Tonight’s the night? Newcastle United v Sheffield United match banter!
Posted on April 5th, 2010 | 322 Comments |
As the whole region waits in anticipation of the big match, the team news is generally good. Only long term casualty, Steven Taylor, and ‘One Size’ Fitz Hall will be missing from selection, and a full strength team will be expected no doubt at St James’s Park this evening.
It should not be forgotten however that Kevin Blackwell’s mighty Blades have promotion ambitions of their own. Though only sitting in tenth on 55 points, they are still in with a slim chance of making the playoff places and will fight tooth and nail for a spot their own piece of the promotion action this evening. Speaking on the game this evening, and their promotion chances, Blackwell said this:
“We don’t want to be the warm up act for someone else’s party. It’s a big day for Newcastle but it is our job to go up there and spoil things for them.”
On the playoff chance he added:
“We still have some thing to play for even though it will probably mean we have to winat least four of our last five matches”.
Meanwhile, our glorious leader, Chris Hughton, had this to say on the game tonight and promotion:
“I think in an ideal scenario, yes, we would like to do it at St.James’ Park in front of a full house,”
“The fans have turned up in their droves at St.James’ all season and to clinch promotion in front of them would be magnificent.
“They deserve to enjoy that moment when we know we’ve done it and we’re all hoping that is Monday night.
“But there is still a job to be done and we have to prepare to face a good Sheffield United side who gave us a good game earlier in the season when we had to fight our way to a 1-0 win.
“We can’t let promotion distract us from the excellent job we’ve done all season and we’ll be looking for a similarly high standard of performance on Monday.”
This match will be covered live Sky Sports, but as usual, if any of you have good links for the game, then please feel free to post them. For all the usual, slightly more in depth pre match speculation, you can also check out Toonsy’s excellent match preview.
Howay the Lads!
Newcastle United v Sheffield United.
Venue / Date / Kickoff: St James’s Park, Monday 5th April, 7.45pm.
Teams.
Newcastle United: Steve Harper, Danny Simpson, Fabricio Coloccini, Mike Williamson, Jose Enrique, Wayne Routledge, Kevin Nolan (c), Danny Guthrie, Jonas Gutierrez, Peter Lovenkrands, Andy Carroll.
Subs: Tim Krul, Tamas Kadar, Joey Barton, Leon Best, Nicky Butt, Ryan Taylor, Shola Ameobi
Sheffield United: Steve Simonsen, Nick Montgomery, Chris Morgan (c), Darius Henderson, Lee Williamson, James Harper, Andy Taylor, Richard Creswell, Marcel Siep, Stephen Quinn.
Subs: Mark Yeates, Ian Bennett, Kyle Bartley, Glen Little, Derek Geary, Jonathan Fortune, Matthew Lowton
Referee: Andy Hall.
Ting!