Jimbo

Well said Stevie.

what about the second half If you dropped an A-Bomb on Birmingham you could cause £50, maybe £60 worth of damage.

On the back wall, there is a giant canvas of Sir Bobby waving to the Toon faithful before his first home game in charge, an 8-0 win against Sheffield Wednesday in which Alan Shearer scored five goals. Hanging to the right is a picture of Sir Bobby and his squad beaming as they pose in Barcelona's Nou Camp before a Champions League game. Sir Bobby Robson and Steve Harper In tune: Sir Bobby Robson and Newcastle keeper Steve Harper agree on the importance of today's clash It is hard to believe it was less than seven years ago that Newcastle were mixing with Europe's elite. Today, Sir Bobby is not interested in looking back and wondering where it all went wrong for his beloved club. This is no time for recriminations as Newcastle, with Shearer in charge, go to Aston Villa for arguably the most important game in the club's history. Lose at Villa Park and Newcastle will be relegated from the Premier League, resulting in an immediate financial hit of £30 million and a potential cost to the club which could last years if, like Leeds United, they continue to plummet. At 76 and fighting cancer for a fifth time, Sir Bobby is no longer a man who can save the club himself, but he knows a man who can: goalkeeper Steve Harper, who can make himself a true Toon legend if he can keep Newcastle in the top flight this afternoon. There is a special bond between Sir Bobby and Harper. Both are from County Durham mining stock, born 15 miles apart; Bobby in Sacriston, Harper in Easington. Harper rates Sir Bobby as the best of the 10 managers he has played in his 16 years at Newcastle. In turn, Sir Bobby believes Harper would have played for England had he not been so unselfish and stayed at Newcastle as Shay Given's understudy. 'Big match on Sunday, son,' are Sir Bobby's first words as they greet each other. 'That's an understatement,' says Harper. Kevin Keegan Harper was in goal for Sir Bobby the afternoon Shearer put five in the Wednesday net, and when Newcastle beat Juventus 1-0 in one of St James' Park's most famous European nights. 'You told the world's media before that game that I had to be absolutely faultless. I was sitting there thinking "no pressure, then!", recalls Harper. 'Aye, and you will have to be faultless against Aston Villa as well. Completely faultless,' replies Sir Bobby. 'Your time has come. You have waited patiently for years for an opportunity. Now you have the best chance of your career to be a hero. One save might be crucial, the difference that keeps Newcastle in the Premier League. 'Steve, I think an important area is set-plays. Villa are fantastic in the air with Emile Heskey and John Carew. You have to keep everybody in front of you alive and awake, switched on. Newcastle need leadership at the back. It's your responsibility.' Harper is in agreement with his former boss. 'We've worked on it in training this week. Villa are also a very quick team, good on the counter-attack. They have a lot of pace and width in the side, like we had when we were in the Champions League with Craig Bellamy and Laurent Robert. 'I know James Milner at Villa very well - you signed him for Newcastle and we became good friends. I've been texting him this week, telling him to put all his crosses in Row Z! 'We need 11 heroes, maybe 14. It is a strange situation. We could win and get relegated, or we could draw and stay up. Our problem has been scoring goals. We haven't scored five in our last seven, but you can be sure every player knows how big the game is for Newcastle. Anyone who doesn't shouldn't be at the club.' The permutations in the drop-zone this weekend are enough to give Stephen Hawking a headache. Newcastle will definitely go down if they lose. If they draw, they can only survive if Hull lose at home to Manchester United. If they win, they will stay up unless both Hull and Sunderland (at home to Chelsea) also win. Harper says it is important to understand the scores in other games, particularly in the closing stages. 'Every player must be aware of what is happening. If we are drawing the game, we have to know if we need to get a winner or if it's better to hold on to what we've got. 'I'll definitely go up for a corner if we need a goal in the last minute. I was a striker until I was 17. In fact, I played up front for 12 minutes in a friendly at Celtic a couple of years ago and set up a goal for Milner!' Harper has seen Newcastle rise and fall since joining from local club Seaham Red Star in 1993. But it is only since January, when Given left for Manchester City, that he has become the undisputed No 1. 'What made Sir Bobby stand out was his man-management. He knew intuitively which players needed an arm round the shoulder and who needed a kick up the backside. I will go round the other players just making sure they are all OK, giving them a pat on the back. It is important because it's such a massive game.' Sir Bobby has not given a team talk since he was sacked in 2004, after finishing fifth in the Premier League. But he knows what he would say if he was in the dressing room at 10 to four today. Alan Shearer Shear pressure: How Newcastle could do with Alan Shearer's goalscoring prowess on the pitch 'I would tell the players to win their individual battles. Win your one-on-one battles. If you are Steven Taylor, make sure you stop their centre forward getting chances, beat him in the air. There are 10 outfield individual battles. If you win seven and lose three, you win the game. If you win three and lose seven, you lose the game. 'On top of that, Steve has to be up for it every single second. There is more pressure on the goalkeeper than any other position. One mistake from the goalkeeper and the whole team plan goes out the window.' Harper concurs: 'I know what Sir Bobby means about goalkeepers. My son is six next month and every time he wants to go in goal in the garden, I won't let him! He should try and score goals - there is more money in it! I know I have to play part on Sunday, but we all do. It is not about individual glory; it is about Newcastle United being united. I'd rather win 7-6 and stay up, than play a blinder, win 1-0 and go down.' Frail health means Sir Bobby will not be able to travel to Birmingham to watch his team play. Instead, he is contemplating an outing to Sunderland for their game against Chelsea. The role of Shearer will be crucial for Newcastle today. Sir Bobby has been enthusiastic about his former ace striker taking charge. 'He has great football knowledge and the pressure won't bother him,' he says. 'I'm sure if Newcastle are winning near the end he will want his strikers to protect the ball in the corner -he was good at that himself.' 'The older he got, the earlier in the match he did it!' quips Harper, in a flash. 'I call him Gaffer now. It was strange the first time I said it, I'd always known him as Alan. But it seems right now - he is the gaffer.' Sir Bobby, the former gaffer, nods in approval. Newcastle's future is no longer in his hands, but it could be in Steve Harper's.

I seriously need to either invest in a hat or a hairpiece, got a bit too much sun on my slapage today and I now resemble one of these:

13 draws for us this season, one more might be enough.

I think you can do better. Story of my life mate

No

Old people that just stop for no reason in front of you. Plastic Manc's who jack shit about football, probably don't even know who half the players in their reserve team yet alone any facts or current footballing events that didn't occur on MOTD, but still wear a ManUre shirt everyday. Anyone who wears a shirt or top with the collar up (seriously, I could kill them). People that take more than 30 seconds to use a cash machine. People that use the word "basically". and thats just for starters.

Get one ! loved mine, trouble is I loved it so much I had to get an iPhone because it's so fucking frustrating not being able to use the full features of it without having universal data access.

Star Trek. again.

http://www.empireonline.com/crypticcanvas/

I've been in acceptance of relegation for months, I'm sure once the reality of fact is confirmed I'll be absolutely gutted, but due to the length of our stay in the bottom of the table I'll keep my emotions in check.

I bet Ashley can't wait to cash in, buy young and cheap and sell on at a proffit, that was the business model he had for the club.

Villa are raciallists, official !

QFT. Aye. Sad thing is you know any decent thread will turn into a bucket of frogs after the first page currently. From next week I'd imagine the site will just become one giant toad crap. Maybe in a few months things might get back to where they were. No one (of the fuckwits) will be interested in coming here once we are relegated Just for the record I totally agree and find the direction of this board in general disappointing.

I've been know to have the occasional twitch....

Obviously not a local Gorilla ?

That, along with the Given sale, has to be the ultimate definition of false economy.

There is a Premier League rule about fielding a weakend side ? Fuck me, we should keep our heads down incase some notices our previous 37 games !

Buffon stuck it out at Juventus when they were in Serie B, give him credit for that at least, when the going gets tough, Given gets going.

"God put fossils in the ground to test our faith"

Nazi's

Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution. This 95%-complete 'lemur monkey' is described as the "eighth wonder of the world" The search for a direct connection between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom has taken 200 years - but it was presented to the world today at a special news conference in New York. The discovery of the 95%-complete 'lemur monkey' - dubbed Ida - is described by experts as the "eighth wonder of the world". They say its impact on the world of palaeontology will be "somewhat like an asteroid falling down to Earth". Researchers say proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and the then radical, outlandish ideas he came up with during his time aboard the Beagle. Sir David Attenborough said Darwin "would have been thrilled" to have seen the fossil - and says it tells us who we are and where we came from. "This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of the mammals," he said. "This is the one that connects us directly with them. "Now people can say 'okay we are primates, show us the link'. "The link they would have said up to now is missing - well it's no longer missing." A team of the world's leading fossil experts, led by Professor Jorn Hurum, of Norway's National History Museum, have been secretly researching the 1ft 9in-tall young female monkey for the past two years. And now it has been transported to New York under high security and unveiled to the world during the bicentenary of Darwin's birth. Later this month, it will be exhibited for one day only at the Natural History Museum in London before being returned to Oslo. Scientists say Ida - squashed to the thickness of a beer mat by the immense passage of time - is the most complete primate fossil ever found. With her human-like nails instead of claws, and opposable big toes, she is placed at the very root of human evolution when early primates first developed features that would eventually develop into our own. Another important discovery is the shape of the talus bone in her foot, which humans still have in their feet millions of lifetimes later. Ida was unearthed by an amateur fossil-hunter some 25 years ago in Messel pit, an ancient crater lake near Frankfurt, Germany, famous for its fossils. This fossil is really a part of our history; this is part of our evolution, deep, deep back into the aeons of time, 47 million years ago. She was cleaned and set in polyester resin - and incredibly, was hung on a mystery German collector's wall for 20 years. Sky News sources say the owner had no idea of the unique fossil's significance and simply admired it like a cherished Van Gogh or Picasso painting. But in 2006, Ida came into the hands of private dealer Thomas Perner, who presented her to Prof Hurum at the annual Hamburg Fossil and Mineral Fair in Germany - a centre for the murky world of fossil-trading. Prof Hurum said when he first saw the blueprint for evolution - the "most beautiful fossil worldwide" - he could not sleep for two days. A home movie records the dramatic moment. "This is really something that the world has never seen before, this is a unique specimen, totally unique," he says, clearly emotional. The missing link fossil X-ray of Ida's badly fractured left wrist He says he knew she should be saved for science rather than end up hidden from the world in a wealthy private collector's vault. But the dealer's asking price was more than $1 million (£660,000) - ten times the amount even the rarest of fossils fetch on the black market. Eventually, after six months of negotiations, he managed to raise the cash in Norway and brought Ida to Oslo. Attenborough: The Link Is No Longer Missing Prof Hurum - who last summer dug up the fossil remains of a 50ft marine monster called Predator X from the permafrost on Svalbard, a Norwegian island close to the North Pole - then assembled a "dream team" of experts who worked in secret for two years. They included palaeontologist Dr Jens Franzen, Dr Holly Smith, of the University of Michigan, and Philip Gingerich, president-elect of the US Paleontological Society. Researchers could prove the fossil was genuine through X-rays, knowing it is impossible to fake the inner structure of a bone. Through radiometric dating of Messel's volcanic rocks, they discovered Ida lived 47 million years ago in the Eocene period. This was when tropical forests stretched right to the poles, and South America was still drifting and had yet to make contact with North America. During that period, the first whales, horses, bats and monkeys emerged, and the early primates branched into two groups - one group lived on mainly as lemurs, and the second developed into monkeys, apes and humans. The experts concluded Ida was not simply a lemur but a 'lemur monkey', displaying a mixture of both groups, and therefore putting her at the very branch of the human line. This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of the mammals. This is the one that connects us directly with them. Sir David Attenborough "When Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, he said a lot about transitional species," said Prof Hurum "...and he said that will never be found, a transitional species, and his whole theory will be wrong, so he would be really happy to live today when we publish Ida. "This fossil is really a part of our history; this is part of our evolution, deep, deep back into the aeons of time, 47 million years ago. "It's part of our evolution that's been hidden so far, it's been hidden because all the other specimens are so incomplete. "They are so broken there's almost nothing to study and now this wonderful fossil appears and it makes the story so much easier to tell, so it's really a dream come true." Up until now, the most famous fossil primate in the world has been Lucy, a 3.18-million-year-old hominid found in Ethiopia in 1974. She was then our earliest known ancestor, and only 40% complete. Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known. Bishop of Worcester's wife to Charles Darwin But at 95% complete, Ida was so well preserved in the mud at the bottom of the volcanic lake, there is even evidence of her fur shadow and remains of her last meal. From this they concluded she was a leaf and fruit eater, and probably lived in the trees around the lake. The absence of a bacculum (penis bone) confirmed she was female, and her milk teeth put her age at about nine-months-old - in maturity, equivalent to a six-year-old human child. This was the same age as Prof Hurum's daughter Ida, and he named the fossil after her. The study is being published and put online by the Public Library of Science, a leading academic journal with offices in Britain and the US. Dr Hurum also found Predator X Co-author of the scientific paper, Prof Gingerich, likens its importance to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, an ancient Egyptian artefact found in 1799, which allowed us to decipher hieroglyphic writing. One clue to Ida's fate - and her remarkable preservation as our oldest ancestor - was her badly fractured left wrist. The team believes this stopped her from climbing and she had to emerge from the trees to drink water from the 250-metre-deep lake. They think she was overcome by carbon dioxide gas from the crater, and sunk to the bottom where she was preserved in the mud as a time capsule - and a snapshot of evolution. But amazingly this final piece of Darwin's jigsaw was almost lost to science when German authorities tried to turn Messel into a massive landfill rubbish dump. Eventually, after campaigning by Dr Franzen, the plans were rejected and the fossil-rich lake was designated a World Heritage Site. But no doubt there would have been one person happy for the missing link to have remained hidden. When Darwin famously told the Bishop of Worcester's wife about his theory of evolution, she remarked: "Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known." Now, it certainly is.