Baggio

Why's that? For being Welsh. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/c/cardiff_city/7294461.stm

This was brought up at the supporters panel with Mort when it first started up, one of the lads from .com I think it was made the point about the club not taking the smallest possible allocation under Shepherd as they thought his thinking was the less tickets they sell the more people he will get in Shearer's bar to watch the games. So the club went down the road of gauging demand for tickets by threads on Newcatle-Online etc, plenty said they should take the full allocation as they would sell out until the time came and there were plenty left over which the club had to pay for, so since then if the demand isn't there at the ticket office then they will just take the smaller allocation.

So we're in a position where we want the Scousers to win the cup final to keep 7th spot a possibility for Europe.

He won't leave until the summer and the other guy we're apparently after from France (Yanga-Mbiwa) isn't available until then as his chairman has said nobody will be sold until then as they're going for the title. Which the papers say is the reason why we're after cover.

so what has Mikey boy done wrong, surely he had a "plan", and any plan would be better than the hopeless Fred ? Well we're better off now than how Fred left us that's for sure, so it's a case of more of the same on our part. If we get a big offer for one of our players that we think isn't worth it then cash in as long as we are confident of making a better team out of it, then it's a case of making the club more profitable and using that money to push the team on.

you've waited 4 years for a half decent run Baggy, to say all of this. You're setting yourself up for a mighty fall. When it comes, I hope you don't run off sulking and crying or getting a strop on again. Learn from your mistakes, football is not about winning a few games, its about doing things in a certain way, and that means keeping your best players, and allowing your manager to run the club and backing him with the funds he needs, not diverting transfer funds elsewhere, and showing the ambition to fulfill the potential of the club [which I suspect Ashley doesn't understand anyway and doesn't help at all]. He will NEVER match the previous regime, remember those who said "anybody could do better than this", so often ? Laughable. Yet we're miles better off on an off the pitch than the mess we were in when he bought us. The best bit is you know it too.

rubbish. Fred wasn't the manager or the owner by the way, and if he had been the manager, then qualifying for europe more than any club bar 4 in 15 years isn't too bad It means he bought Bellamy, Robert, Speed, Dyer, Hamman, Solano, Given, Woodgate, Jenas, etc etc etc ......match that then Mikey baby He sold them all too apart from Given and Dyer. Selling our best players eh? No wonder we dropped like a stone when he cashed in on them all.

how were we run when we jumped from one foot in the 3rd division, with a cow shed of a stadium, half full, and not able to float for 1.25m quid and ended up one of the biggest clubs in europe with one of the best grounds, full every game, and the 14th biggest revenues in football ? It was ran similar to how Man Utd, Arsenal and Spurs are now, we bought mostly with profits the club made as well as £40 million in the bank as part of a deal when the club became a PLC.

I wasn't aware that it was directed at me but you're a good one to question someone for not answering questions. I think he will invest if the club has the money, if that isn't the case then why was Cisse bought?

So you can't tell us how to do it. As far as I'm aware the majority of the cash from Carroll is still in the club, we were never going to rush out and spend it all in the summer and the club said as much at the time, it's why we've got money to go out and buy Cisse and attempt to sign another defender now. We were miles off Liverpool and Arsenal when Ashley bought the club, a lot further than we are now in fact and as for Spurs, they've been ran fantastically well as a business over recent years to get to where they are now.

and its how we did it [ie keep our best players, and back our managers] when we were also in the Champions League. Correct? It's the way we're doing it now too, we're living within our means and pushing forward that way. Yes we've sold a few of our better players in but so have the clubs above, yet we're still moving forward despite this.

in that case, fasten your belt and look forward to the Nou camp and San Siro again. i think not. That doesn't even make any sense. We can't compete with the likes of Chelsea, Man City and Liverpool who have been bankrolled with large amounts recently and we can't compete with Man Utd, Arsenal and Spurs who make good profits that they use to push forward. If you think differently then please tell us how to do it.

We're a selling club because ashley lied to the fans, lied to Keegan and changed the name of the ground? That's what you have basically just argued. I do agree that Ashley could be more ambitious but as that is limited to about £10 to £15m of spending thats no guarantee of moving us even one position up the league. People like you are not able to look at things objectively so you accuse people of 'defending ashley' when the reality is just that people think the club has made progress on the pitch. That's a hard nose impartial 'analysis' that can be made without an opinion on the owner. When people are arguing this maybe it comes over to you as defending ashley but I don't think that is the case for most people, I think it's just accepting the evidence of their eyes so far. I respect your view that the outlook is negative but in the interests of fairness it should be accepted by you and others that it's just a prediction for now with evidence running against it currently. any progress on the pitch will not be sustained, because the strategy [or "plan", ironically as people said that we played so often in europe despite not having a "plan" ] is not the correct way to sustain it. It's the bigger picture. You are being completely taken in by a few results, they are nothing more than an upper blip, and down to a manager making good from a shit set of cards. It's the way Man Utd and Arsenal have been doing it for years and the way Spurs are doing it too.

I've answered this in the other thread. There is ManU and 2 bankrolled clubs. That is all. The old regime has ManU and one bankrolled club. They challenged them because they were football men and knew the club, your man isn't and won't challenge ManU and the 2 bankrolled clubs. This is no excuse for NUFC behaving like West Brom, Blackburn, Bolton etc. The club is not progressing, it will NEVER match the league positions, in the same league, against the same competitors, with the same club as the previous regime, because your man will NOT rise to the challenge and attempt it, with one of the biggest clubs in europe, courtesy of the previous regime, who took over a club with one foot in the 3rd division, light years inferior in every way to the club that your man Ashley found. Who was the bankrolled club the last time we were in the Champions League? We had Arsenal and Man Utd who were far better than us and financed their teams by spending the profits the club made, now we've got those 2 + Spurs who operate the same as well as Man City, Chelsea and Liverpool who have all been bankrolled recently, even clubs like Villa and Sunderland have been bankrolled in recent years spending more money in a season than we ever have. I don't think there's much difference in the quality of players we've got now to the Newcastle, Liverpool and Chelsea teams of 2004, it's just everyone else up there has improved far more in that time.

Talking about when we were in the Champions League as a benchmark to match what the previous lot done is absolutely pointless, we're in a completely different era of football now. Back then it was the era of local businessmen owning clubs, it was an era when most clubs attempted to live within their means and the one's that didn't either went under like Leeds or came close to it like Chelsea, football was so much simpler then for us as it was a case of employ a different manager and the chance of getting into the top 4 was back on since it was a small pool of teams at the top and apart from Man Utd and Arsenal the rest of the teams were nothing special. Then Abramovich came and bought Chelsea and everything changed, I honestly think we would have qualified for the CL the year we came 5th if he hadn't bought them and the more big investors that came in looking to throw money about the more we struggled, to be fair to Shepherd he did take the gamble but it was with the wrong managed and it failed spectacularly and it was a position I didn't see him ever recovering from, the financial hole was too deep. Now look at the league compared to back then, we've got a team like Liverpool spending £100 million and they can't get top 4, I think Man City spent over £300 million before getting there and for a club without outside investment it's practically impossible. Does anyone really think we would have got back into the CL in this current era with Hall and Shepherd still owning the club? Not a fucking chance is what I think. We are superior now on and off the pitch compared to how the club was when Ashley took charge, I don't think there is anyone that can doubt that and while it has taken time to turn the club around I don't think people can have any complaints about the direction we're going in.

I seem to remember Llambias saying on an interview with radio Newcastle that the transfer fee we got for Carroll would be used over a few years rather than spent all at once.

These 2 are not technically mine but when we moved to where we live now there was a small colony of feral cats that lived near the Indian market out back, one of them had kittens and we've slowly coaxed them around to being used to us, they now spend nearly every night in the house. Perdy on the left and Matilda on the right... Matilda... Perdy... You can see here that there was 3 of them originally but one male disappeared which is when we made the decision to keep them in every night. Cats love dreamies btw! Perdy making herself at home...

Here's my cat Baloo, he's not very old and this picture was taken a few weeks before Christmas looking like a Furby. He was a little boy lost to start with... He's growing fast and starting to look like a proper cat now...

Apparently a deal between clubs and the governing bodies ends in 2014 which says clubs have to release players for the ANC so there's a good chance it will change then.

Deserves it's own thread now. Anyway bid rejected apparently...

Without wanting to go down the who scouted who route I always thought Calderwood had a big say in us signing Perch, in fact we tried to get the deal done in January before Carr was even here iirc. Speaking to Newcastle's official website, Perch said: 'It's brilliant to finally get here. There was a lot of talk in January and I was close then but to get it signed and sealed is brilliant. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1292092/Newcastle-set-net-James-Perch-agreeing-fee-Nottingham-Forest-mark-start-summer-transfer-trawl.html#ixzz1kInd5qf7

.............Cisse .Ba....................Ben Arfa ...Marveaux....Cabaye ..............Tiote I like.

Pavlyuchenko is a decent player but there's not much point in him swapping Spurs bench for ours, will probably rip Sunderland off like they've done with selling them squad players previously.

Played 22 Points 36 Saying it was a poor second half would be an understatement but with Stoke, Liverpool and Arsenal all losing too it's as we were so to speak, just another game closer to the finishing line. I think the new formation caused us problems as when Fulham stepped it up in the second half we were all over the place, the centre of midfield was getting pulled apart and the defenders being pulled up to high, that and we had square pegs in round holes with Best being stuck out on the left and nobody in the middle to sit deep and protect the back four. The formation does have potential, Ben Arfa looked excellent out on the right and with the lads to come back from the ANC it could leave us with a very good line up playing this way. I wonder if Pardew will scrap it as a bad idea?

Proof? There's a difference between their 'Sportsmail Reporter' articles (couple of lines, no quotes) and more legit-looking articles where they've not kept the journo's name anonymous. I'm not basing my disdain for it purely on NUFC-related news, for what it's worth. I coudn't really be arsed trawling through, but I think they called Cabaye, Santon and one or two others when no other paper had even hinted at it. They called the Tiote signing too.