Rayvin

Apologies, you're right. Dunno where I got flu from.

I recall reading something about someone in the 90s trying to claim that the flu vaccine caused autism - turned out he was working for a pharmaceutical company that wanted to release a version of the vaccine that didn't cause autism - for huge profits obviously. Anyway, large numbers of people avoided vaccinating their kids because of this. I know flu isn't a regular killer, but I do wonder how many children's lives he may be responsible for...

Actually surprisingly honest in places. At least he didn't claim it affected the team. Nothing new or inspiring though.

He's not going to do that - it'll be worth a lot more on the sell if we're still in the Prem. The man may be cold and unfeeling about football, but I honestly don't think he cares about us enough to even do something spiteful. As far as he's concerned, as long as we're buying tickets, we may as well not exist. All other decisions made are down to the financials. EDIT - I was replying to Trooper there, for the avoidance of confusion.

He wasted money on Kinnear... I'm not sure that your logic holds to be honest, he could very easily have gotten a contract drawn up especially for Pardew. Say it cost him £10k for the contract; if it helps him in situations like this, it's going to save him hundreds of thousands, if not millions. I reckon Pardew will get a single season payout, and the termination will have something to do with performance criteria being met (i.e. Ashley can't terminate early if Pardew is still on top of the KPI - once he falls beneath it, it's a different matter entirely). If I was running this club with a view to staying in the PL and nothing else, that's how I'd do it.

I'd forgotten we even had Santon...

He'll be fine for re-employment. Plenty of managers will be fired this season and he'll swoop into any of the bottom half sides. Wouldn't put it beyond Ashley to re-hire him later in the season tbf.

I think we can probably safely assume that no one is. And that this state of affairs has been running for some time now.

I dunno like, I think he's just chronically lacking in self awareness. Even now I reckon he would probably want us to win as much as we want us to win, and the fact that he's been getting so emotional about it suggests that this really dos matter to him. He's hopeless, and he needs to go, but at the end of the day I feel for him a bit. It's not like he's been actively trying to sabotage the club. Plus, as far back as they were, there have been some good times. That 1-0 defeat of Man Utd last year turned into one of the best nights out I've ever had, it was a truly special result. All of this said, I was expecting to see a headline about his dismissal by now...

For me, this is one of his main failings. An utter inability to think outside of his very limited system. If he could attempt to justify just once, maybe it'd make sense on some level - like his chihuahua was once run over by an ardent proponent of the midfield diamond or something. It's the fact that it's totally unexplained that really gets to me and makes him look all the more stupid. Why do reporters never ask things like "Why are you insisting on having a lone striker up front when it clearly isn't working?"

We could have conceded a lot more.

What he's always told them I guess. We were better in the first half but were also being caught on the counter a lot. He stopped that happening in the second half at the cost of all of our (limited) creativity and structure in attacking.

On the positive side, that's probably the best result possible for anyone wanting rid of him. Damage isn't too bad, and surely it'll see him fired.

I mean, we only have one formation. The players get moved around within that formation, but surely a team needs more than one available formation!?

This has to be the end of the Pardew era...surely..

Ameobi now. All the usual suspects.

We've totally lost the plot here, no structure to our build up any more.

Obertan. It's fitting actually.

So now we're pushing Gouffran upfield to partner Cisse, when we could have subbed him at half time instead of Riviere...

Why did Tiote take that freekick, Alan?

So we put Cisse on but took off Riviere, which means that Cisse (despite last week) will be relatively starved of service instead of Riviere... I dunno why I'm complaining actually, this should be it for Pardew.

Why aren't we trying something different, that's what I don't get. What do we have to lose? Why not try two up front, see what happens. Could sacrifice Gouffran for one thing.

Why are we lofting balls into the box?! It's not working. Anyone could have told you that it wouldn't work against Stoke. Do they have any players under 2m tall?

The other depressing thing here is that Stoke are absolutely fucking terrible... and we still aren't going to beat them.

This is going to be horrifying isn't it...