Tiote

[Dr Gloom 21924]

what awful news. he was awesome for us for a few seasons. great partnership with cabaye. 

[David Kelly 1245]

One of my mates has just said his lass is expecting too.  Not sure if that's true like.

[TheGingerQuiff 2412]

RIP

[Bizza 105]

Fucking hell, only 30 too.

 

That thunderbastard equalizer against Arsenal will live long in the memory.

 

R.I.P Tiote 

Edited June 5, 2017 by Bizza

[ohhh_yeah 2967]

 

His agent Emanuele Palladino:

 

“I can confirm that my client Cheick Tioté sadly passed away today after collapsing in training with his club Beijing Enterprises."

 

“We cannot say any more at the moment and we request that his family’s privacy be respected at this difficult time. We ask for all your prayers.”

[Anorthernsoul 1221]

2 minutes ago, ohhh_yeah said:

 

His agent Emanuele Palladino:

 

“I can confirm that my client Cheick Tioté sadly passed away today after collapsing in training with his club Beijing Enterprises."

 

“We cannot say any more at the moment and we request that his family’s privacy be respected at this difficult time. We ask for all your prayers.”

 

 

Truly shocking    Two years younger than me.

[Monkeys Fist 42458]

Jesus. 

RIP 

[Tom 14011]

Awful news

[Noelie 103]

So sad, put in some good shifts for us, RIP Tiote.

[gpirlo68 0]

R.I.P Cheicky 

 

Awful news

[tooner 243]

30 is too young. RIP Cheick.

[Kitman 2207]

Very sad. RIP

[adios 717]

RIP Cheick.

[LooneyToony 41]

Oh my goodness this is such sad news.  I had my shots at him for his play the last couple of years in particular, but there is no doubt he was exactly what we needed when we first came up. He had so much confidence on the ball, sometimes too much confidence, and added steel to a previously spineless midfield.  He gave us more than his money's worth and by all accounts was a wonderful person. 

 

R.I.P. Chiek.   Heartfelt condolences to his family, friends, and the club.

[TheGingerQuiff 2412]

Wouldn't call Nolan and Barton spineless like. I remember his pass completion rate being crazy high in his first season for us

[LooneyToony 41]

27 minutes ago, TheGingerQuiff said:

Wouldn't call Nolan and Barton spineless like. I remember his pass completion rate being crazy high in his first season for us

 I was speaking defensively.  And yes, Barton and Nolan were spineless defensively. He made our back four better at that time, let's put it that way.

[Slayer 3]

5 hours ago, ewerk said:

My thoughts are with all of his widows.

You fuckin dick

[TheGingerQuiff 2412]

 

24 minutes ago, LooneyToony said:

 I was speaking defensively.  And yes, Barton and Nolan were spineless defensively. He made our back four better at that time, let's put it that way.

 

He replaced Butt though who was anything but spineless. 

 

He came into Hughton's Championship winning side that had no spineless element to it. Granted he was a welcome injection of quality because he was so good at the time. But the spineless comment is you being a typical yank spouting a nonsensical cliché I forgive you.

Edited June 5, 2017 by TheGingerQuiff

[Ayatollah Hermione 13870]

Still very strange news to process, this and it's a massive shame. As a player, he had his critics but fuck me, you really noticed when he wasn't there. An absolute tank of a player on his day. There's no knocking Pardew for what he's said too; the bloke seemed very well liked. RIP.

[ohhh_yeah 2967]

 

With one swish of his left foot Cheick Tioté was a Newcastle United cult hero

 

By August 2008 the word had already got out among Premier League scouts that a 22-year-old midfielder from the Ivory Coast, recently signed up by FC Twente after an eye‑catching season on loan at Roda JC, had something about him. It would be instructive to see how he fared at a higher level and a Champions League qualifier for Steve McClaren’s side against Arsenal provided an early chance to find out just how quickly Cheick Tioté was learning. The sight of him sticking to Robin van Persie like glue during Twente’s home leg, subduing the striker into irrelevance with an insistent performance that at times cared little for the boundaries of the law, lingered in more than a few minds and memories would be jolted firmly enough in due course.

 

Tioté eventually joined Newcastle, who had been attracted by his tenacity and undeterred by an inconsistency in possession that led some suitors to waver, in 2010 and would find himself working for McClaren again five years later. Both had seen better days than a 2015-16 season that reflected appallingly on the Tyneside club but, while McClaren ended up being sacked and scarcely mourned, Tioté was one of the few who rode out a turbulent interlude with his standing among supporters relatively unimpaired.

 

Given the revolving door at St James’ Park over the past decade, that says plenty. But there had always been good reason to enjoy the presence of Tioté, a wholehearted and proactive performer who played at the kind of intensity fans appreciate even when things are not going well. “I don’t like to make a lot of noise,” he said a few months after his arrival but he had non-verbal ways of making his point. It helped that, in only his 19th appearance for the club – having already picked up eight yellow cards and one red – he produced the kind of flourish that, in the blink of an eye, moulds a cult hero. The left-footed 25-yard volley that pegged Arsenal, opponents he always warmed towards, back to an improbable 4-4 draw was perfect in both execution and timing. The moment was etched instantly in Premier League folklore, never mind that of his club; a bolt from the blue that had never seemed likely and would rarely come close to happening again.

 

It would be his only goal for Newcastle; the tally of bookings would reach 14 by the end of his first season and discipline was never something he fully mastered. But that was how Tioté operated; there would never be any compromising when a ball was there to be won. “You take that side of the game out of Cheick and you don’t get the same player,” his team-mate James Perch said after a costly red card against Sunderland in October 2012. A Tyne-Wear derby is never an occasion for mistakes, but if anyone could be forgiven such an error it was Tiote. The idea of leaving anything on the pitch was anathema.

 

Tioté’s was not simply a tale of unchannelled aggression. Between 2011 and 2013 he and Yohan Cabaye formed one of the league’s best midfield partnerships – an efficient blend of vision, vigour and tactical intelligence whose apex came in a 3-0 win against Manchester United in January 2012. This was Tioté’s peak but, while Cabaye would move on, he stayed at Newcastle despite intermittent talk of interest from Champions League clubs – in particular Arsenal, a move he would certainly have welcomed. As Newcastle’s fortunes ebbed, his own form and fortune did too, injuries dogging his final two seasons and ensuring that, by the time he moved to Beijing Enterprises in February, disappointment about his departure was more sentimental than directed towards its impact on a revitalised team’s promotion campaign.

 

Joining a club at the highest level may have eluded him but Tioté appeared twice in Ivory Coast’s Africa Cup of Nations-winning campaign of 2015. That success meant everything; little had come easy during his early days in football, starting out at the semi‑professional club FC Bibo in his home city of Yamoussoukro and finessing his qualities without the aid of proper boots until the age of 15.

“That’s what made me who I am today,” he said of an upbringing that guaranteed nothing. Tioté, though, would turn into a player who guaranteed every ounce of perspiration he had as soon as he stepped on to a pitch. The frayed edges were there, but for a time he was one of the best; it is a tragedy that football, and the world he inhabited beyond it, should be mourning him now.

 

by Nick Ames

Monday 5 June

 

[ohhh_yeah 2967]

Cheick Tiote was a wrecking-ball midfielder loved by Newcastle because he cared so much

 

 

Quote

Cheick Tioté always played football the same way, not just when the cameras were rolling and the stadium was packed, but in every training session, every warm up. Powerful, destructive, he was a wrecking ball of a midfielder.

That he has died after a heart attacking while training with his new club in China, Beijing Enterprises, is tragic, sad and deeply shocking.

 

During his seven years at Newcastle United, the mood in the camp was irrelevant, so was form, or the time of the year. Nothing changed the way Tioté played, nobody could tell him to slow down; nobody could tell him not to make a tackle.

 

Nicknamed 'The Tank', he loved the ones where ball and man were taken, fair, but unrelentingly hard. Physical, powerful, if you asked him about a challenge after the game, the response was always the same. A shy smile, a shuffle of the feet and then a mumbled “football is a contact sport”.

 

Team-mates were always wary of making a 50-50 challenge, but they liked him. It was hard not to. He was quiet, softly spoken, but he laughed and joked and he cared, not just about football, but those who played with him.

 

When there were questions raised about the commitment of other foreign players at Newcastle, it was Tioté who would try to get them to understand why it was never acceptable, regardless of their personal grievances or dissatisfaction.

 

In turn, every manager on Tyneside knew what they would get. Whether it was Chris Hughton, Alan Pardew, John Carver or Steve McClaren, they all joked about having to tell him to be less combative in training.

 

Ferocious when trying to win the ball back, he was occasionally careless in possession. He was a risk-taker, a Cruyff-turner on the edge of his own area, who would spark warning screams in the stands as opposition players closed in. But most of all, he was a blur of destruction in front of the back four.

 

At his best, Tioté was one of the most consistently impressive defensive midfield players in the Premier League, with a £25m price tag on his head to ward off suitors. It worked, but it did not make Tioté happy. He wanted to play in the Champions League and knew that would not happen at Newcastle. He was frustrated towards the end, particularly when the injuries began to mount.

 

Having moved to Europe as a boy to play for Anderlecht in Belgium, he joined FC Twente in 2008 under former England manager Steve McClaren, who recommended him to several Premier League clubs.

He joined Newcastle two years later, immediately after their promotion to the Premier League and was the first real success story of chief scout Graham Carr’s oversees bargain hunts.

 

For a time, there was not a more popular player. The Ivory Coast international was everything a Newcastle supporter demanded. He had his faults, but they could be forgiven because the one thing he never lacked was commitment. A team player who would run until he had nothing left to give.

 

He will be best remembered for a long-range volley against Arsenal, the ball dropping to him outside the area, looping through the air before he moved forward, adjusted his body shape and caught it crisply with his left foot to send it whistling into the bottom corner.

It was a stunning equaliser in a sensational game back in February 2011, Tioté scoring Newcastle’s fourth goal after they had trailed by four at half-time.

 

It was an incredible moment, captured by a photograph that adorned a wall of the club’s training ground many years later.

The celebrations are chiselled into every support’s cache of memories. Tioté running off, his arms out-stretched, sprinting half the pitch before disappearing under a pile of black and white shirts as St James’ Park’s shook with delirium.

 

It was so special because it was such a surprise. It was the only goal he scored in 156 appearances for Newcastle. That was not what he was good at.

 

Yet, for those who appreciate beauty in the art of the spoiler, for those who appreciate footballers who are there to stop others from playing, to win the ball, to harass and disrupt, Tiote was a joy to behold.

 

Injuries had already taken their toll over the last couple of years. Tiote rarely played. Proposed moves to clubs in Spain and Turkey collapsed in mysterious circumstances, there were rumours of medical concerns, but never any question that his heart was a problem.

 

He finally got the transfer he craved, a new start in China just four months ago. A new beginning that has ended devastatingly prematurely for a player who would have had his 31st birthday later this month.

 

by Luke Edwards 

5 JUNE 2017

 

[LooneyToony 41]

1 hour ago, TheGingerQuiff said:

 

  I forgive you.

 

Thank you.

 

And god bless you.

[TheGingerQuiff 2412]

Still can't believe this has happened

[OTF 7295]

Horrible horrible news. 

[Graing 15]

Sad news. I'll never forget him wiring that strike in. He was all heart. RIP.