thebrokendoll

read that truefaith article by hird a week or so ago and thought at the time, fair play to you mate, if you want to be the moral conscience of the football world, fill your boots. ive decided the role's not for me though and actually resent anybody who thinks it should be. yes the saudi's human rights record is atrocious and i doff my hat to anybody whose been active in trying to change them for years. not to those though that have only very recently jumped on the bandwagon, they can fuck off to be honest as i doubt the majority of thems sincerity. i've no doubt they'll donning their stone island kit and chanting ingurland to a pubs tv screen in a years time at an event they should in theory be protesting we boycott. i also have very little time for those who mock the whataboutery line, because like it or not, some of it is very valid. it's only just over a decade since the worlds biggest sporting event was held in china, whose human rights record makes the saudis look like cuddly kittens in comparison. yet i have little recollection of the outrage for that coming even close to what we've seen directed at us this last month. i hope the saudis involvement here can hasten some change in their country, in the meantime i want to enjoy us hopefully becoming something other than the non sporting zombie club we've been for the last 14 years. oh and i wont be wearing a tea towel whilst doing so, they're the wifes and im not even sure where she keeps them.

just about everything the mackems say makes me laugh, although I doubt I very much it's what they intended.

I don't know why I do it to meself but I popped in there just now to gauge their reaction. apart from howe being shite his name is now beheadie eddie. they're fucking hilarious.

keith won't spot him there, he's in the cap and gown at handsworth.

fucking hell, all going on in your street!

amnesty international has 200,000 UK based members and it would appear they do have a few members in wearside.... https://m.facebook.com/WearsideAmnesty/ fair play to them. what seems to be missing from the above page is any significant increase in activity since our takeover. strange really considering the tens of thousands of posts of outrage on rtg and their unequivocal support of human rights. I'm starting to think they're all full of shite.

unless something miraculous happens in january I reckon we could comfortably break in to the bottom 5. grim as fuck..... https://www.fourfourtwo.com/features/worst-premier-league-teams-ever-points-total

bucket hats in the 90s mate.

in less than 48 hours he's gone from being in the dug out, to being in the stands, to being at home with his feet up 90 mile along the coast.

I'm gonna throw my hat in the ring here.... ring king kev.

be paying bruce an £8m signing on fee to come back at this rate!

fycking surreal this.

love this album....

ps..... you can get round the telegraph's paywall on your phone by touching on refresh then before it finishes refreshing stopping it by touching on the 'x' sometimes takes a few attempts, but persevere and you get there in the end! doesn't seem to work for all paywalls though, never managed it with times.

here you go.... How incoming Newcastle boss Eddie Howe was set on the road to Tyneside by Diego Simeone With Newcastle appointment imminent, Howe must quickly demonstrate his unquestionable managerial skills and lessons learned from Bournemouth It is not a perfect metric but the adage that you can best measure a manager’s worth by the state of a club at the beginning and end of their tenure remains as reliable as any. And when Eddie Howe became Bournemouth manager in January 2009, they were 23rd in League Two, 10 points adrift of safety and fighting not just for their Football League survival but their very existence as a club. When he left 11 years later, Bournemouth were exiting the Premier League following five straight seasons in the top-flight, three promotions and easily the greatest era in the club’s history. Yes, the fairy tale did not have the ending he wanted, but the bottom line is that Newcastle United would be getting a 43-year-old manager of vast, if often understated, substance. His use of the 15 months since leaving Bournemouth has been instructive. There have been no media interviews. No self-promotion. No getting his name linked with any enticing vacancy. Howe has instead utilised his first sustained break from playing or managing for a combination of family time – his eldest boys Harry and Rocky are budding footballers – and the chance to prepare for his managerial return. This has meant looking back as well as forward. And so Howe has spent a sizable part of the past year reflecting on what he did right and what he did wrong at Bournemouth, particularly in that painful final season. That has meant re-watching their matches and reassessing the training sessions, of which all were carefully logged, to better understand how his players reacted to what he had been trying to achieve. Howe has his own football philosophy document and, in also watching plenty of football, often live with his two boys, he has been constantly updating his own attacking vision for the game. He has taken time to visit other clubs and understand how they work, notably Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid. The Argentine coach has proved himself one of the masters of adaptation, taking on the big two in Spain with a distinctive style of play that has yielded great success, including two league titles. Howe also visited another Madrid club, Rayo Vallecano, who were promoted last season to La Liga. At Vallecano he has encountered a different kind of coach, albeit one whose journey is similar to his own. When Howe left Bournemouth they were exiting the Premier League following five straight seasons in the top flight CREDIT: PA Andoni Iraola, 39, briefly a Spain international in his playing days, not only has got Vallecano promoted from the second tier but the club, who have spent more time out of the first tier over their history, are currently sixth in Liga – vastly outperforming their budget. Two days were also spent at Liverpool including a meeting with the architect of the club’s golden recruitment era, technical director Michael Edwards. Howe recognises that recruitment will be critical for Newcastle, especially when the club try to navigate this next January transfer window, and he will also know that it was an area which faltered to some extent towards the end of his Bournemouth tenure. At Liverpool he also met Alex Inglethorpe, the club’s academy director. He wanted to understand how the club have overhauled their structure over the past decade to a level that is allowing them to overcome the financial disadvantages and compete so consistently with Manchester City. He has already spent long hours assessing the Newcastle players and there would be immediate familiar faces in Callum Wilson, Ryan Fraser and Matt Ritchie, three players whose careers he has already influenced hugely. There would be risks, of course, on all sides. Howe’s only previous job outside of Dorset – just under two years at Burnley – was not the failure that is occasionally presented but certainly a time when he struggled to inspire the sort of improvement that Bournemouth fans had come to expect. The wider backdrop was also the most difficult personal period of his life following the death of his mother Anne. He felt a need to return to Dorset in 2012 and the people he knew best.Yet the legacy he left at Burnley was strong. He signed Ben Mee, now club captain and one of the most important Burnley players of the Sean Dyche era. Also from Manchester City’s development teams, Howe signed Kieran Trippier, now an England regular and occasional England captain. The combined cost of those two was around £600,000. Another future England international, Danny Ings, arrived from Bournemouth for just £1 million. His next club would be Liverpool. Back at Bournemouth he was able to shape the club almost completely in his own image, right down to the messaging around the stadium to the surface of the training pitches and the shape of the dining tables. The staff around him, headed by his assistant Jason Tindall – often a more demonstrative touchline presence – and numerous other ex-team-mates were hand-picked. Some will follow him to Newcastle. Callum Wilson will once again be under the guidance of former boss Eddie Howe at Newcastle CREDIT: Shutterstock Harry Redknapp would say that football fandom got progressively more laid-back as you travelled along the south-coast between Portsmouth and Bournemouth via Southampton and there can be no doubt that Howe would be operating under a scrutiny at Newcastle that he has never previously known. He is said to be excited by the prospect and would certainly attempt to deal with all the outside noise by simply focussing on improving the team. The experience of working previously with Maxim Demin at Bournemouth, hardly a conventional owner, would also stand him in good stead for what might follow. The hope must be that Newcastle’s new Saudi Arabian owners, represented in England by Amanda Staveley, now give him the autonomy to shape the club in his image and the time for change to take hold. Howe has often spoken about how his mother instilled in him a work ethic that, even by the obsessional standards of football managers, is all-consuming and that he thinks about her before every game. He has an eclectic range of influences and can talk with as much passion about what he learnt in a dressing-room with Tony Pulis and Sean O’Driscoll at Bournemouth as time spent studying managers like Brendan Rodgers and Arsene Wenger, or the legendary basketball coach John Wooden. Like Wooden, Howe is most fascinated by the process and the compound impact of relentlessly high-quality training and preparation. “There’s a lot of worry in the world,” he once said. “The reality is that it’s all about the preparation. You hope then that the result takes care of itself in the knowledge that you have done everything in your power to produce the best performance.

and so they should. little lee's worth every penny of that.

the very best of good fortune to our new man. obviously hope he gets us out the shit and goes to prove those like myself who have reservations horribly wrong and prospers!

wasn't me!

aye, I accept that. that and the fact I'm being a nostalgic old fool. still think he'd do a better job than howe or martinez mind. best not even mention john fucking terry!

I saw him 3 years ago at the cheltenham literature festival doing a talk about his then new book. at what you could probably describe as a neutral part of the country there was football tops in the audience from every one of the clubs he'd either played for or managed and he had the good grace to speak affectionately about each and every one of them from scunthorpe to england. however for the vast majority of the hour long session he talked about US, we hold a special place in his heart and not ashley or the passing of the last 3 years will have dampened that. love the bloke I do and I'd have him back involved with nufc again in a heartbeat. and that includes as a manager in preference to a howe or a martinez.

and me, beyond any shadow of a doubt. the euphoria of ashley finally fucking off is fading at an alarming rate and neither martinez or howe are gonna reignite it.

but what could possibly go wrong?

a quick visit to rtg and it would appear emery is shite and they'd rather have simon grayson.

on a slightly more serious note.... best i get on the official site and sort a brentford ticket before they disappear. the perils of being a returnee!

fucks sake. I was hoping for john terry.