Optimistic Nut

1-2. Ritchie for us, Howe & Tindall for Bournemouth.

The tears when he replaces their beloved Pickford (who played more league games for Bradford than he did for Sunderland, but they still worship him) for England in the next couple of years, too. Hopefully while being Newcastle number 1.

Go to Burnley now and offer them £10-15m plus Pope.

Think Tonali, Gordon, Bruno & Isak would improve any team in the league, Botman once he's up to speed probably joins them. Those 4/5 plus Howe combined make good players very good around them and average players good. Long as we have 4 of those in the team with Isak being one of them, we can beat anyone in the league.

Ah I hate stuff like this. I remember the 98 Cup Final for example, a massive fuss being made about it being 24 years since the last FA Cup Final. McDonald, Hibbert, Moncur, etc seemed like ancient history when you think we had Shearer, Lee, Howey, etc. Those 74 & 98 Cup Finals are closer to each other, than we are to those 98/99 Finals. Happy Friday, everyone.

Think we can win it but would take a draw, as long as we win the two after it.

Fantastic win for the whole of Wearside.

Liverpool have two very "icky" away games in between easy home games coming up. Brentford & Bournemouth away. If we can get the gap down to 5 points in the next 3 games we can at least dream a bit.

I've fancied seeing if we could turn Tino into a right-sided Bale. Has the physical attributes.

They created some chances but felt to me like one of those where if they'd scored one, we'd have found another gear. We have a great knack of once we get to two goals ahead which we seem to do with ease at the moment, to just play within ourselves and see games through.

Sell for £10-15m, get an Onyewu-style loan as 4th choice CB to keep us covered this season and to help with FFP, then go for the big Guehi-style bid in the summer?

Would still mean no-one has pulled away or made up ground on us? We're due a slip soon so it's good the rest have slipped up too.

5 of the top 7 all in action and none winning would be a fucking beautiful set of results.

Maybe not.

This is where City win 15 in a row or some shit and win it again, isn't it?

Fuck them, let's hunt Liverpool down.

Potter will do well at West Ham.

Massive blow Barnes being out tbh. It's been fine when we've been flying out the blocks but there were times early season where we were down or level and he dragged us to a result. Joelinton and Willock can cover there but it's a huge goal there missing if we need a goal.

Sort of why I don't think we should be selling Barnes. Even if he's been pretty average since the first couple of months, he's probably going to get 8-10 goals this season. Liverpool have Jota, Arsenal have Trossard...someone you can trust to get something. We basically need another 5-6 of his equivalents through the rest of the squad.

The pride they'll have when another one of their products dumps them before he plays 100 matches with them, and they claim trophies he wins elsewhere as their own. All while their actual captain continues being a slogger scrapping around the Play Offs as he marches towards 500 appearances for them.

Symptom of the Ashley era. A normal PL club would have had the likes of him, Clark, Gayle, Ritchie for 2 years, 3 tops. No hard feelings, limited player who gave his best.

He's been very good but I still think put your best players in. Shouldn't have to wait for him to drop off before putting Botman in, we should be building on what we've achieved. Murphy has been scoring and assisting but if we signed an RW tomorrow I'd be expecting him to go into the team.

Probably won't be popular but I'd go Botman & Schar CB. Burn has done a good job but you play your best players.

Any idea what our longest winning run is as a top flight team? Must be getting close at 8?

Poor opposition but I thought Targett was good. Unlucky he got two bad injuries for us one at the start of the 22/23 season when he was playing well then Burn took over, then again last season at Man Utd just as all the injuries were building up and he'd have likely got a run.