Obsessed

[Happy Face 29]

This article sums up the double standards, I'd say Liverpool have fucked up their season just as badly as Newcastle (with owners that know fuck all about 'soccer'), but the sentiment towards the two clubs is hilariously two faced as well as grossly misinformed...

 

http://football.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/...2251653,00.html

 

Funny that Dennis Wise felt Leeds was a little too far north for his liking, bearing in mind the strain of commuting from London, so changed jobs for one in Newcastle.

 

Funny, too, that Newcastle's new executive director will spend part of his week in the capital, despite Kevin Keegan's clear insinuation last month that people down there visit the theatre when they could be watching football. Clearly, it will cut down on Wise's travelling time, although how it will benefit the Geordie nation is less obvious.

 

Keegan insisted, when Wise was appointed, that you more or less had to have imbibed Newcastle Brown with your mother's milk to appreciate the special importance of the club, which is the reason he was at a loss a couple of weeks later to explain why such an archetypal London geezer was being brought in over his head.

 

Newcastle have always been a bit of a funny club, although over the past couple of weeks they appear to have staggered into the realms of the surreal. Keegan and Wise as a double act? It cannot last. You would never win any prizes for clairvoyance by predicting a project involving Keegan will most likely end in tears, but people are already putting money on the toys coming out of the pram before the end of the season. Indeed, if Newcastle fail to take something from today's Tyne-Tees derby there could be developments even quicker than that.

 

This is the club, remember, that sacked a manager halfway through the transfer window because results were going so badly. Since Keegan was appointed, Newcastle have picked up one point in the League, gone out of the FA Cup, failed to score any goals and mustered just two shots on target. Rather more alarmingly, Newcastle used what was left of the transfer window to bring in an executive director, a vice-president in charge of player recruitment and a technical co-ordinator, but no players.

 

Should Newcastle slide further toward the sticky end of the table, it is fair to say Wise, Tony Jimenez and Jeff Vetere - whatever their other attributes - will not be much use in a fight against relegation. Whereas a Jonathan Woodgate, a Benjani or even a Marlon King just might have been. Newcastle had a fortnight to strengthen their playing squad, and no deadline whatsoever for augmenting their backroom staff, yet they chose to concentrate on the latter at the expense of the former.

 

Keegan himself has no experience of scrapping or discernible aptitude for grinding out results, which is what made his appointment so risky in the first place. It was as though relegation had never struck Mike Ashley as a possibility. Such a cavalier approach to the transfer window leads to the same conclusion. It could be that Ashley knows what he is doing, and Newcastle will set new Premier League standards next season for slick operation and sourcing new players. Or it could be that Newcastle will be in the Championship by then, in which case all concerned will look a bit silly.

 

Either way, the prediction made here that Newcastle would find ever more bizarre ways of hijacking the nation's attention is already coming to pass. Wise in the boardroom is original, you have to give them that. Can't wait to discover what Alan Shearer was offered. It won't have been as attack coach, heading specialist or anything so conventional. It is bound to have been something completely off the wall, like assistant groundsman, programme seller or Tannoy announcer. They will probably bring in Bryan Ferry, an occasional spectator at St James' Park, as magic sponge man. .

 

What does Ferry know about football? About as much as Ashley, it would appear. Newcastle's new owner is already regarded as a maverick by the Stock Exchange, who are impressed by his ability to make money and manage companies but less enthralled by results since he reached billionaire status and decided to stop being so hands-on and indulge himself a little.

 

All the time he was making his fortune Ashley was far too busy working to spare time for supporting a football team, and some who know him were surprised when he suddenly popped up as owner of Newcastle. Possibly not as surprised as Sam Allardyce, but surprised all the same. Apart from the novelty of owning a football club, Ashley had kept an assiduously low profile up until then. There were hardly any photographs of him in the public domain. Now he is everywhere in his replica shirts.

 

The one he wore for Keegan's first game back in charge had 'King Kev' printed on the back, which is either touching, or naive, or splendid, or completely bonkers. Here's a tenner that says Brian Barwick will not take his seat at Wembley on Wednesday wearing an England shirt bearing the legend 'We're Fab' or 'Cap That!'. Ashley can wear what he likes, football needs all the personalities it can get and conformity is a dull thing. On the other hand we could consider the fairytale-parable of The Emperor's New Clothes

 

Because Ashley has been such a blinding success at business, there is a general assumption he knows what he is doing. The possibility exists that with regard to Newcastle, he might not. He has already admitted the club have cost him far more than he thought it would, so he does not seem to be in it to make a quick killing. He said it wasn't much fun watching Allardyce's team, although had he asked around at Manchester City he would have discovered Keegan is no longer a reliable joy-bringer either.

 

Only Newcastle fans believe the Keegan hype, and they could have been the only ones Ashley canvassed. Yet the great Geordie reunion has been rationalised. Newcastle will now be run by a team of cosmopolitan southerners. Was that in the brochure? Who knows? Will Newcastle turn out to be a fairytale or a parable? We'll find out by the end of the season.

 

Too late now to be the People's club

 

Good luck to Rogan Taylor and his plan to find 100,000 Liverpool supporters willing to stump up £5,000 each for a kitty to buy the club. Good luck, too, in persuading George Gillett and Tom Hicks, once the money is on the table, to sell to a fans' buy-out.

 

There is absolutely no reason why Liverpool should not be owned by their fans, as Barcelona are. It is a great idea and, if it is going to happen anywhere in England, then Liverpool would be perfect. The only snag, apart from raising £500million in the first place, is that too much of the money would be spent in rewarding the American owners with a handsome profit. Dubai International Capital are said to be reluctant to do that, and it is hard to see why the Merseyside people should be any more enthusiastic.

 

The best time for a fans' buy-out would have been before the Americans bought in, when Liverpool were still in the benign hands of the Moores family and actively looking for similarly benign new ownership. There's not a lot of that about, as the club have just discovered. Ownership by the fans would have required a great deal of patience and imagination from both sides, but it might not have been complete pie in the sky. It probably is now.

Edited February 3, 2008 by Happy Face

[Happy Face 29]

...and don't get me started on Rod Liddle...

 

THE BOARD of Newcastle United must have been watching that old comedy film, Airplane. There’s a scene where the stricken plane, flown by a troubled novice, is approaching the airport and in the control tower they are debating how best to help him land it. “Let’s turn the lights on the runway,” one advises, and the boss says darkly: “No, that’s just what he’ll be expecting us to do.”

 

I assume a similar conversation took place at St James’ Park as the board considered the best way to undermine their new manager. Who should we bring in that would really screw him up? they thought. Suddenly, as one, they all said: Dennis Wise! “Perfect. But let’s not tell Keegan we’re appointing him until after the deed’s done. And then insist to him – this is genius – that he has to pretend to the press that he did know about it and is really, delighted. That’ll make him look even more of a dick. And have the players confused and dismayed just as they start their relegation battle against Middlesbrough.”

 

The Tyne-Tees derby is an interesting affair, in a sort of state-of-the-game ironic sense. If Middlesbrough were Newcastle, Gareth Southgate would have been sacked in September and the team would be on their fifth manager of the season by now, and no better off for it. But Middlesbrough are not Newcastle; their fans, board and chairman are more rational, accustomed to being regarded as the third-string side of the northeast – despite regularly outperforming their hubris-stricken neighbours.

 

For Boro, and their likeable manager and selfless chairman, Steve Gibson, avoiding relegation while playing attractive football with the best crop of youngsters in the Premier League would be a great achievement. And much though I thought it unlikely at the beginning of the season, an achievement that is beginning to look as if it might be realised. Newcastle, meanwhile, burdened with delusions, with intimations of greatness unfulfilled, expected a place close to the Champions League, as they always do. And, again as they always do, they’ve failed. Relegation would be a disaster, unthinkable, because they’re Newcastle. But they might pull it off. It’s happened before.

 

Newcastle United wanted a manager who fitted with the image they have of themselves. If they’d wanted a manager who fitted in with the image the rest of us have of them they’d have swooped for Henry Conway, the homosexual fantasist son of the Tory MP Derek Conway, as soon as the story broke. Fur coat and no knickers. But their image of themselves is of latent magnificence, of Wor Jackie and Bobby Moncur and Supermac.

 

Frankly, nobody is good enough for Newcastle United; if they’d appointed Jesus Christ as manager they’d have whined about him playing with a flat back four and quickly brought in Judas Iscariot to act as a “director of football”. A rational perusal of the long list of those they have employed to drag their team towards the heights of the Premier League would suggest Glenn Roeder has been by far the most successful in recent years, and against all the odds, too. But quiet, likeable, decent Roeder didn’t fit in with that image they had in their heads.

 

It’s not so long ago I reported here that the disaffected Geordie fans were chanting “Roeder out, Roeder out!” – and on cue, there were anguished missives to this paper from the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall. But within four weeks, Roeder was out. What, exactly, did he do wrong? He did better for you than you could have expected, at the time.

 

Or better than any sane, rational, human being could have expected, which maybe isn’t quite the same thing. Bizarre though it might seem, the players seem to have a better grip on reality at St James’ Park than the fans or the board. None are interested in going there, as the January transfer window amply demonstrated. Those who do go there do so at the point of a gun, like poor Michael Owen. The long-serving, such as Shay Given, know they are in for a relegation battle. The rest do their damndest to get the hell out.

 

Football’s thoroughly agreeable personalities are rare but, you have to say, Kevin Keegan is one of them. His return to Newcastle, I reckon, was motivated by a laudable romanticism. Every neutral supporter would wish him well, while musing that things don’t look too promising. Three games played, one goalless draw, at home to Bolton, and two heavy defeats. No goals scored, six against. I daresay a home defeat to Boro will end with the Keegan Out! chants ringing around the ground, Wisey smirking in the stand.

 

Meanwhile Boro will continue with the admirable Southgate; the smallest of those three great towns of northeast football and likely, once again, to finish top of the pile. Come on, Boro.

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/col...icle3295249.ece

[Happy Face 29]

What's been your high point so far?

Without a shadow of a doubt, beating the dirty Mags at home. Keiran Richardson's stunning free-kick just about summed it all up perfectly.

 

And the low point?

Not winning a game since the above, at least at the time of writing! That's typical Sunderland - You can change your socks, but you've still got the same old smelly feet!

 

Who's been the star of the show?

It has to be Kieran Richardson again. He was so unlucky with the free-kick against Fulham which hit the post three times. To be fair, we seem to be gelling well as a unit and I'm pretty happy with most of Keano's signings. Having George McCartney and Danny Collins, two quality left-footed defenders, has to be a bonus too.

 

Who's been stinking the place out?

The Mags! The stadium was smelling like sweaty tears with them around. Two-one to the Sunderland!

 

What's been your favourite FanZone moment so far?

This might be a little repetitive, but Keiran Richardson's goal against the Mags! It made Shay Given look like a scared child falling off a slippery rocking horse!

 

http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,11678_4491818,00.html

 

much?

[Craig 6682]

Obsessed

 

 

is that him on the dodgems? used to be good at these when i was a kid but that was a long time ago!

 

Enjoy....

 

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