Graham Carr

[mrmojorisin75]

http://www.whoateallthepies.tv/lists/90415/top-10-most-impressive-premier-league-players-of-201112-so-far.html

 

on the subject of this there's an honourary mention for gervinho...thus rendering the entire thing worthless

[mrmojorisin75]

i'd imagine Dave is talking about the fact the article is just recycled from an interview published months ago in the sunday sun. hence the expression "money for old rope."

or maybe that's too sensible a conclusion. let's tell dave he's been here too long instead.

FAIL.

 

dave's crazy negative these days like, can't be argued

[Dave]

:lol:

 

Better delete my account because I think an article is lazy journalism.

[Guest]

[Guest]

I'd also take offence to the being negative comments, Dave. Did they not see your post in the "International break" thread?

 

 

 

8th.

 

 

I think you need to take stock.

[alexthegreat]

Newcastle United's French scouting policy is no laughing matter - The recruits identified by Graham Carr, father of the comedian Alan, offer Mike Ashley the chance of the last laugh - Paul Hayward, The Guardian

 

When Newcastle appointed the dad of a well-known comedian as chief scout it must have looked like another joke on Tyneside. Instead Graham Carr, father of Alan, has surpassed even Arsène Wenger in his knowledge of emerging French talent and has inspired the recovery at St James' Park.

Newcastle, fourth in the Premier League table and unbeaten in nine games in all competitions, are in danger of giving prudence a good name. So addled by salary inflation is the English game these days that voluntary wage caps are seen as an act of self-immolation. Sick of funnelling money to big names, the owner, Mike Ashley, turned away from Dennis Wise in matters of recruitment and towards a Geordie obsessive whose 49 years in the game include stops at Tonbridge, Dartford and Bradford Park Avenue.

 

Alan Carr jokes that when he told his dad he would not be joining him in football and would instead be heading for the stage he offered to explain through "expressive dance". With the family tradition broken (Graham's father played for Newcastle), the chief scout headed back to Europe, where he has recruited seven French players, among them the creative midfielder Yohan Cabaye and 19-year-old Mehdi Abeid.

Graham Carr worked for David Pleat at Spurs and scouted for Sven-Goran Eriksson before coming home to end the club's Wise years in February 2010. Ashley has tried many a punt in his time as Newcastle owner, from bringing back Kevin Keegan to hiring Alan Shearer for eight games to overloading the place with advisers with brackets after their titles to renaming the stadium after a website to clearing out Andy Carroll, Kevin Nolan, Joey Barton and José Enrique.

 

Those evictions were expected to bring the death agony of Ashley's reign, with Newcastle sliding back to the Championship while the £35m earned from Carroll's sale to Liverpool remained unspent. A maximum wage of £45,000 a week or thereabouts was greeted as an admission of defeat by a self-made man who had been stripped of his reputation for shrewdness in the piranha pool of football finance.

From fourth spot, Newcastle now look down on Liverpool as well as Spurs, the visitors to St James' next Sunday. To proclaim wins over Sunderland, Fulham, Blackburn and Wolves as a return to the David Ginola-Andy Cole-Peter Beardsley era would be stupidly premature. Adversity will strike Alan Pardew's side at some stage in this season and then we will assess their true calibre.

 

For now, though, they are entitled to slide off the hook of ridicule that has held them through Ashley's many experiments. In defending their club against "southern" critics some Newcastle fans have acquired quite a persecution complex. They assume all scrutiny is hostile when much of it is directed at mismanagement from above rather than the team or the congregation.

 

Over many months now a fresh breeze has blown in with Cabaye, Hatem Ben Arfa (back from serious injury), Sylvain Marveaux, Gabriel Obertan, Chiek Tioté, Abeid and Demba Ba, the Senegal striker who was born in the Paris suburb of Sèvres. Leon Best also continues to improve in a squad where Fabricio Coloccini and Alan Smith are the last of the big-earners from the money-spraying years.

 

The goalkeeper Tim Krul says "everyone is fighting for each other" — a nice change from the time when everyone was merely fighting each other. He cites Pardew's policy of tightening the back of the side as the catalyst. But basic coaching falls apart in the end without a sufficient quality of incoming player.

 

This is where Carr comes in. "We won't just watch a player once. With someone like Cheik, it was the result of four years watching him," he said in a rare interview. "I'd first seen him playing for Roda against Arsenal in 2006 — they were hammered 4-0 I think, but you could tell he was going to be a good player. He never stopped running.

"So you keep an eye on him and track his progress, which is where we are with plenty of other players. People will all look at Arsène Wenger and say he's got the French market covered, but we've got a good handle on it, believe me. The same is true of other countries too. The key is to react quickly – that is what will get us our targets. That and the fact that Newcastle United is a big, big draw overseas."

 

In a world where scouting and recruitment have become highly corporate and legalistic endeavours there is something reassuring about Alan Carr's journeyman player of a dad delivering to the tortured Ashley the solution he was groping for and failed to locate in what you might call the Xisco years. "Being a Geordie and having supported Newcastle gives me a bit of an advantage, I think," Carr told the local Sunday Sun. "You look at some players who are talented, but you just have to say: 'They're not a Newcastle United player.'"

Poor Wenger: even his title of French oracle is under threat. But having found them, Newcastle will now have to keep them, and somehow square that need with wage constraints.

 

 

Quite liked that comment in bold.

[Ketsbaia]

http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/sport/newcastle-united/2011/10/23/newcastle-united-attracting-stars-to-st-james-park-79310-29642107/

 

Can't see it posted elsewhere but theres a great article in the Sunday Sun about how we're charming agents and it reveals just how thorough our scouting process is. Its a long article so here's some snippets:

 

A FEW weeks ago, Newcastle United were showing a top European agent around St James’ Park. A pretty major deal-maker on the Continent, this particular character has a number of international players on his books – including one highly-rated striker attracting covetous glances from Manchester United and Arsenal. So no two-bit chancer then. Yet when United officials led him up the stairs to see the stadium in all its glory, he exhaled deeply, whipped out his camera phone and started taking pictures. If first impressions count, Newcastle’s magnificent arena had done its job.

 

Agents – proper ones, not leeches looking for the next pay day – have been welcomed to Tyneside, met at the airport, taken on a tour around the impressive training facilities and given the time of day by the club’s key figures. It always ends with the stadium tour, a chance to re-iterate Newcastle’s biggest selling point: huge crowds, passion and the perfect platform to take a player’s game to the next level.

 

Newcastle’s charm offensive includes engaging with the overseas media. French journalists and TV cameras have been granted interviews and access over the last few months. And while the occasional Joey Barton cross-Channel chat might have caused them a few issues, major features on France’s equivalent of Match of the Day have done the trick.

 

For while reputation might have been enough to persuade them to part with big cash in the past, they are now turning up to meetings with selling clubs and agents armed with reams of information. No longer do they depend on telephone number wages to dazzle prospective recruits – Pardew can now tell a potential signing WHERE they will play, WHAT is expected of them and even HOW the club can improve their game.

For a player like Cabaye, for example, his summer move was likely to be the most important of his life. So his agent sought reassurances that United would be a proper platform for him – that they actually knew what they were buying and where he would fit into their strategy. Armed with stacks of information provided by a scouting team that had collectively carried out five years of background work on him, Pardew was able to soothe any worries the then Lille skipper had.

 

And thus we come to the biggest requirement for any new recruit – character. Some managers think they can see it by staring a player in the whites of his eyes, but there is more to it than that. Again, contacts on the ground are consulted. L’Equipe and other sports media are forensically digested by the club’s talent spotters, while even a quiet cup of coffee in a bar near the ground can be a gold mine of information if the waiter is one of those with his ear to the ground. Taxi drivers carrying club reps to watch a game have even been known to pass on valuable nuggets in the past.

 

Pardew acknowledges that this intangible can be tricky. The club went as far as meeting one player this summer, but opted against signing him because it didn’t feel right and, while the United boss understandably wouldn’t divulge the identity of the star, the Sunday Sun understands that Gervinho did not come across well in a face-to-face meeting. Newcastle withdrew their interest because they felt they were being used to smoke out interest from a bigger club and sure enough Arsenal’s bid landed them the player. So a talented player went by the wayside – but the club only want those committed to the cause.

 

Can't fail to be optimistic after reading that 

[Dave]

Good stuff. The kind of stuff we should be doing, tbh.

[Sifu]

[Guest Heneage]

It's frightening how similar our transfer strategy is when compared to Lyon's.

[NG32]

http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/sport/newcastle-united/2011/10/23/newcastle-united-attracting-stars-to-st-james-park-79310-29642107/

 

Can't see it posted elsewhere but theres a great article in the Sunday Sun about how we're charming agents and it reveals just how thorough our scouting process is. Its a long article so here's some snippets:

 

A FEW weeks ago, Newcastle United were showing a top European agent around St James’ Park. A pretty major deal-maker on the Continent, this particular character has a number of international players on his books – including one highly-rated striker attracting covetous glances from Manchester United and Arsenal. So no two-bit chancer then. Yet when United officials led him up the stairs to see the stadium in all its glory, he exhaled deeply, whipped out his camera phone and started taking pictures. If first impressions count, Newcastle’s magnificent arena had done its job.

 

Agents – proper ones, not leeches looking for the next pay day – have been welcomed to Tyneside, met at the airport, taken on a tour around the impressive training facilities and given the time of day by the club’s key figures. It always ends with the stadium tour, a chance to re-iterate Newcastle’s biggest selling point: huge crowds, passion and the perfect platform to take a player’s game to the next level.

 

Newcastle’s charm offensive includes engaging with the overseas media. French journalists and TV cameras have been granted interviews and access over the last few months. And while the occasional Joey Barton cross-Channel chat might have caused them a few issues, major features on France’s equivalent of Match of the Day have done the trick.

 

For while reputation might have been enough to persuade them to part with big cash in the past, they are now turning up to meetings with selling clubs and agents armed with reams of information. No longer do they depend on telephone number wages to dazzle prospective recruits – Pardew can now tell a potential signing WHERE they will play, WHAT is expected of them and even HOW the club can improve their game.

For a player like Cabaye, for example, his summer move was likely to be the most important of his life. So his agent sought reassurances that United would be a proper platform for him – that they actually knew what they were buying and where he would fit into their strategy. Armed with stacks of information provided by a scouting team that had collectively carried out five years of background work on him, Pardew was able to soothe any worries the then Lille skipper had.

 

And thus we come to the biggest requirement for any new recruit – character. Some managers think they can see it by staring a player in the whites of his eyes, but there is more to it than that. Again, contacts on the ground are consulted. L’Equipe and other sports media are forensically digested by the club’s talent spotters, while even a quiet cup of coffee in a bar near the ground can be a gold mine of information if the waiter is one of those with his ear to the ground. Taxi drivers carrying club reps to watch a game have even been known to pass on valuable nuggets in the past.

 

Pardew acknowledges that this intangible can be tricky. The club went as far as meeting one player this summer, but opted against signing him because it didn’t feel right and, while the United boss understandably wouldn’t divulge the identity of the star, the Sunday Sun understands that Gervinho did not come across well in a face-to-face meeting. Newcastle withdrew their interest because they felt they were being used to smoke out interest from a bigger club and sure enough Arsenal’s bid landed them the player. So a talented player went by the wayside – but the club only want those committed to the cause.

 

Can't fail to be optimistic after reading that 

 

This is what we were crying out for under shepherd,  this is light years ahead of what was previously in place.

 

Its totally heart warming.

[TheGuv]

It's just common sense imo. Why haven't we been doing this for years? 

[jdckelly]

It's just common sense imo. Why haven't we been doing this for years? 

because its Newcastle, common sense is in scarce supply usually

[NG32]

It's just common sense imo. Why haven't we been doing this for years? 

 

Yep , it is common sense, I honestly think shepherd was to tied up with agents and thus over reliant on them, sending us shit and burnt out uninterested players.

[Exiled in Texas]

It's just common sense imo. Why haven't we been doing this for years? 

 

Because under Shepard we were begging players to come as trophy signings. Payers who wouldn't normally want to come here came for the money. See Sunderland today for a similar approach

[Ginola]

Really positive stuff, that.

[NG32]

Didn't we also have a bad reputation for paying up as well??  Seemed to remember reading that recetnly.

[Taylor Swift]

It's common sense but I bet you only really Arsenal, Spurs and Man Utd do that, and now Liverpool may because they have an owner who's very modern perspective. Some of the other teams don't do it because it's a waste of resources when they can't compete with most clubs on wages and transfer fees, but clubs that can and should do - like Villa, for example - are clubs that I bet you don't do it. Sunderland and Fulham - both established Premiership sides that can spend money from time to time and pay good wages - would benefit from this kind of organization and structure as well, but I bet you they both don't do it. We're ahead of the curve here and it makes the likelihood that we find gems like Cabaye and Tiote greater than it is for the likes of Sunderland to find someone like Sessegnon.

[Si]

Once you go down the route of throwing around huge wages like Freddy did  to attract players then it's hard to pull back from that, really glad to see that the club are going on a charm offensive with the right sort of people, really positive article.

 

 

[Ritchie]

Nice to see we told Gervinho to fuck off, like.

[eliassenfredrik]

http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/sport/newcastle-united/2011/10/23/newcastle-united-attracting-stars-to-st-james-park-79310-29642107/

 

Can't see it posted elsewhere but theres a great article in the Sunday Sun about how we're charming agents and it reveals just how thorough our scouting process is. Its a long article so here's some snippets:

 

A FEW weeks ago, Newcastle United were showing a top European agent around St James’ Park. A pretty major deal-maker on the Continent, this particular character has a number of international players on his books – including one highly-rated striker attracting covetous glances from Manchester United and Arsenal. So no two-bit chancer then. Yet when United officials led him up the stairs to see the stadium in all its glory, he exhaled deeply, whipped out his camera phone and started taking pictures. If first impressions count, Newcastle’s magnificent arena had done its job.

 

Agents – proper ones, not leeches looking for the next pay day – have been welcomed to Tyneside, met at the airport, taken on a tour around the impressive training facilities and given the time of day by the club’s key figures. It always ends with the stadium tour, a chance to re-iterate Newcastle’s biggest selling point: huge crowds, passion and the perfect platform to take a player’s game to the next level.

 

Newcastle’s charm offensive includes engaging with the overseas media. French journalists and TV cameras have been granted interviews and access over the last few months. And while the occasional Joey Barton cross-Channel chat might have caused them a few issues, major features on France’s equivalent of Match of the Day have done the trick.

 

For while reputation might have been enough to persuade them to part with big cash in the past, they are now turning up to meetings with selling clubs and agents armed with reams of information. No longer do they depend on telephone number wages to dazzle prospective recruits – Pardew can now tell a potential signing WHERE they will play, WHAT is expected of them and even HOW the club can improve their game.

For a player like Cabaye, for example, his summer move was likely to be the most important of his life. So his agent sought reassurances that United would be a proper platform for him – that they actually knew what they were buying and where he would fit into their strategy. Armed with stacks of information provided by a scouting team that had collectively carried out five years of background work on him, Pardew was able to soothe any worries the then Lille skipper had.

 

And thus we come to the biggest requirement for any new recruit – character. Some managers think they can see it by staring a player in the whites of his eyes, but there is more to it than that. Again, contacts on the ground are consulted. L’Equipe and other sports media are forensically digested by the club’s talent spotters, while even a quiet cup of coffee in a bar near the ground can be a gold mine of information if the waiter is one of those with his ear to the ground. Taxi drivers carrying club reps to watch a game have even been known to pass on valuable nuggets in the past.

 

Pardew acknowledges that this intangible can be tricky. The club went as far as meeting one player this summer, but opted against signing him because it didn’t feel right and, while the United boss understandably wouldn’t divulge the identity of the star, the Sunday Sun understands that Gervinho did not come across well in a face-to-face meeting. Newcastle withdrew their interest because they felt they were being used to smoke out interest from a bigger club and sure enough Arsenal’s bid landed them the player. So a talented player went by the wayside – but the club only want those committed to the cause.

 

Can't fail to be optimistic after reading that 

 

[garth]

Nice to see we told Gervinho to f*** off, like.

 

Yep! What I've see of him so far I'm glad we did tell to fuck off.

[Sifu]

Nice to see we told Gervinho to f*** off, like.

 

Yep! What I've see of him so far I'm glad we did tell to f*** off.

 

[healthyaddiction]

Nice to see we told Gervinho to f*** off, like.

 

Yep! What I've see of him so far I'm glad we did tell to f*** off.

 

I heard he was excellent yesterday.

[Guest elbee909]

Whether we told him to fuck off isn't of much consequence as he didn't want to come here anyway.