Whitey Grandad

That’s even worse. If they want my continuing support they’ll go and get it back.

Oh FFS no! Who the feck takes a drum to a football match? They should stick their drumsticks up their arses.

Take both off?

This is the big concern. RM needs to wise up very quickly or the situation will get beyond him.

We had other options. My problem with Stephens is that he just holds up our game and robs it of any momentum. If I had my way he wouldn’t have been out there from the start. I’m not sure what was wrong with THB. He seemed a bit ’off’ all game.

Oh yes indeed. The North car park was a nightmare. The burger van in the middle only made things worse. I wasn’t clear if the blockage was caused by too many people or queues for the burgers or those standing around watching the TV screen or those listening to the live band. Over 30,000 people have to get away after the game and blocking one of the main escape routes isn’t a very good idea. Why don’t they turn the fan zone thing around and have it facing north? I expect there will be changes for the next game.

Oh dear. I have only gone and bought a ticket for this one. I can’t stand up for long so I chose a seat on the end of a row with what I hopefully thought would be an open view. The ticket arrived today and it says “safe standing “. Oops. Whatever, it will be a day out, a train ride and a night in a hotel. A win might be expecting too much.

There’s a very good reason that fans knock Stephens.

At least Martin will take Stephens with him. Won’t he?

Now, now. No need to get shirty. “More control in possession”, you say. Control of what? Is the obvious reply. Today we played as though we didn’t know what the main point of the game was; that of putting the ball in the other team’s net. In my view there were two players today who were responsible for our lack of ambition or objectives. Stephens put a dampener on our game whenever he received the ball. He is too ponderous and slow in thought. Smallbone was the other. All he did the first half was ping the ball back first time whenever anybody passed it to him. After half time this had changed and I can only assume that Martin had spoken to him.

Nothing 'adjudged' about it. It hut his knee and he was offside.

I think you'll find I have been consistent. I detest his style of football and I am still waiting for these "many years of success". I don't harp on about it all the time but today was abject.

That's exactly how I saw it. Just when we needed them they gad all gone quiet.

I turned on him last year.

It bounced off him on one occasion.

That can only happen if we win the toss at every home game. It has become a convention that if an away team wins they choose to attack towards their own fans in the second half. Sometimes they might choose not to if, for example, the angle of the sun affects the goalkeeper’s sight.

That’s not actually true. That mistake meant that Newcastle could sit deep and concentrate on defence. Or are we going to have to rely on scoring two or three goals in every away game?

Because the world is broken.

Not worth the paper it’s written on. Sam Goldwyn

Then let’s ask why they are doing it again this season? It can only be because they’re under instructions.

I remember a game we had at Chelsea a long time ago. I collected my daughter from Reading University and we drove to the ground the rain all day was Biblical with continuous thunder and lightning and we knew that the game could not go ahead. We even bought a programme and got inside the ground but and got to the top of the steps only to be told that we could go to our seats but that the game had been called off. We still have that programme for a game that never happened.

I might try that.

Materialised? Virtually none of it. Too many to pick apart individually but ‘Expanding Trade Horizons’ isa good place to start. Brexit has shrunk our trade horizons beyond even the direst predictions. I don’t see how looking at Australia, New Zealand or Africa can possibly replace trading with somewhere that’s only an hour or two’s flight away. A European visit is a day trip. These others are a week. Besides, there was nothing about being an EU member that prevented us dealing with these far off sunny uplands anyway.

Whoa! Hold on there for a moment. The referee is always correct. Especially in matters of a subjective nature.

A long while ago I read somewhere that investigators could tell whether a deceased person was left or right handed by the difference in the number of fillings in the left and right of the jaws. A right handed person brushes the left side more than the right and the left will have fewer fillings. I rushed to the mirror to examine mine and found out that I am right handed.