Be Excellent To Each Other

Ah, I don't watch the news.

guardian reckon hes gone, fucking hell how many clueless moron boards do we need till a rich shiekh buys us?

Poison dwarf for manager I reckon.

Keegan seems to have gone then and Man City have put together their January shopping list - Cristiano Ronaldo, Fabregas and Torres.

If nothing else, this makes me want to reinstall football manager and give myself loads of money.

And grow a beard:

huh?!, keegan hasnt left the club.

Yeah apparently after training today someone tryed to get an interview with King Kev and all he would say is that he's leaving right now....... and he did, because he went home

it all got blown out of proportion from there really

where'd you see that rubbish?

Yeah, I think Sky need to get better sources. Or I do.

Something doesn't smell right about all this. Ashley backtracking perhaps?

oh but I was just trying to be funny...

but a large cloud of failure has descended

my bad

It all happened as Keegan was 'summoned' to London to talk with the people running the club, who think it's a good idea to run the club from somewhere as far away from Newcastle as they can manage.

Rumours flew of both him being sacked and him walking, but both have been denied.

Really, Mike Ashley should stick to running chav clothing shops and not football clubs.

Newcastle make Spurs look like a professionally run outfit.

Newcastle make Luton look like a professionally run outfit!

Curbishley quits West 'Am.

I don't blame Curbishley leaving or Keegan for that matter if he does go. They've both been made to look a bit daft as they seemingly have little or no control over who is bought and sold but get it in the neck if results and performances are bad! With all these takeovers happening it seems the boards of each club are getting a little too hands on

Ok, now he's gone. I think.

yeah this seems to be 100% now although newcastle are again taking forever to release an official statement.

I think this Ashley fellow has to be some kind of cretin. Why bring Keegan back when even I know that him not having control of transfers would be a problem. All Keegan was doing was coaching, not managing.

Having a Director Of Football is all very well if it's someone good. Frank Arnesen was an excellent director at Spurs (and presumably still is at Chelsea). He has no ambition to manage (tried it once, hated it) and worked well with the manager. I was gutted when Chelea nicked him and we ended up with Comolli (who apparently may not be much longer in the job after fouling up our transfers last week). But Dennis fucking Wise? Holy moses, the only job that man is good for is a cabbie! Anyone who Ken Bates treats as a son has to be bad news!

I think we've also got a bloke called llambias doing the main scouting role and to be fair our transfers this summer have been pretty good, its the lack of them that is the problem. Im not sure if thats a cash problem or just a lack of faith in the manager well when keegan was in charge.
Teh way we've gone about them, getting cheaper players with cheaper wages and no media outing out interest and the progress seems to be a very good way to aquiring players.

I think the european style of managing can work in the premiership, where the players are bought by others and the manager focuses on tactics, player line-ups and motivation. Just newcastle tried to do it with no experience in doing so at all.

Depends on how it works. If the Director Of Football/Sporting Director works with the manager then great. It's worked quite well at Spurs until recently because Ramos wanted certain players and apparently the Sporting Director fouled up and we are now left with holes in the squad. But it had been working great. Basically the manager would say what he wanted and the Sporting Director would do the donkeywork.

Problem is when the Sporting Director and other people start dumping players on the manager and selling people without his consent.

You would have thought that people would have learned from the Portsmouth experience frankly. Although they were big enough to turn it around and get Harry back on his terms and look at them now! They don't expect to win the league and they were grateful to win the FA Cup. Keegan could have still been good for Newcastle and might have got them a cup or two, but for Ashley to berate him for saying Newcastle wouldn't make the top 4 was bloody stupid. With the squad they have at the moment I can't see them doing any better than they did under Big Sam now that Keegan has gone. From the outside they've looked under strength going right back to Souness and the fact they didn't significantly add to the squad over the Summer is a joke.

Of course Harry Redknapp would be against the Sporting Director idea, how else can he buy and sell so many players- Ed.

Ha anyway, fucking international break eh? what a boring 2 weeks of football. Hasnt even started yet.

x 1000000

Nothing?

Malc

Nobody's been able to watch it.

It did read exciting through.

Apparently Setanta will be showing highlights free to air from 10.45pm.

It was aceness!

*has Setanta*

That... was a decent evening's football in the pub. Me and Gareth have been watching nine out of ten England games down the pub for the last couple of years and they've all been fucking shit. Tonight, we watched (not glued to the screen but we had an eye on it) and it was pefectly fine. Walcott shone, obviously, and Croatia tried to kick us out of the game but the ref was having none of it.

Tomorrow's headline: Threeo Walcott

Malc

I've got Setanta too but after the Andorra game I thought I'd give last night's match a miss. Bugger.

Latest* rumour on the toon:

The person being lined up for the manager job is....



*utterly unsubstantiated

ah shit better not be, fucking howay man ashley, zico said he would come, just give him a contract already.
Anyway whats capello doing when hes not on his international break? get him in aswell.

I thought that might get your attention. I hope it isn't aswell, as I dislike O'Leary.

Judging by last night's highlights, he was having plenty of it. Although Croatia's sending-off was harsh, they were extraordinarily lucky not to end the game with 8. The high-foot on Terry should have been a yellow at least, one player on a yellow should have gone for sure, and another decided to dive all over the place, whenever he was just outside the England box. Appalling.

It's kind of funny to feel 'cheated' when your side's just won away 4–1 in a place where no-one's won a competitive fixture before, but it just felt like once the Croats went 2–0 down, they just thought 'sod it' and started spoiling for a fight. (And the disallowed goal was for yet another dodgy dive, it seems.) Presumably, they couldn't understand how England had suddenly gelled into a cohesive unit (well, and David James, who still proved he shouldn't be wearing any England shirt)—and, to be fair, they weren't alone. Anyone else (who saw the game or highlights) notice something about the goals, too—they were from open play.

(Of course, the Scots had to ruin the evening slightly by beating Iceland, and Ireland sadly didn't manage to edge past Montenegro, but you can't have everything, right?)

Wasn't the coverage/analysis of the highlights crap? I realise it was quite short notice, but still.

But yeah, England could have had a penalty, Lampards goal could have stood, The Guy who Body Checked Rooney on the edge of the penalty area should have gone, the diving guy should have gone, and the high foot on Terry should have stopped play. It could have been 6-0 just with those chances alone. If you add in what might have happened if Croatia were on 8 or 9 men too!

There were still some wasted chances, and croatia were obviously off their game, but let's hope this is the begining of something.

Malc

Some people really should be careful what they wish for.

Newcastle up for sale.

That's an awful lot of words to just say "I had no idea what was involved with running a football club, why didn't somebody warn me?"

Yeah, he was in over his head from day 1.

I think the man just liked the idea of owning a football club but really had no idea at all. Should have been looking at someone like Charlton or Millwall, not debt ridden Newcastle and fans who, although loyal, have expectations beyond the teams current finances.

Football is an incredibly corrupt sport. Under the normal rules of business, it should have gone bust a long, long time ago. For an average club, 70% of revenues go out as wages to the employees, which is ludicrous. In terms of equality, Liverpool made as in a Champions League run to the semi-final as they did in gate receipts for the entire Premiership season.

Ashley didn't realise that the reason for all this massive transfer fees is that the money isn't paid for years and you have a whole bunch of agents taking a cut, and the money just... disappears. You can't say "more fool him" because the whole game is rotten. That is why the same faces pop up time after time, it is a closed shop because the cat can't be let out of the bag.

millwall?! he wouldnt have lasted 2 weeks with them fans.

Have to say the whole expectations with our fans is way over blown with what people see because of the media. When we were looking for a manager last season after sam allardyce had left the local paper had a poll with who people wanted as the next manager and only half the people wanted keegan which suggests half the fans arent clueless morons.

Then I wanted didier deschamps, now I want zico, really how amazing would it be to say zico, the white pele, being your manager. Hes be run out in 6 months but I bet we would have had some good chants when we won the 3/4 times in between them months.

These two sentences really contradict each other.

Fans on the radio were demanding Keegan's return. I felt like phoning up and pointing out that not even CUS Jesus was so audacious as to return for a third time.

Werder Bremen 0-0 Famagusta
Roma 1-2 CFR Cluj-Napoca

I'm good at this.
Might want to put your money on BATE Borisov tomorrow night.

heh.

I was at the Chelsea match, they ripped Bordeaux to shreds. The Roma result is really excellent news.

They gave all 39000 of us a free scarf too, which was nice.

Does that sort of thing happen often, oop thar in't permyer leegs?

I've never seen it before and it was rare enough for a friend on SA to mention he'd heard of it, which I've never heard of before

Chelsea are, despite reputation, frequently excellent in these ways. The prices haven't increased in 4 years (and the CL group games have halved in price), the membership was halved in price this year and they very frequently either heavily subsidise or simply lay on free travel to away games so it wouldn't surprise me to learn this was their invention.

Also the prices for a big match like Man Utd are exactly the same as Stoke, if they think it's going to be oversubscribed they simply offer the tickets first to those who've been to most matches (via a loyalty point scheme that favours cup and away matches) so rather than most money, the best chance goes to the loyal supporters. Which I think it pretty cool even if I rarely have enough.

The theory with the scarf was to get the entire crowd waving them as the teams ran on, they backed this up with two HUGE Chelsea flags at the bottom of the stand right opposite the world feed TV cameras. I guess it was designed to intimidate the French team a little and it clearly didn't hurt.