Kitman

You've clearly been smoking blowing Parky. Well blow me

Yes, presumably the wage bill will start to decrease from 1 July. I think we'll see player sales coming through from that date too. I don't think the club will go into administration personally.

You've clearly been smoking Parky. You couldn't smoke a whole Parky. Not at one sitting

No surprise he won't accept a pay as you play deal. He's always fucking injured, the greedy little toerag.

Based on nothing at all I have a feeling it's going to turn out OK. All this shizzle is designed to force a close on the sale of the club. We'll look back and laugh. I admit I have been drinking a bit.

I think Ashley is clueless rather than evil. He's screwed things up royally and now he's looking to make a run for it imo. He doesn't care if that makes things worse, as long as he gets out quick. He's doing the equivalent of running out of town as fast as his tubby legs can carry him, with his trousers and pants round his ankles.

Fucking hell man, perspective required. Aye it's nothing a good donkey ride wouldn't eclipse. And a Kiss me Kwik hat and stick of rock for added class

Can't help but agree with that assessment as things stand. It'd be different if a new manager could geton and sort out the squad but that doesn't look like happening atm

You could argue that he has been instrumental in our decline. A huge signing on fee and annual wage were paid on the basis his goals would fire us up the league. That money translated into debt or funds that could have been used to buy/pay better players for key positions. As it turns out he's mainly been injured, his worst injury being sustained on England duty when it was irresponsible to us for him to play. In addition he's been picked whenever fit regardless of his or other players' form and his media profile has been a distraction. He hasn't banged in the goals when we've needed them most as a rule. I realise that he has sold a lot of shirts and added a bit of glamour for sponsors etc. but I wish now in retrospect we hadn't signed him. The money could have been better spent on the squad imo and I can't wait to see the back of him.

I didn't realise it was him.... "YABOO BOLLOCKSS HISSSSS" Reminds me of:

Managerial choice is your (who's we?) only criticism? You don't feel he owes any responsibility for the debt he brought to the club leaving us with the crippling wage bill we have today? You don't have anything negative to say about the money he and the Halls took from the club, making them extremely wealthy men in the process? The outrageous salaries and dividends, rewarded to themselves regardless of how the club was doing on the pitch, not to mention cronyism and other financial irregularities. You don't have any comment on the Halls and Shepherds appalling PR and numerous public gaffes? Just to make it absolutely clear, I regard all these failures entirely independently of Ashley and none of this mitigates his disastrous reign. But how quickly are we supposed to forget Shepherd's own failures, which have played at least part of the mess we have found ourselves in now? Any talk of a return of Shepherd and company is an utterly nauseating prospect. Oh, and at least 3 of those managers required no hindsight to see they were very, very bad decisions. To use the words 'only criticism' slighly underplays his failure in the one area of his work he absolutely had to get right. Not to mention the unbelievably bad timing and of his dismissals which then forced us into the next bad choice. It's not all down to Freddy.....the Halls must take their share of the blame for the dodgy appointments, they were the majority shareholders after all. To be fair I could see the point of Allardyce, especially with the money all gone, so I wouldn't put him in the same category as Souness and Roeder. Souness there is absolutely no fucking excuse for.

Martin Samuel is a fat cunt of the first order, I haven't forgotten the ill informed shit he wrote about us earlier in the season. So I'm not going to applaud him now he's finally got something right.

Get tooled up mate. http://www.sausagemaking.org/acatalog/mincers.html I'm British. I would much rather complain about the lack of decent sausages than make them myself. Apparently there's a decent sausage shop near where I live that's the shizzle. Run by........a Gorman! Wunderbar!

I think any manager thrown into that situation was going to struggle. Not making excuses for him but he needs time to learn his trade. Whether he should be doing that with us is a moot point of course.....the question is whether in the long term the gamble's on him worth taking. At this point in our history I think it is.

I'm trying to stay positive. Let's see how it pans out, eh

As more time slips by......

It's make up your own story time judging by the Sunday papers

It was only a matter of time I suppose

Not too wide of the mark I fear

I've given up trying to guess what's going to happen with this lot. The truth usually turns out to be stranger than fiction. Odd that the press are fixated by a small Championship club, mind.

Wasn't he injured all the time when we had him?

No one said that one manager was going to do, as someone else has said in this thread we wanted progression, even if it was from 13th to 12th. Under Allardyce we were going backwards at an alarming rate. By the by, WE realised football had changed, WE realised we needed a change from top to tail, followed by a periood of stability, investment in youth and a scouting system of note, we knew we needed to stop buying players just for their name, we knew all of this, unfortunately WE don't get to make the decisons, that falls to the mororns at the top. A back line hasn't always been poor and he did more to make it pourous than many others. Robson and Keegans (neither defensively minded) had better defence than your Fat Sam, we didn't have steel we had thugs, whats the point in a steely midfielder when he can't pass the ball once he's got it? Just as you're saying it's harsh of us to judge him after so few games,it's madness for you to think he'd have done any better if he'd stayed. 9 points from a possible 36. That's relegation form. So Newcastle United or Blackburn will never again challenge for the title? Fuck off. If it takes a decade or it take four I'll still be cheering us on. I'm quite happy to take the long view mate, but it seems you aren't You might be content with a top ten place, but that's not enough I want more. I want glory. If that means waiting until I'm 65, then so-fucking-be it. I wonder, do you have an opinion of your own, or do you just use Sky Sports? Barely watch Sky Sports except for the actual matches, and even then you can never take a panel with Jamie Redknapp on it very seriously. 9 points from a possible 36 - I guarantee you I can pick out a good third of the league who will have similar runs next season. It's a very poor run of form but you can't sack a manager for a poor run of form, especially when you weren't in any imminent danger of relegation. He'd picked up 15 points from his first 9 for a team that had finished 5 points from relegation the season before, or do those games not count in your overall assessment? You weren't going backwards under Sam, if you went backwards from 5 points from the drop you wouldve been around the drop zone at that point. It's complete madness to think he wouldve been relegated that season, whereas to think a manager who has got good results at his other two clubs (and who had started the season well with Newcastle) mightve made things better is perfectly reasonable thinking. If you'd seen the team play week in week out, you'd know what a load of bollocks this statto stuff is.

Mate, you won't get much patience on here if you start repeating stereotypes put about by the press. If you speak to grass root fans, not the mongs on Sky Sports, you'll find that most people don't want champagne football or anything approaching it and there's no expectation of winning things. We want stability, an owner who invests and a team that shows progress year on year. Sam's football was quite simply appalling to watch. The team showed none of his supposed virtues and was clearly going backwards. His Bolton teams could mix it up between long and short football, were agggressive and well organised. Our team played hoof ball, was badly organised, the set pieces were a joke, couldn't score, couldn't keep the ball, leaked goals for fun, was dispirited and went to places like Derby aiming not to lose and failing. Sam was totally out of his depth and responded by bullshitting and making excuses. He had clearly lost the dressing room, training was acknowledged by the players to be a shambles and there were complaints of lack of fitness. We still had injury problems depsite his legion of assistants. He had a terrible record against the weaker teams in the league, the majority of which we'd played by the time he was sacked with the difficult games to go. It's not fanciful at all to say we would have been relegated under his watch and he would have been sacked imo by most clubs. I understand how things look to the outsider but you honestly don't understand just how bad things were under his leadership. I'd bet you didn't watch most of the matches at the time. Giving him more time wouldn't have solved a thing. He was hopelessy out of his depth and had given up by the time he got the bullet. You weren't far from relegation the season previous to that. If he had a terrible record against the weaker teams in the league, did he have a decent record against the stronger teams in the league? Only he left you in 11th place. He must have done decent against one set of teams. After Sam left you had 19 games left. These included games against Bolton, Boro, Rovers, Birmingham, Fulham, Spurs (who were in massive decline), Reading, Portsmouth, Sunderland and West Ham. Under Sam you would have picked up 11 points from those 10 games alone to get the 37 needed for safety that year, let alone the matches against the top 6 teams where you mightve scraped a point or two. You would not have got relegated that season under Sam, and yet you sacked him when you desperately needed stability. No, we started the season well against the weaker teams and then went on a terrible run which culminated in his sacking. I can't be arsed to look up the exact stats but I assume it's the 9 points from 12 games one mentioned. The point is we were in a tailspin which he couldn't climb out of. We had the momentum of a relegation side, which we know all about from this season - your comment about getting 11 points from 10 games is the sort of guff people have come out with this season. To be frank he never showed any signs of hacking it at NUFC. Maybe he will at Rovers I don't know. But he offered us no stability at all, the football was terrible, his signings were shit, he'd lost the dressing room. I hope for your sake he does better for you but I was glad to see the back of him at the time. As it turns out you're quite correct to say we could have done much worse because we did. That 's not to say he was going to be any good for us, we've seen the evidence. Bolton and Newcastle are different clubs, however you try to paint it and it's not because of deluded fans.

You're just talking bollocks now. Did you read any of my post? Big Sam wasn't offering any sort of stability, we were going down the plug hole fast and he'd obviously thrown the towel in. There was no 'Big Sam Out' campaign by the way, he was sacked by the new owner.

Mate, you won't get much patience on here if you start repeating stereotypes put about by the press. If you speak to grass root fans, not the mongs on Sky Sports, you'll find that most people don't want champagne football or anything approaching it and there's no expectation of winning things. We want stability, an owner who invests and a team that shows progress year on year. Sam's football was quite simply appalling to watch. The team showed none of his supposed virtues and was clearly going backwards. His Bolton teams could mix it up between long and short football, were agggressive and well organised. Our team played hoof ball, was badly organised, the set pieces were a joke, couldn't score, couldn't keep the ball, leaked goals for fun, was dispirited and went to places like Derby aiming not to lose and failing. Sam was totally out of his depth and responded by bullshitting and making excuses. He had clearly lost the dressing room, training was acknowledged by the players to be a shambles and there were complaints of lack of fitness. We still had injury problems depsite his legion of assistants. He had a terrible record against the weaker teams in the league, the majority of which we'd played by the time he was sacked with the difficult games to go. It's not fanciful at all to say we would have been relegated under his watch and he would have been sacked imo by most clubs. I understand how things look to the outsider but you honestly don't understand just how bad things were under his leadership. I'd bet you didn't watch most of the matches at the time. Giving him more time wouldn't have solved a thing. He was hopelessy out of his depth and had given up by the time he got the bullet.