acrossthepond

Would've left Anita on but otherwise Pardew's changes were good. We obviously have the players - they just seem to come out so rarely. Most of the time they look like anonymous ghosts who have never played together instead of full internationals. Too bad it takes being 3-0 down with one of the worst performances in recent years to get the team playing any sort of football.

This should be the last game Santon plays for us at LB. I don't mind his attacking game but defensively he is an abomination. You can see the clear contrast between him and Debuchy - Debuchy is a defender struggling for form whose innate quality has showed today. Santon is not a defender.

Cisse should come on soon, our strikers are looking isolated.

Pick that out!

Santon completely at sea for that chance. Nowhere near his man.

Time for another half of our players going through the motions.

Was that meant to be an assist by Krul?

Just underlines how far up the table we could've been with a win over Hull. Jol will probably go. I don't understand how he's been so short-sighted, since I know he's a good manager. Signing a bunch of pensioners is generally a cover plan to allow youth players to get strong enough to take their places, but that obviously hasn't happened at Fulham and he's about to pay the price, I think.

Well that's us out then, job done for Pardew and co.

@Moog: Support the men in black and white who go out and play in front of you every other week. That part of the club still belongs to us no matter who the owner is or what division we play in. It's a wretched situation but there's nothing any of us can do. Fat Mike won't budge until he's good and ready.

Class. I hear there's a local managerial vacancy, if you're reading this, Joe....

The only disappointment is that he wasn't given longer to utterly destroy the mackems. Five or six more games of his incompetence and they'd be past the point of no return imo. A useless manager, as much a dinosaur in his own way as Kinnear. We'll never hear from him again in this country, unless he gets a job as a pundit spouting his 'controversy.'

It's hard to see past the 0-3 to Sunderland and the 0-6 to Liverpool. The utter lack of any effort in those games and the manager's feeble tactics were enough to turn people against him and the team - and I confess I was one of them, stating on here that it was time for Pardew to go following the loss to Liverpool. Without the idiotic appointment of Kinnear, I imagine the summer of discontent re: Pardew would have continued, but the arrival of our director of fuck-all did enough to alleviate some of the pressure on the manager by way of sympathy to keep there from being any more trouble. Now he appears to be getting the team turned around with some positive displays and decent tactics and if it can continue, then support for him will continue. I probably was wrong to want Pardew out at the end of last season, but judging him solely on the period following our win over Chelsea, he looked a man utterly out of his depth, with no plan B and no idea of how to dig us out of the hole we were in. He seemed unable to inspire any devotion from the players. I know part of that was down to a depleted squad, but I still worry that "that Pardew" lurks beneath the surface, and as soon as things get a little bumpy, he'll revert to type and we'll end up playing terrible football with an unmotivated squad.

He wants to keep his mouth shut and concentrate on what happens on the pitch. That's what we judge him by - everyone knows the transfer failures are not his fault, but mouthing that complete load of bullshit is only going to harm his image in the eyes of fans. I understand he was probably forced into that bogus statement, but if I were him now I'd answer transfer questions with "Sorry, the window has closed and we just have to focus on making sure this is a successful season."

In fairness he thinks we're talking about Bryan Robson.

Tell me you don't hold it against the boring beige cunts as well and I'll show you a liar. Besides, little rivalries like that are what makes football so great. I remember when we played Stoke in the FA cup 3rd round just after Fat Sam had been sacked. They were still in the championship and it was the first time we'd played them since maybe the 80s, when there'd been some bother with our fans at their industrial shithole of a ground. Something silly that happened a while ago, yet it fired our fans up, much the same way the home tie with Leeds has this year, and we ended up really looking forward to it and trouncing them 4-1 (didn't hurt that KK was re-appointed that day either.) So yeah, could we let it go? Definitely. Am I going to? Not a chance. Football's about heroes and villains (no pun intended) and the way those wankers carried on definitely qualifies them for the latter category.

Do we fuck. They took the piss out of us when we were at our lowest just for a laugh. I hope we're in a position to repay the favour one day.

The terrible crime of wanting our club to be great again - or, if great isn't achievable, then at least not a sad parody of itself ran by a piss-taking chancer and his alkie crony and helmed by a dogsbody like Pardew who's content to collect his cheques and toe the line. What a shocker! Fans of ailing club want owner to splash the cash! How unreasonable we are for daring to want reinforcement to a squad in dire need of it. It's all OK because Uncle Mike bought us 5 players in January so we could stop up (never mind that failing to spend in the summer was the reason we were in that position.)

Another true classic of a thread from CT. The biggest girls' blouse on the board moaning about moaning girls' blouses. Fans complaining about the lack of investment that turned us from 5th place Champions League contenders (one match away from 4th) to relegation dodgers the next season is what's turning us into a laughingstock. Fucking hell, you couldn't make this up.

I think they call that a "Plan B." Something nobody at this club seems to know anything about.

On a loan with no option to buy? He did decently in a shit team but a 20 minute cameo at SJP does not suggest he's streets ahead any of those players who we could've signed on a permanent basis, barring Lukaku and Borini. The real difference is that they would cost money and Remy didn't (I think a 2m loan fee was mooted?) That's not even getting into the (unlikely) possibility of Remy being sent down halfway through his time here. As far as loans with no option to buy: Hmm, a young, powerful forward who'd bust a gut to prove himself worthy to his employers, or a mercenary who already knocked us back once? Admittedly Remy will want to play his way into the France squad, but the simple fact is that we're doing him (and QPR) a favour, as our illustrious director of fuck-all already stated. No movement forward in the market. So yes, I'd rather have had any of the players you named above, barring Sessegnon, on a permanent basis than Remy on loan. Ideally it would be both.

A storming half-season followed by a quick sale in January might be best for all concerned, if he were to be replaced adequately.

Another load of shit that only we put up with is factoring agents' fees into transfers (Ba, for example.)

Still available, isn't he? I'd take him until the end of the season.

Seems like we're not even bothering with a fake bid this year. This club will never progress as long as we have Ashley. The fish smells from the head. Llambias, Wise, Jimenez, Kinnear, all of them are merely cronies and fall-guys for the fat bastard who has successfully converted this great and storied club into also-rans, when we aren't busy being the laughingstocks of the league.