problem is that Fat Freddy flew by the seat of his pants. He didn't plan ahead, put contingencies in place and consider the consequences of his actions. His made snap decisions to sack people without considering who he could get in to replace them, which innevitably lead to us scraping the barrel.

 

Middlesbrough recently sacked Gareth Southgate AFTER sounding out Gordon Strachan and establishing that he would be interested in taking up the reigns. That's they way it should be done.

 

 

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