Gemmill

40.

This post is sponsored by 20/20 hindsight. No one was advocating selling Miggy after he'd just gone through his purple patch.

https://www.themag.co.uk/2024/09/this-latest-initiative-im-very-impressed-with-newcastle-united-sporting-director/ Well. This lad is destined to be very good friends with @thebrokendoll, I think.

"Look at all this extra work I won't do". Unbelievable.

Could be worse, you could have a dog that wants walking.

Not as quick as your three colleagues!

America can just fuck off at this stage. The mass shootings and the fact that it's a coin flip whether they give the world another four years of Trump. Just write the place off as a bad job.

Please don't lecture the fabulous baker boy about fresh sourdough. I invented fresh sourdough.

oh god, you lying spent with webs of poached spunk floating all around you. Dear me.

It's all the lads down south who are getting hysterical about this. Too much smashed avo on toast, I reckon.

Waiting for point number 2 though.

Oof when CT is tumble drying your undies, you know you've REALLY gone off on one.

I think the event itself is a good thing - the more transparent the club is, the better. Much worse would be to have windows go by and just keep sending Howe out to front everything up and nobody ever hear from the bloke that's in charge of our entire recruitment strategy.

Hope's is largely just the quotes, posted without context. I would have to go through and do a side by side vs the Athletic (which I'm not gonna) but my sense is that Hope's focused on mostly the quotes that indicated tension. I might be being unfair though, and he would say "I published direct quotes".

Much better article. Actually feels like a positive event rather than a negative one. Clearly still work to do on his and Howe's relationship.

It's on YouTube I believe, so you can actually watch it.

It could be argued that Howe has been doing the same thing.

We've been saying that Howe shouldn't have to be the one fronting up the window and the transfer policy, so they've given journalists a chance to speak to Mitchell direct. But Mitchell has obviously taken the approach that he's not the sacrificial lamb being sent out to maintain Howe as the golden child, and take all the flak for a window that was largely driven by the previous transfer policy and the manager's insistence on one player. There's definitely tension and an element of "know your place" going on, but I think we all knew that before the interview. It's not like Howe is waking up this morning to discover there's a tension between him and the DoF, he already knew it. We can't be a club that has a DoF structure and allows Howe to dictate. None of us know to what extent that's really true, but we got a glimpse in the summer when Eddie hoyed his Germany wobbler that he's not a man that feels comfortable with change or possibly with this new structure. If he pushes that to where it becomes a terminal event, I'll be absolutely gutted. But you can't make the DoF subservient to the head coach. You'll never be able to employ a DoF worthy of the title.

It would be a disaster for Eales if Howe leaves. I don't think there's any conspiracy to get him to walk at all. I just think you've got two big egos wrestling over boundaries. Ultimately Howe will have to give because Mitchell is senior to him in the pecking order. Or he can choose to walk.

He's saying that we've spent £250m+ and made no player sales, and that that approach isn't fit for purpose. June 30th is all the evidence he needs to point to to say that he's right. We built up a pressure on player sales where we had to get rid of two players, both of whom we didn't want to have to sell, and they are now immediate starters for other PL sides, at least one of which is probably our competitor for European spots. That's what he's saying can't continue. I don't really see how you can argue against it. He's not saying we bought poorly or that our scouts didn't have success in those instances, or suddenly became bad. He's saying we need to cast a wider net so that we can become a player trading club that identifies talent early, buys it, and has the ability to trade it away so that PSR concerns fall away.

I've just had a proper read and it doesn't sound great from that perspective. There seemed to be quite a lot of "Eddie's smart enough to know..." and what he was basically saying was "Eddie should be smart enough to know that I'm right". I mean the idea that we need to be more like a Brighton is spot on. He's been at big clubs and if he's come here and said our scouting network isn't up to scratch, and our way of assessing players isn't right, then I believe him. We have to start identifying players before their price goes daft. This was very much a "that window wasn't my fault" interview though, and we've seen Howe saying pretty much the same from his point of view, which doesn't look too clever. Let's see what happens. I don't mind there being a tension between DoF and the head coach - there probably should be. Especially initially when Howe isn't used to it. But if he leaves in a huff and thinks he can go on to a bigger club and not find himself in the same situation, he's kidding himself.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-13813933/Newcastle-sporting-director-Paul-Mitchell-transfers.html Paul Mitchell:

They've taken months and months to approve this. They know it fucking stinks, but they've just lost a legal case to Leicester so I think they've just buckled here.

Nice to get a new take on it though.