Howay

How far from relegation do some of our fans need to be to stop saying “surely that’s enough” IF Burnley won their game in hand we’d be 9 points clear of them with 6 games to go

Wow what a player Bruno is. More goals than Wood, the way he shields the ball everytime he touches it is textbook. 6 points from Wolves and Leicester, Burnley 1 point from Norwich and West Ham, is their run starting?

You won’t get more time and space than that in the conference let alone the PL. nightmare of a header.

#kickabout

Howay man.

So is it sportswashing, or an investment to make money? I also enjoy that “the mags are adamant PIF are” and investment fund, I mean those two words are in the name of the thing. Thick as pig shit. No clue whatsoever what that jlaws point is. They’re a £700B (that’s only liquid funds iirc) fund who have effectively spent £1.3B on a football club, a notoriously hard thing to turn a profit on. How would we ever be sold at a profit unless we are one of the elite sides? And to get there they’d have to spend a fortune which makes profit even less likely. They can keep making up scenarios but the real reason they bought the club is staring them in the face. If they wanted profit they could have put £1.3B into Google shares ahead of the split.

Is that bloke in anyway reliable? Seems a weird time to throw in a bid for a player? Unless we think we now can show we are safe.

As Craig mentioned I think the timing is weird, unless they have a bloke lined up and coming in and have accepted going down but think this gives him a head start on getting his methods etc across, which would lend itself to the ownership thinking it’s time for a change as you mention. If it’s simply to try and stay up I think it’s a rash gamble with a short term outlook. When you look at the managers at the top end of the championship it’s mostly managers you’d say are probably worse than Dyche, WBA got Bruce for instance.

Fernandinho too maybe? What I like about the Man City players are their flair players don’t get discouraged or shy away when people try and intimidate them like Athleti did. Foden, Grealish, KDB, Silva etc will just keep going. I’ll always remember when Grealish played Birmingham for Villa and that fucking idiot ran on and punched the back of his head, he kept his head and then went on to score the winner iirc.

I’ve heard from the bloke I know that this £60m figure being thrown about is the internal communication at the moment, and that it’s what we can spend under FFP. That seems to line up with Howe’s quote there. Not sure how we can be capped to such a low number, whether it’s true or whether it’s just being put out with the intention it leaks out to the press which helps to deflate the idea of what we will spend. I just don’t really get how it tracks if we were wanting Botman and Eketike in January. Additionally, the players I’ve heard we are scouting have been a waste of time (Saliba, Kamara (Marseilles), Pacqueta, Raphinha, Nunez, etc), even the lower end ones (Brennan Johnson, Djed Spence, and Lloyd Kelly), if that number is true as after Matty Targetts 15m we’d be able to afford maybe one of them.

Agreed, feels like a desperate gamble by the new owners who’ve sadly fucked the clubs finances. They’ve done shite this season but from the outside it looks like the lack of investment finally caught up with them.

Luke is back defending his favorite person, who didn’t move training sessions to evenings but sometimes he did. Thanks pisshead. Special points for “this is dull” when he’s the one that started arguing with a post that had zero to do with him.

Half expect him to throw in a couple of “how do you say?” When the glasses come out.

Spot on, notice how Pardew has his glasses on the classic Pardew trying to look like an intellectual go to.

Personally think this is a swing and a miss from Douglas. It’s putting too much weight on the high finish we got and leaves out a crucial point of why Pardew wasn’t accepted, and why I personally won’t look back on Pardew’s time “very fondly”, which was the manner of his appointment. It was a gut punch to the fans, a popular manager was removed for no fucking reason and replaced by a man who had no right to get a PL job. It felt like Ashley yet again being spiteful towards the fans as there was a good atmosphere and feeling from the fans towards Hughton and that squad. I look back on that 5th place season and really enjoyed it at the time, but I don’t really look back fondly at it. Not because I’m deluded and was expecting more, but because it was pretty much peak Ashley - from the manner of Pardews appointment, to the complete disregard and lack of desire to build on that 5th place finish which led to immediate decline in the squad and atmosphere. A lot of those players also left the club in ways that left my feelings towards them a little sour, I understand why some of them did it from their view and I don’t think they owe us anything but it still soured my opinion of them. For example seeing Ba suddenly being our cheerleader and trying to get to events/matches etc.

Does this exile weirdo post his count daily?

Seems it was kicking off after the Man City game. Savic pulled Grealishs hair who responded by saying “you’re a cunt mate” sadly the video I saw of it was removed from Twitter. Then Savic tried to head butt Sterling, followed by Grealish and Savic being held apart in the tunnel Found a picture of Savic and Grealish

In front of our scouts

It’s all future events so it’s pretty subjective I guess. I just personally feel that it would take a lot for them to be in a position to realistically compete with us next season. I have a very low view of the majority of our squad so think improving on those players with every player we buy is almost certain. Couple those two views and I think the clubs will be a wide margin apart next season. Totally get football can change quickly though. On Rafa, he only had them 15th I think they’d have been safer with him but I still think they’d have been comfortably bottom half. If they sell those two I’m not sure how much they’d get but I’d be a little surprised if they went for nearly £50m each. I’ve heard that’s what their ask is from us for DCL but everyone knows they’re over a bit of a barrel as well. They’ve also done an astonishingly bad job at spending their money, so give them £100m to play with and they’ll buy mostly crap (Myolenko and Alli would be nearly £65m if their fees were fully paid for example), I don’t really see that changing much as it’s been consistently shit regardless of the manager they’ve had. Don’t get me wrong, I want them to go down but at the same time I just don’t see them being a threat to us next season even if Lampard is sacked. I do think they’ll hang onto Lampard if they stay up, the narrative around them is Rafa is mostly to blame it seems which helps take some heat off Lampards dog shit management.

I’m not saying ours has been good, just it’s a weird thing to suddenly start banging on about. It also, as the Fish points out, fucks up their “Ashley is brilliant” mantra as one of the areas Newcastle fans brought up was lack of funding in the youth side. I mean, they have Henderson and Pickford but in the same time frame we’ve had Carroll, Dummett, Forster, Woodman (borderline atm), Armstrong, Longstaff, and going a little further back Shola, Taylor, Ramage, Aaron Hughes, Chopra. While I agree Henderson is the best of the bunch I think we’ve produced more who have been fairly regular PL players compared to them. Is our academy producing far less than it should be? Absolutely but I don’t think theirs is some conveyor belt of talent that warrants them taking the high ground on this topic.

Updated

They have the Loch Ness Drogba tbf.

They have but I don’t really see any signs they will change that, I also don’t see them attracting an Ancelotti level manager that would paper over that and have them finish above 12th. I guess I don’t see this as a blip for them, they’ve been on a downward trajectory for a while now that was slightly slowed at times due to the level of manager they had. They now have a manager who is more in line with their level, it also hasn’t been a fluke under Lampard they weren’t miles better this season under a manager as good as Benitez. I don’t think they have much flow from their academy nowadays tbh, they only have Jonjoe Kenny, Tom Davies, and Anthony Gordon around the first team squad, Kenny is out on loan and 25, and Tom Davies is unregistered. We arguably have more with Dummett, De Bolle, Anderson, and the Longstaffs hanging around the first team squad and our academy has been massively underwhelming. It’s be quite a turnaround for them to come 9th - 12th especially if it’s going to take a really good manager coming in, keeping DCL and Richarlison, and some youth team prospects getting into the side from next season. I also think 9th - 12th would be the bottom end of our target, not that I’d be angry with Howe if that’s where we finish, as we could finish there this season and as Alex pointed out if you take results since Howe arrived we’d be 8th. Clearly taking results since Howe come in is effected by opposition played in that window but we’d also likely have a much improved squad to offset that. It could happen that they suddenly turn everything around and challenge the spots we are targeting but I see it as far more likely they finish bottom half if they do manage to stay up. As like I say I really do not think their squad has much talent/quality in it, they’ve also been weakening through transfers (Myoklenko is a downgrade on Digne for example), and owe a lot of money for Dele Alli which impacts their already shit financial situation.

What a weird fucking thing to go after, I also forgot they had such a glowing track record of youth prospects themselves.