Demba Ba and Vurnon Anita v Wigan.Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a guest blog this time! Many thanks to “ToonBano” from the Toon blog www.toonbano.com for his thoughts – wt.
What a relief.
NUFC have stopped the rot of 4 straight defeats, got a clean sheet and scored three well worked goals in the 3-0 victory over Wigan. What is even more of a relief is the system and the strategy used for the Monday night win. The 4-3-3 has been begged and pleaded to come out of retirement by myself and others this season because it is the system that suits our players the best. Against Wigan we finally used it properly, passing the ball to each other and created space with movement and fluidity, as the players were completely comfortable playing in positions that suited them as well as the team overall. Hallelujah!
We were far from perfect but it was a damn sight better than kicking the ball long, bypassing midfield altogether into the two strikers. This way of playing is rigid, lazy and has no place with the type of players we have. I never want to see us play like that ever again. Hopefully the penny has finally dropped with Alan Pardew but we will only know over the next month. It wouldn’t surprise me if he decided to go back to hoofball. He’s done it before. (more…)
Hoof the ******!“Alan Pardew will tell you that he tries to play good football – That’s rubbish, he plays long ball football. It’s very direct, there is no creativity in midfield, he just wants to play route one football. Every time I’ve seen his teams play, they play that way but he’ll say in the Press ‘we play good football.’ At times he can be a conman.”– ex player and pundit Stewart Robson when Pardew was appointed as Newcastle United’s manager.
In my previous story on Alan Pardew’s long balls, “Pardew’s long balls – An in depth probe,” I revealed that thanks to our Silver Supremo’s love of “route one” football, Newcastle United are now the biggest long ball team in the Premiership. Indeed, they are eclipsing even the high priests of long balls, Tony Pulis and Sam Allardyce, as well as Pardew’s own long ball protege, Brian “long balls” McDermott at Reading, who Pardew beat into second place by some distance. This piece is intended as some kind of follow up to that.
But first however, here’s a truncated version of the table I presented in that piece, which covered our first eleven Premiership games (up to and including West Ham).(more…)
