Howay

Really thought La Liga would have bent over backwards to allow Barca to keep him. It’ll surely be Man City or PSG that will end up signing him.

I’ve genuinely no way of rating what a player is worth anymore, Arsenal paid £50M for Ben White who is not a stand out CB in any way to me. I suppose it’s what Villa would accept and money is no object to Man City. It’ll be interesting to see how Grealish gets on as for me he’s not hit his ceiling yet, he seems to just keep stepping up to the next level when given the chance and with Guardiola coaching him I could see him becoming an elite level performer. I saw an image of two full 11’s Man City could field if they sign Grealish and Kane and honestly both sides could finish in the top 4. Meanwhile we can’t put out two starting 11’s of professional players (meaning without dipping into our youth sides).

Who is apparently having second thoughts about joining permanently even if we do get a bid accepted. Who’d have thought showing this little fucking ambition would be unattractive to players. I still think there’s a chance ASM leaves late, and with them two gone we are completely fucked.

Edwards is such a tit, that certainly reads like praise for Bruce as the focus was definitely on his “different strengths and attributes” which just happen to be things that aren’t tactical awareness and being up to date. The highest praise of all for Bruce comes when Wilson says it’ll be nice to have a good coach around from the start of the season to help the previous lot, I know if I was in the previous lot I’d be buzzing with all that praise. There’s also fucking no chance Bruce wanted Jones brought in, he was clearly fuming with him on the touchline regularly and like Alex says he even distanced himself from being involved. Edwards yet again showing how little he knows about the sport he covers, he has different strengths and attributes but maybe it’s better left to sports journalists like Caulkin that have strengths like research, writing articles that aren’t just clickbait, and giving a shit about the fan base of the area they cover.

Haven’t even bid for anyone yet. What a fucking shit show of a club.

If that happens I can’t see us staying up. 2 weeks left of the window so if that’s true about them holding out for more it would be another week or so before he transferred there, giving our crack transfer team a week to replace our best player with someone that’s capable of immediately having a similar level of impact, or buying a number of players that are upgrades on other areas, both are unlikely and Ashley would love to gamble that we’d somehow stay up so we’d hear how it was just too late to sign anyone.

Edwards is clueless tbh, I’m not going to give him the benefit of thinking he’s a WUM I’m just going to accept what he says as if he actually thinks it. Why does he relentlessly compare Bruce to Benitez? Especially when he basically tries to imply Benitez did a shit job, matching the efforts of a newly promoted side after spending 80m or so on attacking players isn’t exactly the ringing endorsement Edwards seems to think. Much like Pardew I can’t accept using lack of signings as a defence when the blokes themselves constantly defend Ashley over said lack of signings. Also he can absolutely fuck off going on about it being joyless if this is what the fans think is funny. Again blaming the fan base, maybe what’s joyless is Mike fucking Ashley going in to year 13 of ownership of this club and Steve Bruce, a woefully unqualified and fucking shit manager, going into season 3, maybe it’s the uninspired fucking shit football that Bruce has the side playing? Nah blame the fans that have travelled miles to watch the side lose to fucking Rotherham. What an absolute fucking prick he is, why doesn’t he do us all a favor and fuck off and cover some other club the miserable little wank.

Don’t think they call him a paedo enough in that article.

Napping thank fuck . Better here than typing it to him and having my phone vibrating knowing he’s coming out with his spew while being unable to call him a divvy.

Think I’ve just about hit my limit with one of my mates, he’s a big anti-vax type (but denies being anti-vax he’s just questioning things he says). I’ve not seen my father or sister in nearly 2 years at this point due to all the travel restrictions, so my dad hasn’t met his 9 month old granddaughter. Meanwhile this ball bag constantly puts his rants in the group WhatsApp I’m in, arguing with basically the entire group, yelling about his rights and a multitude of other things all the while sharing absolute fucking nonsense articles wrote by people that have zero medical knowledge and acting like they’re all fact, and that any other news source is agenda led propaganda. I’ve argued with him in the past but it just goes fucking nowhere. This morning the whopper decides to post a fucking petition some throbber is sending round about how we shouldn’t have vaccine passports and that sort of thing. I’m genuinely at the point where I don’t regard him as a mate anymore, I just called him a stupid cunt if he thinks I give a single fuck about his opinions on individual freedoms and muted the group for a bit. He wasn’t worried about what he deemed the small threat COVID posed to him (why give a fuck about anyone else?) so why is he arsed about the even smaller percentage he’d be effected in anyway by the vaccine? I’d be more willing to respect his hesitancy regarding the vaccine if he didn’t celebrate “freedom day” by snorting lines of coke he bought from what I assume must be Bykers most careful and trustworthy drug dealer, before buying some fucking anti-parasite drug from India off the internet called Ivermectin that apparently is all the rage with other anti vax idiots to prevent COVID (the authorities are very strongly warding off this one due to the litany of side effects that it creates even when used for it’s intended purpose). No point at all in this post btw, just needed to vent about the tit and I’ve been climbing the walls of the house now and feel like we have a way forward out of all of this but people like this have suddenly decided to question absolutely everything unless some helmet on a podcast that’s been demonetized is saying it. I know others have lost more than me, I saw Renton had posted the loss of his sister a few months ago which I’m really sorry to hear about and my condolences, this just serves as even more reason for me to be absolutely sick to the back teeth about people like this.

I agree the target himself is underwhelming, I just mean if we are to go for him it’s pretty pathetic being outbid by Nice. Absolute fucking zombie club.

So Nice and Brentford are the teams to beat us to transfer targets so far, the list of clubs we can’t compete with continues to grow.

Spot on, the same people screaming sports washing at Saudi Arabia are helping Qatar with their own brand of it. They’re as bad as each other, do these people honestly think Qatar just sits on its hands doing fuck all to Saudi Arabia? As that’s the way it’s often portrayed which is exactly what Qatar wants. Saudi Arabia are probably the biggest and the baddest, but they’re kidding themselves if they honestly want to act like the ruling families in the other surrounding countries are shining beacons of humanity. Like you say, I’m all for a higher standard being applied but then we need to deal with the heavy ties to Qatar, UAE, and Russian mobsters at the top of the game just as much as blocking Saudi Arabia. We’re going to now act aghast at this type of phone hacking, yet when Liverpool did it to Manchester City’s scouting system it was largely met with a collective shrug. Of course there’s a part of me that would absolutely love this lot to come in and blow through fortunes getting NUFC to the top of the game, but more of me wants fucking rid of Mike Ashley and that’s what’s getting completely lost on a lot of these arseholes who constantly have pops at the fan base. Meanwhile we have to sit and watch Manchester United fans get applauded for storming their ground and getting a game cancelled before their owners buy Jadon Sancho and give Rafael Varane 500k a week. If these guys want to talk morals and fairness that’s fine, so let’s level the playing field and introduce hard caps on yearly salary and transfer spends, spread the TV money through the entire pyramid so that the lowest levels of the game don’t have to struggle financially all the time, that’s not what they want though they just want the current clubs at the top to remain there while they shrug and trot out lazy stereotypes about the rest of the teams. Until there’s some type of fair reporting on the fucking horrors committed by Qatar, and all the fucking shit that they do behind the curtain, it’s not fair of them to attack NUFC fans who want a deal with SA to happen.

Speaking of stupid cunts, Wraith has been on Simon Jordan’s talkSPORT show: What an absolute shoeing he gets by Jordan , claims to have contacts on both sides of the deal. What a throbber.

Exactly, the stupid cunts initial stance was that it was all bollocks and the Saudis weren’t for real, that is absolutely and very clearly not the case. At this point he’s just acting like he called it if it doesn’t happen, as if he knows the outcome of cases before they’ve even started. The very same bloke wrote an article about why it was all bollocks because he didn’t understand some of the filings with Companies house during the bid, he’s an absolute embarrassment tbh and would be better off just piping down rather than embarrassing himself further like he is with all this.

A thread on it by a serious journalist, rather than by a lazy wank like Edwards.

So another fucking pointless season under an owner that’s actively trying his hardest to sell the club. Left to watch Steve Bruce’s minging fucking tactics as well .

Just to remind us of what we were missing out on.

Pardew’s tenure was really big for me in that respect, I remember before him a 3-0 or 4-0 loss felt like a complete fucking hammering, I would be absolutely gutted and embarrassed we got smacked like that, but he seemed to lose matches by those score lines or worse regularly enough that they started to feel like a 2-0 or narrow loss. We’ve had some right plums as manager under Ashley mind

I think the Shaw goal was as excited as I’ve been for a goal in years tbh. I’ve always been a club before country type fan, but I did always watch England. I think it’s just that prior group of players was so immensely dislikable that it made it easy as fuck to shrug off their failures, Gerrard, Terry, Ferdinand, Owen, etc are just complete and utter insufferable up their own arse bellends who played international football purely for personal gain and let their club rivalry ruin what was on paper a good England side. In stark contrast it’s clear the current lot care, and they also seem a lot more conscious of their positions in society and the weight their word can carry when they speak up on behalf of people, so this one hurt and for me it still does. I think what makes it even harder is knowing in five or so weeks I have to also go back to watching Brucey and the boys, as much as I’ve criticized Southgate I like the bloke tbh I just want him to grow, I thoroughly dislike Bruce as a person and as a manager. I’d say somewhat similar to Gemmill I’ve almost switched to enjoying watching England more. Of course sections of the fan base are outright embarrassing fuckwits which can at times make it tough, and the bandwagon jumpers tend to be the brexit rugby crew in their relaxed fit jeans and Clarkson haircuts, but I honestly try to block all that out and just enjoy football for a change since Ashley and the Premier League as a whole has done about as much as they possibly can in 12 year to ruin it.

Yeah, I don’t think we should sack him or anything. I think like you say he deserves the 2022 WC, but I really think he has to show improvement as imo there’s some real issues with his game day team management that ultimately cost us after we got away with it a little earlier in the tournament through the strength of our players. Like KD just said I think this squad is becoming a premier side at the international level, with most of the squad playing at the highest levels of the club game and Southgate needs to grow with the side and allow them to start to assert pressure of their own rather than just backing off a shying a little from teams based upon name. I rate the Italian side, I did before the tournament but I don’t think they were some Goliath that we should have feared and respected them to the degree we seemed to in the second half, having so little possession against them and doing nothing to try and remedy it was my biggest complaint. I get the ‘he made the final doing it this way’ defence but I think we also have room to criticize him as I really do think we didn’t assert ourselves on the tournament like the squad likely can and relied on being hard to beat, I take your point regarding France but I’d also say that the players France have at their disposal lend better to that. Kante and Matuidi are/were the premier defensive mids in the game, Varane is arguably the best CB around, with Pavard, Hernandez etc all leading in their positions. On the flip side our strength is our attack and Southgate shied away from that to try and make us hard to break down, it’s a viable enough tactic and it’s admirable he stuck to his guns but he deserves criticism when it’s ultimately what cost us. I think ultimately I’m at the point where I commend him for everything he’s done, and I really do think he’s done a good job, but he also deserves criticism as we’re moving away from being an ‘underdog’ type team (I know we have the resources underdogs don’t but I mean more in terms of the ability of the players he had in 2018) into being a team that can genuinely challenge for tournaments, and with that transition he has to also grow and allow the team a platform to perform, having basically 1 shot and 29% possession over 90 minutes in what was really a home fixture isn’t the platform. Regarding Kalvin Phillips we’ll have to agree to disagree, I saw nothing to suggest he’s good enough in this tournament for him to be a starter in a squad pushing like we seem to want to do, I think he got in because Henderson was coming back from injury and he just did enough for Southgate to keep picking him but we absolutely need more there or we’re going to keep struggling when we come up against sides with better CM pairings like Italy had. Hopefully Bellingham keeps up his emergence and Southgate puts faith in him like he did with Saka, as Bellingham is by far and away a better player than Phillips.

He was fine in most games, I think he was one of the worst players on the pitch for a couple of the games but I saw people the love him just highlight that he ran 15km in those games. I don’t think he’s a completely shit player I just think he’s a very very average PL centre mid, Henderson is better in every aspect as a number 6. My confusion at him is the overrating of his games, every game was followed by pictures of him with “how good is this man!!! 😍” posts while all he did was break up play a bit and shift the ball 5 yards, which is his role but I don’t think he did anything impressive or above when compared to Rice. I see him as about the same as what Dier used to be, people overhype him as he does the basics fine, is pretty no nonsense but ultimately doesn’t add much to the team. Whenever Bellingham breaks into this England side the Phillips luvvies might get the point, as Bellingham does everything Phillips can do but he can also contribute to attacking phases regularly. Maybe I’m being harsh, I didn’t rate either him or Rice before the tournament but Rice has won me over whereas I’m still scratching my head at the hype Phillips gets.

I hope I’m wrong, I genuinely do but I’m not convinced his decisions and mistakes are ones he will learn from. He clearly favors Saka, Mount, Phillips to clearly better players (I think Saka and Mount are both good players fwiw, I just think he has more talented options, I also think Mount was poor all tournament but continued to be selected due to Southgates favoring of him as he supposedly tracks back more than Foden etc). I stand by that I think he’d be better suited as an assistant manager, I just think he tends to miss with a lot of his subs or team selections and criticism of it is being hushed since we reached the final, a final which was reached at times through brilliance from players he shunted to the side in favor of industry. My main worry is that it was similar to the Croatia SF loss in 2018, we went up early and progressively sat further and further back and rather than make changes to alleviate pressure he just waited. He didn’t learn from that to me, despite having a far more talented and deeper squad. I’m not saying he should have just thrown caution to the wind and threw on attackers but he had a ton of options like swap out Trippier for Henderson so we could have a midfield 3 and try to hold possession for a bit as we were continually out of sorts 30 yards from our goal all second half, or throw on Sancho/Rashford when Bonucci and Chiellini were camped out on halfway to stretch the field and alleviate the pressure that way. We can say it’s hindsight but honestly most people watching recognized changes had to be made and he sat on them. I’m more than willing to praise him btw, he’s done an excellent job getting the squad to where it is now, clearly his man management skills are brilliant as he’s keeping the squad happy despite the players noted above not playing much. I just see a manager that isn’t great at game day decisions and continually makes odd/overly conservative choices when he doesn’t need to and I really fear it’s not something he will learn from so we will waste chances for a genuinely talented and confident crop of players to fulfill their potential just to keep a nice bloke that has done very well but is arguably starting to hold back the squad a little. Hopefully it’s harsh and he goes on to win us things, not that it’s a must as I know it’s extremely hard to win but to have chances like this one and basically just whiff it and go out fairly meekly is utterly disappointing isn’t really good enough. It’s all moot anyway, he will be manager going forward I just personally have reservations about his ability to grow with this squad. I think he maximized the potential of the team in the WC but is holding back the potential of this current side. Want to add, I thought Declan Rice was quality yesterday but I absolutely don’t understand the plaudits Kalvin Phillips gets, hopefully Bellingham continues his trajectory and we see him take place over the severely limited Phillips.

Aye, he literally argued against signing him for us ffs.