Official Premiership 2008/09 thread

[Matt]

This is what they do not get, they are a small club with dilusional (and at times loyal) fans. That is why probably every ground yesterday let out a massive cheer when the villa scoreline came through.

Seriously, I've never got why Newcastle fans are so great. There's a mass exodus as soon as they go two down, they're forever wanting managers sacked because they haven't qualified for the champions league and no matter who the chairman/board/owner(s) is/are they're always protesting because they lost a couple of games or one of the player's they wanked over when they arrived haven't been as successful as they thought they might be.

But yes, they get drunk and take their shirts off, world's greatest fans they are.

[Gazz]

I remember when Newcastle were everyone's second team because we played sexy football going forward and didn't bother to defend.

Now we just don't bother to defend

[Guest Ringmaster]

What a disgustingly boring last day. At least Sunderland tried to win, the other three sorry shits of a team didn't even bother. And it's not like they played teams that had anything to play for, it was a bunch of third-stringers and two teams that didn't really care where they wound up.

Also, I'd have liked to see more Newcastle tears! Not just the fans. How about Alan Shearer?! Cry, bastard, cry :@. Bastards couldn't even bother to care!

And it's not like the CL final will make up for the lack of girly weeping, John Terry won't be there.

Edited May 25, 2009 by Ringmaster

[Liam]

Went along to Craven Cottage for the last game of the season. Shame that we had to lose, but the atmosphere was great with the Euro qualification, and the team came out for a lap of honour. The Everton fans were class though, cheering our Euro qualification, and with some even hanging around to cheer the Fulham team on their lap of honour.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

I remember when Newcastle were everyone's second team because we played sexy football going forward and didn't bother to defend.

Now we just don't bother to defend

....Or play sexy football....

[The Future]

Or any sort of football for that matter

[METALMAN]

When I was in Newcastle yesterday I was asked if I was upset that Newcastle got relegated by a local. lol.

He also told me he got fed up with the team for a while but only started paying attention again once Kevin Keegan was made manager. lol.

[therockbox]

Good article about Shearer and Newcastle from The Times:

Geordies need tough love not another hero

"Newcastle United needs to be filled with people who love this club”, Alan Shearer said on Sunday and in that one, endlessly banal, hopelessly misguided sentence the latest would-be Messiah laid his finger on everything that has gone wrong with Newcastle’s football club and why it would be madness for Mike Ashley to appoint the former centre forward as full-time manager.

This is a club that have had far too much love: the love of the fans, the love of their various managers, the love of other supporters who, until now, have been happy to rally behind Newcastle as their second team.

This is a club that have basked in an orgy of self-infatuation, living on myths, dreams, brown ale and anything else that could numb the senses to the catastrophe that has been ticking like a time-bomb all season.

And now they want to turn to a man who has an excess of love but who has no qualifications to lead the club out of the mire into which they have jumped, feet first, except an ironed shirt and an occasional turn of phrase. A man who ticks no boxes whatsoever except possession of a Geordie accent and a legendary status on Gallowgate that is so patently irrelevant to the club’s present predicament as to be almost laughable.

This club do not need love; they need to be stripped clean of all sentimentality. They need a man who feels nothing but contempt for the position Newcastle now find themselves in and who is prepared to ignore the mass of fans and their hare-brained schemes.

They need a man who can state the truths the supporters do not want to hear; who can perform reconstructive surgery on a team that have lost all semblance of unity and coherence; a man who is hard-headed, hard-nosed and has spent hardly any time on Tyneside and is thus untainted by the delirium.

They need a man with a proven track record of management; a man who can finesse an understandably panicky owner; above all they need a man with the deep and long experience capable of persuading the good players to stay (and, let’s be honest, there are not many of those), who can get rid of the dross without the whole thing descending into a fire sale, and who can go into an infinitely complex global marketplace, identify a new crop of talented youngsters and persuade them that Newcastle are not a busted flush, but a club that can ride high once again.

And the new manager needs to do this with a close eye on the rapidly deteriorating finances, a deep awareness of the long-term contractual implications of his manoeuvrings in the transfer market and with a nose for how his string of new signings will cope with the unique demands of the Coca-Cola Championship, a league that is different in style, pace, philosophy and tempo from the Barclays Premier League.

Shearer, it hardly needs stating, is qualified for none of these tasks and it is symptomatic of the delusional contagion in the North East that so many supporters think he is.

Perhaps the most darkly comic aspect of Shearer’s initial appointment was how often we heard the phrase “the mood on Tyneside has been transformed”, as if the fans might be able to emote an awful team out of the relegation zone; as if the level of intoxication inspired by the great man’s appointment was a good thing rather than a distraction from what was, even then, a formidable challenge; as if sentiment has any bearing on success and failure when a team are plummeting towards calamity like a man in a concrete overcoat.

I sat in that opening press conference, heard Shearer’s repeated protestations of devotion to “the football club” (as if we doubted that), watched the fans outside taking off their shoes in an apparent show of fealty to their new saviour, and then got the train home wondering if this tedious soap opera will ever end. First Kevin Keegan, then Shearer; give it a couple of seasons of failure in the Championship and they will doubtless turn to the ghost of Jackie Milburn for managerial redemption amid yet more scenes of jubilation outside St James’ Park, yet more dreams of a return to the glory days, yet more whimsy and surrealism.

For the record, Shearer’s tenure has been a failure in almost every possible way, bar his ability to deflect criticism from his own inadequacies during post-match press conferences. He managed a derisory one win in eight games, executed tactical shifts and machinations that made Claudio Ranieri, the Tinkerman, seem like a rock of stability, but, most damningly of all, the St James’ Park hero failed even to inspire the passion and resolve in the players in what was the whole point of the exercise.

In retrospect, Newcastle needed only a point from their last two games to retain Premier League status, but failed to manage even that; their meek, passive, antiheroic surrender in the final quarter of an hour away to Aston Villa symptomatic of a club that had expended all their reserves of emotional energy on irrelevant happenings off the pitch; a club that have, in truth, spent so long navel-gazing that they no longer had the wit or the wish to look to the fights — the real fights on the pitch — that needed so dearly to be won.

As Alan Hansen said on Match of the Day (which is where Shearer should have stayed, firmly on the couch) on Sunday: “Even then, in the last ten to 15 minutes there was nothing, absolutely nothing. You know their life depends upon this and yet we spent 15 to 20 minutes waiting for some sort of effort [which never came].”

Some will point to Keegan, who as a virginal manager brought Newcastle back into the top flight 16 years ago.

They will dare to believe that this sets some kind of precedent. That inexperience can be some sort of blessing in club management.

But what about Sir Bobby Charlton, who took Preston North End down from the old second division in his first season in charge? What about the dozens of other precedents that show that experience matters in football management just as it does in every other area of life?

The reality is that, lumbered with Shearer, things are likely to get a lot worse for Newcastle, a club that face a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvent themselves from top to bottom.

But has Ashley got the balls to ditch him, to make a decision based on the kind of hard corporate logic that has served him so well in amassing a fortune in the sports goods market? Would the fans even let him?

And with that last, rhetorical question we hit the bull’s-eye of Newcastle’s travails. Until the club have an owner who can ignore the myopic short-termism of the nation’s most capricious fans, there will be no bounce for Newcastle United. I am not saying that all supporters are burdened by overinflated expectations, but can it be seriously denied that Newcastle are weighed down by a critical mass of unrealism? That this is the underlying reason for the lack of a single major trophy in 40 years?

Shearer’s appointment would symbolise everything that is wrong at St James’ Park, past and present. Expect him to be unveiled by the end of the week.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/col...icle6367739.ece

[Bigal]

Steve Bruce is talking to Sunderland after Wigan agreed possible compensation, and Ellis Short has confirmed a 100% takeover of the club, with Niall Quinn likely to remain as chairman.

Oooh, I'm excited

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Good article.

I concur.

Spurs tried it with Hoddle and Ardiles and frankly those times were dreadful. Newcastle can rebuild, chuck out the old wood, get in some hungry youngsters who would die for the cause and have a bit of skill too, and get realistic. Then they could get themselves a decent little team together for a possible return.

If Shearer stays and the mentality stays the same, they're gonna struggle in the vicious fight of the Championship.

Of the three relegated teams I have no doubt whatsoever that West Brom will finish highest.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Steve Bruce is talking to Sunderland after Wigan agreed possible compensation, and Ellis Short has confirmed a 100% takeover of the club, with Niall Quinn likely to remain as chairman.

Oooh, I'm excited

Wigan after Strachan?

[Dynamite]

Apparently Niall Quinn turned down a £20mil bid for Kenwyne Jones from Spurs. I don't know who's crazier, Quinn or Spurs.

[Bigal]

Quinn.

And I'd imagine Strachan could well end up at Wigan. He'd do a decent job there. He'd do a decent job at Sunderland too, but my bias against Celtic leaves me cold (Martin O'Neill's Northern Irish, so he has that >_>).

[IAceI]

No thanks to Strachan. Bruce I don't particularly want, he's a self confessed Newcastle fan and so is his family, he's even said to the media before "I could never manage them". Guess he was lying.

He'd probably improve us, and no doubt find a few gems. But in the long run? He seems to chop and change a bit lately, I dunno, maybe I just want someone with a bit more rep - show a bit more ambition. But we could do worse than Bruce. But a Newcastle fan?!

[cmb211087]

Apparantly Owen COyle is in talks with Celtic. Burnley may as well just ask to stay in the championship if that is the case.

[IAceI]

The lure of Europe with a Scottish team wouldn't appeal to me over the appeal of trying to keep an English team in the most competitive league in the world.

Perhaps it doesn't for Coyle either, and the money will. But he's such a big part of what Burnley has achieved, I dunno, it just doesn't seem right.

And I have Celtic, I don't like Burnley either but there's no denying what a good job Coyle has done with them. Not a team many people would have expected to see in the Premiership anytime soon.

[9 to 5]

Coyle has done a wonderful job with whatever that team is he with. Him leaving might as well consign that club, whoever they are, to being owned as fuck n xt season.

[Adam]

Three stories have annoyed me today.

1. Steve Bruce abandoning all that work at Wigan to go to Sunderland-for what, the only perk is more money to spend, Wigan are better right now.

2. Owen Coyle to Celtic. Come on, give it a go with Burnley. They've got no chance without him IMO.

3. Al-Fahim, aka 'Mr. Dreamer' from the Man City takeover, buying Portsmouth. No mas.

[Matt]

Coyle won't go to Celtic, it'll be Dolly, I'm sure of it.

[Dynamite]

In fairness to Bruce, there's not much more he'd really be able to achieve at Wigan. He built a good team at the beginning of the season and then had to sell two of his best players in Palacios and Heskey and now Valencia looks set to be off as well. At least with Sunderland, he could build a decent team, keep hold of his better players and have the chance to move on further than he would have been able to with Wigan.