thebrokendoll

just been forced to brave the local tesco superstore, last three normal time, afterwork visits have seen the shelves empty of toilet rolls and it's getting perilously close to having to look for the biggest leaves in the garden. got there 15 minutes before it was supposed to open expecting it to be busier than normal, but not fucking pandemonium. gridlocked round all tills with folk with trolleys piled twice as high as they're designed for. managed to get a 9 pack of bog roll just before the aisle emptied, briefly toyed with idea of picking up two but decided not to be a cunt. pasta shelves bare as were bizarrely the ones which normally house ambrosia devon custard apart from two tins of the chocolate flavour. queued for 40 minutes to pay for 9 bog rolls, a jar of alta rica coffee and 2 pints of milk. fucking country is about to go in to meltdown.

i remember the papers claiming swine flu would be killing folk in the uk at the rate of 60,000 a day. think it might've been the sun mind.

aye, bang & olufsen supply our tannoy system. I read it in the chronicle!

what pisses me off every bit as much about bruce/the local press and their apparent disregard for the truth is also their uncanny knack to make things disappear altogether. 7 months of bruce now and we haven't heard a solitary word on the fact our academy/training facilities are fucking light years behind that of our penniless third division neigjbours. not puppets though. definitely not.

it's a fucking nightmare I'll grant you that. I mean, do you give credibility to a reporter from a newspaper you normally wouldn't even entertain as a catalyst to light the garden bonfire? or do you believe a morally bankrupt, complicit fat liar with a history of stitching up his employers to feather his own nest, including those who've supported him through the death of his parents. a man who's continuously told us he's not a puppet to an absolute cunt on an uunprecedented scale and that that cunt is in actual fact a nice bloke? it's like being stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

currently holed up in the van next to talybont reservoir in the brecon beacons. it's fucking bleak outside, had to drag the dogs outside for a piss! woodburner's on, pleasantly stoned, half way through a bottle of merlot and cosy as fuck listening to this. give it a go.....

for who? not for this shit show.

to quote (sort of) snowball and napoleon... all reporters are cunts, but some reporters are more cuntish than others. occasionally they get it right as opposed to staggeringly wrong.

not sure if there's already a thread for this? a lot of what gets said seems to get buried in who it applies to, so just in case it deserves a slot of its own... according to the mag, craig hope has upset the fat lad, take your pick on whether that's ashley or bruce or some hideous, grotesque amalgamation of the pair of thems cholesterol. https://www.themag.co.uk/2020/03/mike-ashley-bans-reporter-due-to-negative-newcastle-united-coverage/

if I was the longstaffs old man I would be telling my two lads to get as far away from this shithole of a club as it's possible to get. can't even begin to describe how incredibly sad that makes me feel.

canny article from fourfourtwo. the main problem I have with pieces like this is that they're not the norm, not being written by the local press and more poignantly not even being understood by 50,000 profoundly stupid fuckwits..... This FA Cup run merely masks Newcastle's sorry stasis under Mike Ashley Newcastle United are through to the FA Cup quarter final after their win over West Bromwich Albion on Tuesday night. Given what the club’s attitude has been towards domestic cups over recent years, that must be a real novelty. For as long as Mike Ashley has owned Newcastle, a succession of managers have seemingly tried to exit domestic tournaments as quickly as possible. The logic being that the first team squad is so narrow and the club’s focus is so trained on retaining the Premier League broadcasting revenue, that aiming for anything else has been turned into a frivolous pursuit. The cut and thrust (the fun) of cup competitions are a nuisance. An obstacle, even, on the road to gilded stasis. Newcastle are hardly alone in having that attitude, but it's a mentality which is hard to tolerate in football. It’s contradictory. The whole point of sport is competition, so watching it reduced to a form of risk analysis is enough to push any supporter towards existential crisis Newcastle fans can speak for themselves; it’s not anyone else’s place to describe their relationship with their team. But it's discouraging to witness the wilful ignorance towards their dilemma - this faux-incredulity at their complaints about Steve Bruce. As if, after years of watching ambition being retracted – and it has been for nearly a decade and a half now – an appearance in a cup quarter-final is supposed to be some sort of recompense. Perhaps that’s overstating things, but there does seem to be a growing habit of belittling these supporters. How often, for instance, have they been criticised this season for responding negatively to Bruce? Either to his initial appointment or the performances he has authored since His football has often been dull, antiquated and unsuccessful, and pretending otherwise would just be disingenuous. Yes, Newcastle are unlikely to be relegated this season and, in a few weeks, they will probably have the privilege of being knocked out of the FA Cup by Manchester City, but it’s a strange world indeed when such meagre accomplishments represent ultimate validation. “What do you think of Steve Bruce's Newcastle now then!” Well, the same. That they're a football team without a proper identity. That they exist in games without ever defining them. And that in spite of the odd encouraging result, they've made no ideological progress over the last six months. The most pertinent conclusion remains a damning one: Newcastle are the only club in the Premier League that would ever have given Bruce another job at this level of the game. Not entirely coincidentally, they're also the only club in the Premier League that - quite literally - cannot give season tickets away. That’s not necessarily an indictment of his abilities, more just a recognition that he isn’t a coach capable of taking a club on a journey worth buying into. He is an eighteen-month appointment. A do-the-best-you-can man. He is someone who can pick up the baton, carry it for a few hundred yards, but who will invariably trip over his own feet a short way down the track. Eventually the results will turn and his situation will become irretrievable and when that happens - when he clears out his desk and boxes up his lever-arch files - it'll be as if he was never there at all. . He’s not going to change Newcastle’s realities as a club. He isn’t going to transform any of their players or encourage any sort of evolution. So, what’s the point? That’s not meant to be dismissive. It’s just that the trend in modern management is for precisely the type of head coach that Steve Bruce has never been. It’s a world of thinkers and doers, pragmatists and philosophers. The fans understand that; this is what instructed their original despondency. They knew that the occasional one-goal win over a top-six side would really just be a nice day out and that, a week or two later, their team would be back to where it was before, with all the same weaknesses and fragilities. They knew that they wouldn't go anywhere under Bruce and, to date, they're being proven absolutely right. A statistic which illustrates that: since beating Chelsea on the 21st January, Newcastle have not won a Premier League game. Since the 2-2 draw with Everton three days later, they haven’t even scored a Premier League goal. The sequence itself isn’t the problem. The issue is the lack of growth. While one bad performances bleeds into another, the good performances - like the wins over Manchester United, Tottenham and that last-minute victory over Chelsea - never seem to instruct anything at all. They don't take anything from those games. Newcastle never get any stronger or better as a result and it's been that way - with the Rafael Benitez interlude excepted - for as long as anyone can remember. It’s the same players playing in the same way every single week. The only real variable is the performance of the opposition. Worst of all, there seems to be an acceptance from on high that that is the sort of football club Newcastle are happy to be. That they're content to be a victim. And happy for their supporters to be told that anything other than failure every year is cause for celebration. A quarter-final is a nice moment and Wembley is finally in reach again. That's excellent; the fans deserve that. Here's hoping that they can somehow upend Manchester City. But it's very telling that 14th place and a win over a Championship team is what has become a "told you so" moment at Newcastle.

aye them too! as for waddle above.... if he had a tash it'd be baz from sid the sexist.

man city's away strip is possibly the minciest outfit I think I've ever seen. they also look like somebody's dropped a bag of drumstick squashies.

aye. loathe to give any credit to a daily mail reporter but I reckon other than a recentish article by brian reade, hope seems more on the ball about the shit show that is nufc managed by bruce than anyone else. or is at least prepared to actually write it.

some lunatic should've decapitated the cunt.

missed opportunity for hope there. when bruce asked him if was calling him a liar he should've just said yes. bruce signs for newcastle on the 17th july, joelinton on the 23rd july, ashley's turns up at the training ground in his helicopter on the 24th july. since that week he's never stopped lying, the fat complicit cunt.

it's hard to work out in this thread amongst all the debate about who's taking paddock lad's lass out on a date, whether michael kiwanuka is a good musician or not?

you fucking stupid cunt.

why do you like paying to be dry fucked in the arse by a fat narcissist who's pissing himself laughing at your misery?

we've gone way beyond lewis carroll and his possible use of opium. we're in to the realms of a san pedro cactus the size of a giant redwood; albert hoffman knocking up a blotter like a quilt cover or even dr rick strassman administering the spirit molecule with a fucking petrol pump. bruce is either insane, hallucinating in a way never even experienced by a shaman, or thicker than fucking whale spunk. it's a tricky one.

i know michael martin has his critics (i've had several spats with him over the years) but it's hard to disagree with anything he says in this article.... http://www.true-faith.co.uk/everything-steve-bruce-says-is-wrong/ an infinitely more accurate summary than the utter fucking drivel written by that cunt edwards.

luke edwards latest musings, hideous cunt that he is. probably shouldn't give this wildly inaccurate pile of steaming shite any more publicity, but just in case anybody fancies a chuckle.... Newcastle United is a wonderful club in a magnificent city but it can be claustrophobic, a difficult and demanding place to play football. It can feel so intense at times that it is difficult to breath let alone relax and reflect, suffocating and stifling. And the walls are closing in on the team and manager Steve Bruce, the atmosphere, toxic all season, is now so poisonous it could prove fatal. Relegation is a very clear and present danger again. Newcastle is a club that is never far away from a crisis. It is the heavy price you pay when you have an owner like Mike Ashley, a management structure which lacks the required talent and expertise and a recruitment model that views players as individuals, never as part of a coherent team building project. There was always going to come a time this season when Newcastle faltered and floundered. They are not a very good team, have not been playing well and got lucky so many times over the course of the first half of the season, you always knew there would come a point when that deserted them too. It was always the danger, it was what we all thought would happen last summer when Rafa Benitez refused his new contract, left it until five weeks before the start of the season to admit it and Steve Bruce was hastily appointed as an emergency replacement. It stank of desperation because it was and all but a few predicted Bruce would be a disaster, especially with a team that had been stuck in a desperate relegation battle all last season and lost two thirds of its goals over the summer with the departures of Salomon Rondon and Ayoze Perez. Disaster looked unavoidable, yet, for six months, it has been. Newcastle have not been in the bottom three since August, they were tenth in January, they are in the Fifth Round of the FA Cup for the first time in more than a decade. They were, for all their limitations and the ugliness of the football, doing well. Bruce had stabilised things, defied the doubters and Newcastle had something every team that deserves admiration possesses - a refusal to be beaten easily, a never give up attitude and a strong team spirit. They played badly, but found a way to win, to collect points and stay out of trouble. It deserved praise. It barely got any. Even when they were winning, Newcastle’s players were told they were rubbish, the manager clueless, “a relegation team in all but points total” according to one local critic, never shy to attack. It was a snappy soundbite. It won support, it preached to the already converted, it gained traction and it painted the picture people wanted to see. Even when Newcastle were winning, even when they were beating Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United, Sheffield United and Chelsea, drawing with Manchester City and Wolves away, the manager and team have been told they are crap. Nothing is good enough and the manager certainly never will be. Some of us refused to jump so such a conclusion, preferring to wait and see how Bruce did before he was condemned, derided and dismissed as a mistake. It is, after all, the fair and reasonable thing to do with all managers, especially at a club that also expected Chris Hughton and Alan Pardew to be horrendous failures, only to end up pleasantly surprised when the former took Newcastle back into the Premier League in style and the latter took the Magpies back into Europe with a fifth-placed finish at the end of his first full season in the dugout. Rationale and reasonable were not what anybody wanted, though. There was anger, vitriol, pain and sadness. Benitez offered hope, light amid the darkness of the Ashley regime. So, when he went, the darkness and depression returned. Nobody wanted to hear that Benitez was also partly to blame for his departure, that his refusal to compromise and the overriding attraction of a £12m-a-year-contract in China could not be dismissed or ignored. But that did not fit the popular narrative, it did not tell anyone what they wanted to hear, not at a club that had a dedicated band of supporters, in their thousands, not hundreds, who vowed “If Rafa goes, we go.” They were true to their word too, at least 8,000 fans deserting the team, staying away but not losing interest. Everything, though, had to be negative, it had to be critical, it had to argue everything had turned sour. It has seeped into the foundations, it has shaped media coverage, perceptions and even when results were good, it fuelled negativity and a sense of impending doom. There were two things you were not allowed to do according to the rule of the mob. You could not criticise Benitez’s behaviour or decision to leave and you could not argue Bruce deserved to be shown some respect and be given some time to show what he could do, before we rushed to judged. I did both, write what you think and know, not what people want to hear is always a decent starting point as a football journalist. It made me a target for abuse, a social media lightening rod every time Newcastle lost. So, when Newcastle won, I argued back, I pointed out things were going far better than they had thought, that maybe Bruce deserved some praise. I also enjoy arguing, although not on a rare weekend off with friends in Sheffield last week, who laughed at the comments I have received. They know me better than anyone, but even they were shocked by some of it, especially when it poured in even after I had told people I was off work, drinking in the same pub I celebrated my 18th birthday in, erm, a long time after. It was an argument I was winning too, but not anymore. The tide has turned, Newcastle’s bad performances are being punished, they are back in trouble and Bruce looks confused, unsure and uncertain. The players have lost confidence and belief, they are in trouble, real trouble. It has been coming for weeks, there is no point claiming otherwise. The team has lost the things that made them likeable and, yes, successful to a point. They are becoming easy to beat and they do, indeed, look increasingly clueless as an offensive force. Where do Newcastle and Bruce go from here? Well, this is what managers are paid to do. There was always going to be a spell like this when results would be poor, and the critical background noise would become so loud it would drown everything else out. He has to deal with it, shield the players, keep them going and find a way to win again Because, despite everything, despite the £40m striker who cannot score goals, Joelinton, despite the three loan signings made in January, shoved into the team at Crystal Palace, who look ill prepared, despite the run of just one win in nine league games and disjointed performances, confused tactics and lack of coherent attacking plan, Newcastle are still seven points clear of the drop zone and three of their next four league games are at home. They are still doing ok, they are still not a relegation team because of their points total and all is not lost. Nobody has failed, not yet. The rest is up to Bruce and his players because they might only need another nine points to be safe. Then we can talk about style of football, long term plans and everything else, because then it matters. This season was always going to be a survival battle, anyone who says differently is deluded, wants Bruce to fail or is so bitter towards the club they have forgotten why they were complaining about Ashley in the first place. Context is crucial, regardless of what you might think if you pay too much attention to social media. It’s going to be fascinating to watch how things unfold and I will be arguing, as ever, while it does.

even a decade and a half isn't long enough to erase the horror of 'shoes off' quite comfortably the most cringingly embarrassing song ever to grace a football ground and those that partook should've been given a lifetime banning order! that said, i remember a game at villa park, where one fucker possibly surpassed shoes off both in the cap and gown (formerly the witton arms) and in the away end by removing his prosthetic leg and waving that about in the air, to much hilarity from the zany shoes off boys. it wasn't funny, although it would've been if he'd keeled over sideways! been a few year now since i even attended an away game so can't really comment on the newer ditties. 'no surrender' was doing the rounds 35 years ago, so i'm guessing it's either back in popularity or there's some kind of remake?? as for tommy robinson... he'll hopefully get sucked in to the same jet engine as ashley.

it's not a bad article, with the exception of this... 'Supporters are sick and tired of having the piss taken out of them' tragically there's tens of thousands who are that stupid they don't appear to realise that's what's happening, prefering even to defend ashley in some cases. until people start seeing the blindingly obvious and walk away they'll have what they deserve... a dying club.

the usually reliable george caulkin seems to have ruffled a few feathers on his twitter by stating that bruce isn't the problem at nufc... Steve Bruce isn’t the problem at #NUFC. Each game, each result is portrayed as a referendum on his management and another week goes by, ignoring the bigger picture ... that the club is built to fail and that’s exactly what’s happening. Nobody can be surprised by that, surely? i think as a stand alone statement it's fair enough, we all know ashley is the biggest cunt, however bruce is far from deserving of much defence, if you willingly play with fire george, there's a reasonable chance you'll get burned.