CB Fry

I know it's all an act, so I will just applaud this as a quintessential example of your forum "character" and its lack of self awareness. Beautifully crafted. Bravo.

I'm still amazed that the Bundesliga has any good players whatsoever. Why aren't they all just playing for the Billionaire teams already?

I'll try and upload some pictures of the famous Derbyshire coastline later on.

This doesn't really make sense. If you're not accepting that Gao appointed decent people like Semmens ("his advisors did") then fair enough Gao has got himself good advisors, so Egg's point still stands. If Semmens was awful you'd be blaming that on Gao without a second thought, so I don't get why you need to distance him from the decision when the guy we have seems pretty good. It's weird you want a Chinese guy to impose more control and set "clear objectives" when from what I can see there is an incredibly clear strategy, Semmens seems completely empowered to activate it. I don't really see how Gao being significantly more visible would be any real benefit vs where we are now. Or, as I suspect, you don't really want "clearer objectives" or "shared interest" whatsoever. You just want us to outbid Villa or Everton for some striker from Belgium. Just say that. You don't want us to be skint anymore. Fine. Just say that.

Well it's all about Villa now: they are the one that have spent a few quid and now have the "platform" to invest and grow and build and next season invest and grow and build and next season invest and grow and build and so on and so on until people realise these clubs don't achieve the thing they think they will at the end of a jolly exciting transfer window, they just finish eighth again. And again. People moaned and moaned like fuck when we didn't "build on" our sixth place finish but I have still yet to see any club our size do any better than we did in terms of "building" on.

Before we got relegated the first time we had 25 odd consecutive seasons in the top flight, and by your metric we had "fuck all to show for" that as well. Without saying the word Leicester, can you give us some other clubs that have lots and lots to "show for" in the last decade or so? Birmingham City won the League Cup i guess. Wigan. You tell me.

Lovely sentiment here from our Arabic cousins. Hit the translate button.

They'll go out and get a top class elite manager like the boss of Barcelona or something.

Only on this bloody forum would people try and argue that Southampton is a bigger city than Newcastle. I mean, honestly.

Leibherr wouldn't be bankrolling us to compete with Abu Dhabi or the Saudis though. We'd be better off than we are now but not by loads. We'd still be trying to break even/live within means/etc. The main difference between us and say Leicester is not really over-and-above massive bankrolling, its been the right choices in player/manager recruitment, and pretty smart reinvestment of incoming fees.

One can only imagine how much development is going to be happening across Newcastle Marina in the coming years.

You enjoy the season, sweetheart.

Well, we will see. Obviously. But the point is that there is in our own (incredibly recent) history and in the other teams that have stayed up in recent seasons that you don't necessarily need a star striker, or even that many goals. That season with Austin and Co "others" didn't score. Hardly any fucker scored. It's quite a low bar. We still need to clear it but it is low.

Tadic 6, Gabbiadini 5 and no one else more than 3. Raining in they were.

Last season you can look at Brighton (Maupay 8 ) or Burnley (Wood got a few but the entire team scored only 33). Loads of teams with no-Danny-Ings can and do stay up. So it can be done, and we hope that Armstrong and Adams can get 20 between them

Baffles me why anyone is even bothering to rise to his pointless baiting.

Isn't the accurate comparison to the Health Secretary in this instance the Home Secretary?

....and those supermarkets will source far more meat products from Denmark or France or Poland to cover volumes if the price of UK products is at a premium. They'll use British when they can charge consumers a premium for it, but it will be a volume drain from farmers and processors who will just lose out to EU competitors, whose products continue to be waved through our borders far more easily than British producers can move stuff out other way. Lose/lose. But it didn’t take long for the mugs to hoover up the "it's all their own fault" narrative, so well done Boris. You reap what you sow indeed.

The team would start running out to "Thong Song"?

Nah, he know exactly what he's doing there. a) in the moment, obfuscate and just muddy up the issue but pretending that Andrew Marr is objecting to the death of any animal rather than engage with the real issue b) in the aftermath make the social media/wider coverage about him not understanding farming rather than the actual issue. He is using his own buffoon character as a human shield against actual policy analysis. In it's way it is clever and its why he wins. Either way, just like the CO2 issue a couple of weeks back, this pig issue will get miraculously sorted, and played as a win for the government before the week is out. There's no doubt that as soon as he left that studio he told Defra to do whatever it takes so he can say he "saved the great British banger" in two days time. Really the main issue is all the stuff he was coming out with on the restructuring of the world of work in the the UK is abject nonsense but probably scores well in focus groups. He's a master at what he does, I'll say that.

If they been ours for three years you'd fucking hate them i guarantee it.

If Townsend or Gray had been our players for a few years they'd be absolutely hated as inconsistent wasters by the exact same people demanding we should have signed them in August.

Meanwhile Ralph and the Norwich dude are on jobs for life.

All I can see is a season of a lot of "well, it's completely unrealistic to expect us to beat them" followed by a lot of "well, on another day we would have won that" and plenty of "well, bad day at the office" followed by the occasional win. And of course, when that win happens the exact same people who keep referring to our defeats as one-off events, and berating other users for their negative knee-jerk reactions to "look, it's just one defeat" will respond to that singular win as comprehensive and irrefutable proof that absolutely everything is fantastic and great and off we go into challenging the top half and all you doubters have been proved utterly wrong because we won that one game. What a season it's going to be.

my usual - hesgoal.com - picture great but is one of those weeks where they are streaming dutch coverage. So in the market for any alternatives.....