Newcastle v Sunderland – Derby day match preview.
Posted on October 30th, 2010 | 78 Comments |
The cheesy chip eating, trampy blue pop drinking brigade will be ruining the look of the landscape in Newcastle for a few hours tomorrow afternoon, so let’s hope we can send their distorted faces back home without anything to smile about!
Sunderland are wandering around at the moment believing they are the best, and they could have some justification for that to be honest. Afterall, they didn’t spend last season in The Championship, unlike us.
Still, I have a newsflash for them – they are not as good as they seem to think they are!
A bit of luck, and a few own goals have gained them points at home against some good teams. If they had lost that bit of luck then they wouldn’t have anywhere near as many points as they have now. To illustrate just how a bit of luck can play a part in the table, if we had some luck we would be four points better off already.
Steven Taylor will miss the match although he is back in full training and will be back in contention for a first-team recall soon enough. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for Dan Gosling, Hatem Ben Arfa, Steve Harper, Sol Campbell and Leon Best.
The formation will be key tomorrow in my opinion. Sunderland are likely to play a 4-5-1 formation, so it depends whether or not Chris Hughton decides to match up to them or stick with the two strikers up top.
If we play a 4-4-2 I suspect that we will lose the midfield battle as we will be outnumbered. If we match up to them it will be more of a level playing field in the midfield, but it will leave us looking rather light up front. It’s a call that Chris Hughton has to make, but I would like to see a team of;
Newcastle – Tim Krul, Danny Simpson, Mike Williamson, Fabricio Coloccini, Jose Enrique, Wayne Routledge, Joey Barton, Cheick Tiote, Jonas Gutierrez, Kevin Nolan, Andy Carroll.
Having said that I can easily see us starting with two up front tomorrow and playing Joey Barton on the right of midfield again in a carbon copy of the team and formation that done so well at West Ham a week ago.
Sunderland will be missing Frazier Campbell and David Meyler who are both long-term absentees. As far as injury news goes that is about it for them to be honest.
In their last match, a 1-0 win over Aston Villa, Darren Bent didn’t actually score! Instead it was the turn of their second highest goalscorer ‘own goal’ to take some of the limelight as Richard Dunne rather unexplicably put through his own net to gift the spanners a win at the Stadium of Light last weekend. It was their first win without the intervention of Darren Bent scoring for 14 months, but call them a one man team and they get ever so defensive……. Their team for that game was;
Sunderland – Simon Mignolet, Nedum Onuoha, Michael Turner, Titus Bramble, Phil Bardsley, Ahmed Al-Muhammadi, Jordan Henderson, Lee Cattermole, Steed Malbranque, Danny Welbeck, Darren Bent.
Newcastle hold the upper hand in terms of Tyne-Wear rivalry, and that is a fact that won’t be changed tomorrow regardless of the outcome. This will be the 144th meeting between the two sides. Newcastle have won 51, Sunderland 46 and there have been 46 draws. It’s also been ten years since Sunderland managed a win on Tyneside with their last win coming way back in 2000 courtesy of a Niall Quinn header.
It will be a tough game, as derbies always are, and form goes out of the window to coin a cliche. There is no doubt that I am up for it already and I will be in The Gallowgate End screaming the lads on to what will hopefully be our 52nd Tyne-Wear derby victory.
Howay the lads!
P.S. – No prediction this week ;)
Date – Sunday, 31st October, 2010.
Kick-off – 1:30pm.
Venue – St James’ Park, Newcastle.
NUFCBlog Author: toonsy
toonsy has written 643 articles on this blog.