Battle of the long balls II.Venue: St James’ Park, Newcastle. Date: Sat 19th January, 2013. Kick off: 3.00pm. Referee: Andre Marriner (West Mids). UK TV: None.
Hello, good afternoon and welcome to our “match banter” feature for this afternoon’s game between Newcastle United and Reading from St James’ Park.
This of course will be the Magpies’ second encounter with Reading, the last one being a 2-2 draw at their place, the Madejski Stadium, at the end of September. Back then it was a battle of the long balls between Alan Pardew and his Reading protégé (though they are both 51), Brian “long balls” McDermott, who was a chief scout for Pardew in his first managerial job. Newcastle and Reading are the two biggest long ball sides in the Premiership so far, but thankfully, Pardew’s Magpies seemed to be settling into a style which is slightly less reliant on “route one” tactics in recent games, though in their last game against Norwich, a 0-0 bore draw, Newcastle showed some signs of reverting to their previous long ball ways. (more…)
Will Hughton be Pardew's executioner this afternoon?Venue: Carrow Road, Norwich. Date: Sat 12th January, 2013. Kick off: 3.00pm. Referee: Anthony Taylor. UK TV: None.
Hello, good afternoon and welcome to our latest “match banter” for this afternoon’s “Battle of the Bird’s” as the Magpies travel to Norfolk to take on the Canaries of Norwich City.
City of course are managed by Alan Pardew’s predecessor at Newcastle, Chris Hughton, who was sacked in controversial circumstances back in December 2010. With Pardew currently in dire straits and Newcastle having the lowest points total after 21 games in their Premiership history so far, it would not be beyond the bounds of possibilty for Pardew to be sacked if the Magpies were to capitulate to Hughton’s Canaries. If that happened, the situation would not be without a little irony. However, Hughton has had a poor run of results recently too, with Norwich having lost four of their last five games. Two of these have been against daunting opposition (Chelsea and Man City), with one of the others, against West Ham, being rather controversial in terms of refereeing decisions. The other being a narrow 2-1 defeat at West Brom. Despite this though, the Canaries are still currently perched three places above the Magpies in twelfth with 25 points, five more than Newcastle. Our last game at St James’ Park earlier in the season resulted in a narrow 1-0 vistory to the Magpies though, with a 20th minute strike from the now dearly departed Demba Ba making the difference between the two sides. (more…)
Laurent Blanc: Why not?Many thanks to “ToonBano” from the Toon blog www.toonbano.com for his fifth guest blog here – wt.
Apologies for the sensationalist headline but bear with me there’s a point to it. My patience with Alan Pardew has been down to a thread for most of this season (just have a little look in my archive section to see the proof), but since that Brighton humiliation the thread has snapped. For good. The man is totally incompetent at his role and how he manages to get away with it without any real criticism in the footballing world is astonishing. His greatest talent is being soaked in Teflon it seems.
To the eye of the realistic, honest and well informed Newcastle United supporter, his incompetence does not go unnoticed however. In fact, it drives us up the wall! When you look at every aspect of the Newcastle Utd managers responsibilities he holds, it is quite reasonable to say that the one we have in place has failed at almost every single one of them. I’ll name a few and you decide whether he gets a ‘pass’ or a ‘fail’: (more…)
Same old Shola, always scoring.Many thanks to “ToonBano” from the Toon blog www.toonbano.com for his fourth guest blog here – wt.
As we managed to fall over the line to a 1-0 ‘win’ over QPR its got to be said that was one of the worst games of football I have ever seen in my whole life. Which was caused by mainly two things a) QPR being one of the worst teams that have ever shown up at St James’ Park and b) Our defensive starting line up. Those two miserable things cancelled each other out into an insufferable bore fest that would kill anyone’s Christmas spirit no matter how jolly they were feeling prior to kick off.
But this kind of performance from us on our own patch against a completely inferior side is no surprise whatsoever to all of us, or it shouldn’t be. It’s a typical Alan Pardew performance which we have come to expect in his 2 years here as manager. We didn’t exactly ‘win’ that game on Saturday afternoon but just managed to get the ball into their net on that bare minimal occasion, as the opposition had no chance of doing the same to us. QPR were hopeless. We were not much better. (more…)
A bright new dawn for NUFC?Many thanks to “ToonBano” from the Toon blog www.toonbano.com for his second guest blog here – wt.
Today is the two year anniversary of Alan Pardew’s very first game as NUFC manager, when we defeated Liverpool 3-1 thanks to goals from Kevin Nolan, Joey Barton and Andy Carroll. Just looking at the goal scorers that evening and the impressive overall performance, compared to who we have in our team now after another defeat at the hands of Fulham Monday Night, it’s safe to say things have changed a lot over that period of time.
Most people were confused and concerned as to why Alan Pardew was even in the dugout that night two years ago as Chris Hughton was doing a sterling job in our first season back in the Premier League after the ultimate humiliation of relegation. Which of course was thanks to him for rescuing this club from certain doom by getting us promoted at the first time of asking, even though he had no previous managerial experience at that point of his life. Most fans thought he was unfairly sacked and I was one of them. (more…)
