As a Newcastle United fan, I’m used to our local paper — the Evening Chronicle — churning out this sort of information. But as I’ve criticised this in the past for linking us with fifty-three different players and when we eventually sign one, triumphantly announcing “we told you first” — conveniently ignoring the 52 times they were wrong — I’ve been delighted to uncover an even less reliable source of information.

This is known as the Sky Sports Rumour Room, where people are supposed to send in the latest transfer rumours they have heard, only it appears to be a mix of existing transfer speculation mixed in with local rivalry, wishful thinking, and complete and utter bollocks.

And obviously, I’ve been having fun with it…

Looking at Jermaine Beckford — currently at Leeds United, 26, linked a lot with Newcastle recently, out of contract at the end of the season, untried above League One — what have people heard he’s up to? (remember, this is supposed to be rumours not “fantasy transfer window”)…

(Rumours all as at 12th January)

So firstly, I’d like to offer my congratulations to Jermaine Beckford, for having been responsible for 1/6th of all transfer rumours — that’s quite an astonishing return for a league one player. However, he is obviously remarkably busy, having managed trips to Newcastle, London and Glasgow all in one day. Unless one or more of these sources is telling porky pies, of course…

It’s obviously noticeable that he’s previously been linked with Newcastle, so anyone linking him with Newcastle — unless they have anything new to add — is just regurgitating existing gossip. On the other hand, the fact that virtually everyone (with the exception of Leeds fans) who talk about him seem to want him to sign for their club (I particularly like the ‘barcodes out of the running’ which suggests that the person knows something, followed by the impassioned plea ‘come to a big club with ambition’ which then suggests the person hasn’t got the foggiest what Beckford’s plans are after all).

But some of the funniest bits are people who obviously don’t know the details of a particular player, yet aren’t going to let that deter them from. There’s the people (#14, #19, #23 –who seemed to feel that selling a player out of contract in 5 months would finance about seven signings, #25) who seem to think someone is likely to pay over £3.5 million for a player they could get in the summer for free (over 24, will be out of contract). At least do some research before making up blatant transfer bollocks.

Although on that note, the best one I saw doesn’t involve Jermaine Beckford at all. It’s this one, from a Sunderland fan–

My uncle works at the stadium of light and he said that bruce might be taking in 3 players such as a £3 million spending on mario melchiot. A £4 million transfer for Hull city’s Hunt, and a end of season loan to buy for LA Galaxy striker Donavan.

Hmm. The only LA Galaxy striker with a name like that I can think of is Landon Donovan, but he signed for Everton last week. If your uncle does work at the Stadium of Light, I really hope he’s not part of their scouting team, otherwise Steve Bruce is in trouble…

But I also like the people who add the words “(RELIABLE SOURCES)” or “FACT!” to their blatant nonsense, just so people know that it must be true, because it’s not actually possible to write that sort of thing if you’re lying. I think. Unless it’s just that writing FACT! makes it come true. So I’ll just leave you with a rumour I recently heard…

Newcastle United will sign Jermaine Beckford, Matthew Kilgallon, Cesc Fabregas and Kaka, all funded by the £1.4 billion Real Madrid will pay us for Kazenga Lua Lua… and I’ll win the Euromillions. FACT!

In fact, I think this would be a good thing for every football club. Putting rivalries aside for a moment, in general fans have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the directors of their respective clubs. Basically, fans are treated as a cash cow for the club to milk by whatever revenue stream necessary (TV, gate money, merchandise) in order to ensure that the club makes a profit to pay large sums of money to players, directors and shareholders.

Okay, it doesn’t always work that way, but who wouldn’t prefer to see their club run by the fans, for the fans?

And that’s why, despite being a little sceptical that they would be able to raise the amounts of money required, I’ve been firmly behind NUST up to now. Until what I can only see as misinformation coming out of their mouths at the expense of Mike Ashley.

I’m not a fan of Mike Ashley: I don’t see that he has the best interests of the club at heart, and I’m sure he’ll sell up as soon as he finds someone who will meet his asking price. But that’s precisely why this information coming from NUST looks completely bonkers. If I give them the benefit of the doubt and say that it’s not deliberate misinformation, then it looks like stupidity… and frankly neither of them look particularly good for someone who thinks that they would be able to run the club better and more openly.

What they said was this:

sources have told us that Mr Ashley is making up to £7m profit out of our club every monthNUST: Supporter Survey

Note that they’ve chosen to include the quote (they could easily have skipped it if they felt it was nonsense) — so either they attach credence to the sources or at very least they want the reader to — and they’ve associated it with a survey suggesting that the fans should buy the club from him.

If Mike Ashley was making £84 million pounds per year out of the club, do you really think he’d have tried to sell it only six months ago for around £100 million? There may be better businessmen out there, but I can’t imagine he’d want to sell an asset for only a tiny smidge more than it makes in profit per year.

In the Premiership (when we were making considerably more in TV money), the club had a turnover of £100 million, with £73 million on wages. That year, the club made a loss of £34 million (source: The Guardian, Jan 2009). This means that the other outgoings of the club were around £60 million.

Now, even if you were to assume that all club outgoings were down by two-thirds (a frankly ridiculous scenario), and that income was exactly the same (again, nonsense), then Newcastle would still not be making £7 million per month.

By allowing this sort of information to be associated with their cause without any justification (fine, if they’ve got figures to back up this level of profit, but it seems extraordinary so I’m not going to accept it on their say-so), NUST have made exactly the same false assumption about the credulity of Newcastle supporters that many others have made in the past — and they’ve pretty much destroyed their credibility in the process.

Of course, if they can back up this claim, then I’ll apologise…

But I’m more inclined to believe what I read from the independent NUFC Finances site, which looked into published finances:

A year ago the comment on this site was “In summary what Shepherd left was a club that was losing over £30m a year, had debts of £70m, had no assets they could borrow more money against, and had a set of players on long, lucrative contracts. Ashley can get rid of the debt but the £30m annual losses with over paid players will take longer to sort out.”NUFC Finances

NUST have a lot of explaining to do if they want to regain any credibility. And may I suggest that one of the first things they do — unless, as I said, they can back up that quote — is to apologise to Mike Ashley. He might have done many things wrong, but without him the club would be in a much bigger financial hole.

If you sound bitter, it sounds very much like — as Baldrick would say — “a bag of grapefruits to me”. And it also makes me glad that you didn’t win, because if you’re such a bad sport, then maybe either you’re not fit to take part in such a contest, or you’re an arrogant son-of-a-bitch who is expects to win, and therefore needs to be spoonfed a whole heap of humility through a few defeats (the heavier the better).

And that’s one of the reasons that I’m delighted Rage Against The Machine got the Christmas number one. Additional reasons would include that I don’t like the X-factor, I don’t like being forced to listen to whichever good singer (because let’s be fair, they are) meets with Simon Cowell’s approval this year (I like musicians who can play instruments, instead) and also I like Rage Against The Machine.

And, whilst I’m happy — for obvious reasons — that Newcastle beat Middlesbrough yesterday, Gordon Strachan’s post match comments have made me even happier about it. I’d always had a lot of time for Gordon as a manager, and I accept he’s under pressure at the moment, having managed to accumulate only 0.67 points per game in his 9 games so far, as opposed to the manager he replaced who was managing a 1.77 per game over 13 games which was not deemed good enough. So yeah, I’d say he’s under pressure.

But really, if you can’t be gracious in defeat (and in victory), then you shouldn’t be allowed to play the game. My kids would be told off if they had a temper tantrum just because they didn’t get their own way and maybe someone ought to have a word with these people. Just have a read of these quotes and tell me how sour, exactly, their grapes appear to be:

SIMON COWELL has blasted the campaign to get RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE to the festive top spot – branding its supporters “a hate mob”. He says the Facebook crusade to keep this year’s X Factor winner from being the Christmas No1 is akin to bullying.The Sun

This — and the next statement — were both before the winner was announced. Simon, Cheryl, if you can’t stand the heat, you know what you have to do…

I cannot bear to see him lose out to a mean campaign that has nothing to do with his efforts. If that song, or should I say campaign, by an American group is our Christmas No 1 I’ll be gutted for him and our charts.Cheryl Cole, quoted in The Guardian

I particularly like the Cheryl quote, coming as it does with slight overtones of jingoism bordering on racism. Bloody foreigners, coming over here, taking our Christmas number ones…

I don’t recall her complaining about any other non-Brit being top of the charts at any other time, so I can’t help but wonder whether there’s perhaps more to it than she’s suggesting.

And then contrast that with Joe McEddery, who was the one who actually came second in the Christmas chart battle:

McElderry, 18, praised the campaign, adding: “It’s been exciting to be part of a much-hyped battle and they definitely deserve congratulations. [...] This time last year I never thought for one minute that I’d win The X Factor, never mind about having a debut single out, so I’m just delighted to be in the charts.BBC News: Rage Against The Machine Beat X Factor In Charts

That is how to lose graciously. Good luck for the rest of your career, Joe.

But back to those ungracious bastards. Middlesbrough lost to Newcastle yesterday. During the game, Alan Smith of Newcastle was forced off by injury after being repeatedly fouled by Boro players; later on in the game, Pogatetz clearly handled the ball in the penalty area, denying Newcastle a third goal.

Yet did Gordon Strachan see these things as “evening themselves out over the course of a season” (or even possibly a match, in this case?). Well obviously not.

Everyone agrees there was a blatant shove in the back in the build up to the goal. That is what happens when you are Newcastle and everything goes with you. It was a penalty too. It was a good save from Taylor. He stretched his hand and fingers out to get it.Gordon Strachan, quoted on Vital Football

Yes, the ball struck Steven Taylor’s hand near the goal line. Whether or not it was deliberate (I think probably not, he was just turning to face the play), it probably should have been a penalty. Also, there was certainly contact between Ameobi and Pogatetz — whether a foul I’m less sure as Pogatetz seemed to go to ground very easily. But there was nothing at all wrong with Newcastle’s second goal — which is presumably why Strachan doesn’t mention it.

Not once, anywhere, in any of the press reports I have read about the match, have I heard Gordon quoted to say anything remotely positive about Newcastle (the context that the quote “They have experience. It’s a man’s team” gave the implication that Newcastle were better at cheating). Nowhere have I heard him mention the clear penalty Newcastle should have had. Nowhere have I heard him mention Newcastle’s undisputably fine second goal. Nowhere have I heard him mention any of the decisions that went for Middlesbrough. Sour grapes. Bad loser. I don’t have anything against Boro (beyond obviously wanting Newcastle to win); I know Boro fans and I have a great deal of sympathy for the fans because Newcastle have been through pretty much the same mill over the last year or so (although we’ve been ahead on ‘national laughing stock’).

But until Gordon Strachan learns how to lose graciously, and accept that sometimes his team, or his players, or his decisions weren’t as good as those of the opposition, I’m going to keep hoping he loses, because obviously he needs more practice at losing to stop him being such a bad loser. And you can add Grumpychops Wenger to that school while you’re on…

Compare this to Chris Hughton’s comments after Newcastle lost to Nottingham Forest earlier in the season:

We paid the price for a poor first-half performance when they were much better than us. I just wanted to get the players in without conceding a goal and see if we could change and improve things. But Forest scoring just before half-time left us with a bigger challenge and although we responded to it, we just could not get the break. BBC News

Again, he’s getting over the point that he feels his team were unlucky, but he also actually is prepared to give the victors a certain amount of credit: – “they were much better than us”. That, Gordon, is something you could learn from.

This is the former British Lion Gareth Thomas, who is something of a high-profile player (ninth highest ever test try scorer) even if at 35, he is presumably coming towards the end of his professional career.

I don’t think anything more positive (or negative) about Gareth for this. Basically, if he was playing for my team, I’d support him. If he was playing against my team, I’d want him to play badly. His sexuality has — as he himself says — got buggerall to do with the sport…

“I just happen to be gay,” he added. “It’s irrelevant.”Gareth Thomas, quoted on BBC News

I don’t want to praise Gareth for coming out, simply because the idea that he has to be brave in order to come out rather demonstrates that we still expect ingrained homophobia in professional sport. But perhaps we are wrong to expect this, as can be demonstrated from the reaction he encountered from some team-mates:

“But they came in, patted me on the back and said: ‘We don’t care. Why didn’t you tell us before?’ Two of my best mates in rugby didn’t even blink an eyelid.” Gareth Thomas, quoted on BBC News

Perhaps we are finally growing up after all. I’d like to think any other homosexual player in professional football would receive the same response from their team mates and — with luck — from the terraces, although I think you might need a few idiots ejected from grounds first.

And if that wasn’t a big enough sporting revelation for one day, it also transpires that Newcastle’s manager, Chris Hughton, was formerly a columnist for the newspaper of the British Workers Revolutionary Party. No, that isn’t a joke.

In his youth at Spurs, he used to write a weekly football column for The News Line, the paper of the British Workers Revolutionary Party, although he says that this was because a mate of his asked him to, and he wasn’t really bothered about politics, just liked the idea of having his own column. Yeah, and the fact that he seems to have introduced a kind of a workers’ collective at Newcastle for making decisions is entirely coincidental, is it Chris …

I knew there was something I liked about him…

Firstly, here’s the Observer online:

Championship

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Barnsley 1 Colace 53
Scunthorpe 1 Hayes 58

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David Hopps at Oakwell
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 12 December 2009 20.09 GMT

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The other membersof the Championship’s top three, West Brom and Cardiff, had already come a cropper at Barnsley this season, and Newcastle will be relieved they did not join them. It all looked straightforward: a goal up at half-time, Newcastle’s superiority unquestioned, and a routine 45 minutes away from what would have been their eighth successive win. It proved to be nothing of the sort as Barnsley summoned a zestful second-half performance.

Championship: Barnsley 2-2 Newcastle (Observer)

I hate to be picky about it, but as the text makes quite clear, it was Newcastle who were playing at Oakwell, and whoever has put this page together — presumably using a previous Barnsley game (possibly this one against Scunthorpe, methinks) as a template — has done David Hopps somewhat of a disservice by giving the impression that he can’t remember which team was playing Barnsley for more than five minutes.

Still, at least while they got the goalscorers wrong, the actual score of both teams wrong, and the away team wrong, they were correct in that Barnsley drew at home.

Having said that, the BBC’s report into Brian Laws leaving his job at Sheffield Wednesday seems to make Brian out to be something of an egomaniac self-publicist with a tendency to speak about himself in the third person… or they’ve got the author of the quote wrong:

Sheffield Wednesday manager Brian Laws has left the struggling Championship club by mutual consent. The Owls lost 3-0 at Leicester on Saturday to slip into the bottom three and have not won since 17 October.

Laws, 48, left Scunthorpe to take charge at Hillsborough in November 2006 and academy boss Sean McAuley takes temporary charge following his exit. “We believe a change at this time can deliver fresh energy and direction,” said chairman Lee Strafford. [...]

“Brian Laws has done a very good job at Sheffield Wednesday in the light of the low level of resources at his disposal in the first two years of his time with the club,” added Laws.

BBC Sport: Laws Leaves post as Sheffield Wednesday manager

…I also spotted online someone seeming to suggest Liverpool were a “team packed with quality”, where it would seem to me that the words “not exactly” have been accidentally omitted between the words “team” and “packed”, but it is always possible that this one was intended as satire…

I’m deliberately excluding the off-field activities as it appears that Ashley and Llambias are attempting to replicate, entirely by themselves, the Millwall chant “no one likes us, we don’t care”, and as well as being somewhat depressing, retreading the same old ground with those two is also somewhat boring.

Instead, I’ll just look at what we have so far achieved this season with a paper-thin squad which was plainly not good enough for the top-flight last year and has been severely depleted since.

One of the key things I can see is that there is a significant lack of flair in the second tier. Newcastle’s much maligned defence are currently the meanest in the division, having conceded only 10 goals (only Chelsea and Leeds in their respective divisions have conceded less goals, and Chelsea have conceded more per game) simply because most teams do not have flair players who can produce a magical pass or shot to unlock a mean and well organised defence. This is somewhat different to the top flight…

At the start of the season, I certainly wasn’t entirely convinced the club would be capable of mounting and sustaining a promotion challenge (I’m still not convinced about sustaining; I think the squad far too thin to cope with injuries), but I have to say that Chris Hughton has done a marvellous job in getting the players to play reasonably well (or at least, even if we play badly, still be hard to beat), and while I wasn’t, and I’m still not, convinced that he is the right man to lead the club forward in the long term, I have been impressed with not only how he has handled the role this season, but how he has spoken to the media (and therefore the fans).

He seems to see that the main goal is not to attempt to win the league: it’d certainly be nice, but from interviews it seems quite plain that for now at least his ambition is one place lower: automatic promotion. And that’d do. I think any fan offered that now would accept it, and most would have bitten your hand off if offered that at the start of the season.

We may not always be pretty: but Hughton has got them at least trying to play football; he’s got us conceding few goals, well organised and actually playing for each other. Almost as if they were a … oh, what’s the word… a team. Which is quite a new and refreshing concept, given the last few years.

So I’d like to wish him the best of luck, and remember that first and foremost we need fifty points. That’d keep us up. Once we’ve got that, if we can get another forty after that, that should guarantee us automatic promotion (over the last five years, only one team has needed 90 points to take second place). Of course, I’m saying this before we play Watford, so things could go terribly wrong here…

And then we’d just need about ten or eleven new top quality players to stay there.

Newcastle fans have a lot of problems with the Ashley regime, pretty much all of which have been documented here, there, and elsewhere, so I’m not going to go into them again. But one of those problems is the constant state of uncertainty which has surrounded the club since Mike has been seemingly trying to sell the club for quite some time.

Now reports suggest Ashley is getting fed up of waiting for someone to actually put up the money to buy the club (I don’t blame him, I’m fed up with it too) and is contemplating taking the club off the market. It appears from the outside that this would only be a short-term measure, but does it have to be?

When Ashley took over the club he was hailed as a hero by most fans from rescuing the club from the Shepherd/Hall regime which most fans were thoroughly fed up with. He seemed to enjoy mixing with the fans, and having fun meeting with them, discussing things with them, and being part of the Newcastle fanbase. It wouldn’t be easy, but he could get there again. If he wanted to.

Sure, it’s likely that some fans would never forgive him, but most fans would come around if they could see that, over a period of time, he was running the club as they wished it to be run. It appears patently obvious that there is no multi-billionaire potentially waiting in the wings to bankroll Newcastle the way Abramovich has bankrolled Chelsea, so what are our other options?

If we are to be bought out by someone who struggles to get the money to buy the club and ends up transferring that debt onto the club (in the way Manchester United and Liverpool were bought), does that really help our situation? Of course not.

Does Mike Ashley need to invest ridiculous sums of cash in order to turn around his pariah status in the eyes of fans? I don’t think so. What the fans want to see is a genuine acceptance of mistakes he has made and to put things in place to prevent this from happening again. If it can be demonstrated that the club is being run properly, then he’ll turn the public disapproval into neutrality and possibly back round to approval again.

So what does he actually have to do?

The first, and possibly the biggest thing is communication. Ashley and Llambias appear not to have understood the importance of talking to the fans, telling the fans what is happening at the club and so on. There was a second critical failure of this during the Kevin Keegan days (exposed by the tribunal) where Ashley and Llambias said that the club had deliberately misled the fans as a public relations exercise (which has now backfired in spectacular fashion).

So how to get round this? Firstly, talk directly to the fans. Let’s have an official Newcastle United blog, and possibly a twitter stream, posted directly either by someone in a senior position, or by someone who has access to these people. Ideally, let’s get an ordinary fan involved: give this fan the chance to sit in on meetings and report back to other fans. That would be a great way of winning back trust.

I am of course available to offer either my professional services or my personal ‘fan’ services for this, if they want to get in touch…

Secondly, let’s look at the issue of money. One of the greatest problems with Newcastle was the amount of debt they were carrying. I’m sure Mike Ashley would accept that the fact he did not conduct due diligence on the club prior to a takeover meant he received somewhat of a nasty surprise. But how do we fix this? Well, assuming that there isn’t a multi-billionaire around prepared to pour a limitless pot of cash into the club (and there isn’t), the club needs to be run on a sound financial footing.

Does this mean a wage cap? Almost certainly, for the time being. Does this mean an end to expensive imports? Yes. Does this mean scrapping around for cheaper players who might have potential, and bringing them through the youth ranks? Yes. Does this mean Newcastle fans will have to wait for success, and accept it won’t come overnight? Yes.

But all of this will help the club in the long-term. We have players on wages which are simply not sustainable for a Championship club. Should we be willing to let these go, if an appropriate offer comes in? Well, this is where it gets tricky.

Currently, the squad is paper thin and a few injuries or suspensions could seriously derail any possible chance of promotion. So how to solve this?

There are two options for solving this. The first is that you don’t; you gamble that the club will be promoted at the first attempt with a paper-thin squad, and we won’t be driven into administration by the wages of some players. The second requires someone — and here’s an opportunity for Ashley to redeem himself (to some extent) relatively quickly — to put some money into the club for transfers. But let’s make those transfers of people who are available at relatively low cost, for Championship-suitable salaries, and who are likely to have a reasonable resale value in a couple of years.

In other words, gamble on youth. It might not work, but as opposed to gambling on more established players on higher salaries with no appreciable resale two years down the line, at least this position is more sustainable.

We need a bigger squad; but at the same time we still need to try and reduce the overall wage bill.

But here’s the problem: if the fans see the club selling big-name players to buy cheap, they’ll see it as a further dismantling of the squad, crippling our chances of promotion. It would be a hard sell to convince the fans that is in the long-term best interests of the club. Which brings us back to communication: if a genuine fan was able to attend and report on meetings (as well as more public pronouncements and explanations from the hierarchy), we’d at least have some evidence that Ashley was trying to put right his mistakes. Back to communication again.

Thirdly, let’s look at ownership. Rather than looking to sell outright, why not look for additional investors as it appeared he was originally doing? If we assume the club is valued at £80 million, and someone has £40 million to put into it, that would give the club a value of £120 million — so for that stake they would get a 1/3 share of the club — and rather than going directly to Ashley, this money could be used to pay debts, buy players and so on: they might own a lesser share of the club, but the overall value of the club ought to have increased in comparison.

Allow the supporters trust to buy a share of the club in this manner, if they can put up the cash…

But, if there are no investors ready and willing to do that, let’s just have the club taken off the market and end the uncertainty. Let’s have Ashley undertake to say that he will not sell the club for x amount of time — say two years. Let the fans know what is actually going to happen beyond the next two months and end the uncertainty again. Back to communication. This actually allows people to start planning somewhat.

Finally, he needs to make sure that he has the right people. This is not about being nice; it’s about making the right decisions for the club (not the fans and not the owners), irrespective of how ruthless they may be. This comes back to the likes of Shepherd being the “man who shot Bambi” (showing that ruthlessness is sometimes the right thing to do, even if you demonstrate your lack of knowledge of kids films at the same time).

But this right people business is not just on the management and coaching side, but those involved in running the other aspects of the club. For example, Llambias might be a brilliant and astute businessman (I don’t really know) but he seems not to understand that someone at the club needs to be a bridge between the owners and the fans. If Llambias is appointed just to run the club, that’s fine, but someone else needs to be a public spokesperson for the board (and here we come back to communication again).

Ashley needs someone — an employee or otherwise — who is an active part of the club, and who is allowed to privately disagree with him and tell him he is wrong. There is a perception (whether true or not) that he is surrounded by people who will do what he wants (including stupid running-naked-on-the-pitch bets). This needs to stop. He needs an advisor who will tell him what he’s doing wrong, and what he should do.

He doesn’t actually need to be responsible for the day-to-day running of the club (and it’s obvious he doesn’t want to), but he needs to have the right people in place to do that job — and they need to be willing to argue with him, to tell him that the club needs more investment now, or that the fans need a public statement on such-and-such and issue, or whatever.

In short, run the club properly; run it for the fans as well as for himself, and he has the opportunity to redeem himself. If he can act as a trustee or guardian of the club for the fans; for the region, and not for himself, if he can demonstrate that he has learned from his mistakes then not only can he turn himself from a publicly vilified figure but, in time, he could turn himself into someone who actually is thought of with affection.

In short, he’s made mistakes, and big ones. But his best effort does not have to be “woefully short”. He can put it right.

If, of course, he wants to. But should he still want to, should he still have that spark of love for the club, then with the right actions — not all of which would be easy — this is all achievable.

One of the things that the people behind the remarkably successful Football Manager series have learned is that when they bring out the new season edition, people will buy it. But it’s not just a case of people buying any old crap: it’s a case of people buying it because they have a history of producing the best football management sims out there, and so people have come to expect a high quality game.

I do know somewhat of which I speak — I have been playing the game since its earliest incarnation as “Championship Manager” (although I would suggest that they weren’t really producing the best quality football sims until the next version — Championship Manager ’93. So in that respect I’ve been playing the football sims these people have produced for 16 years.

Bloody hell. When I think of all the time I’ve spent doing that, I could have actually done something constructive with my life.

Of course, that’s only if you assume that building a quality Newcastle team capable of winning trophy after trophy (even if it is only on my PC) is not something constructive. And for the rest of you afficionados, you might be content with my brief review: “yeah, it’s good” — before rushing off to order Football Manager 2010 for yourself.

If, however, you’d like to know what I thought of it first, then read on…

Well, all I can say, having played as Newcastle is that the realism is stunning. Not only will Ashley not allow the manager any money at all for transfers, he expects you to finish top of the Championship with a paper-thin squad. If that wasn’t realistic enough, my Newcastle side started off the season with a 1-1 draw away to West Brom, followed by 3-0, 2-0 and 2-0 wins against Reading, Sheffield Wednesday and Crystal Palace.

As usual, they’ve tinkered with the screen layout slightly, and have the tooltip affair which may be helpful to any beginners, but anyone who has played the game before might as well just switch this off — you should find your way around without any problems.

The 3D match engine hasn’t changed much (I still prefer the ‘elevated’ view) but one key thing has changed: rather than just being a pitch with advertising hoardings around, you now have a view of the stadium and the crowds. In this example, you can see Peter Lovenkrands crossing for Nile Ranger to score a diving header and get Newcastle off to a good start in the pre-season friendly against Falkirk.

Depending on the stadium, and the team, you’ll see different actions (fans cheering a goal and so on) as well as stadiums which are virtually full to those which are half-empty. It’s a nice touch.

Not so useful however is the “back room analysis”. The idea behind it is quite useful: it compares your team against the team you are about to play, tells you where relative advantages and disavantages lie — in this example I have a height, strength, speed, aggression and determination advantage over the team I’m about to play. Less useful is what you can do with this advice: you are simply directed to visit your tactics screen whereas some suggestions by your assistant or coaches would be more useful “try to play a controlling game; we don’t want these to hit us on the break” or similar.

Secondly, there’s the goal analysis. This simply tells you which 15-minute segment of the game the opposition have scored and conceded the most goals in. Really, what is the point of this? Without any further information (“team tires easily, likely to concede goals at the end particularly against fresh, fast players”) it’s just bonkers statistics. It would be fine for the media to quote it, but why on earth would my assistant manager feel it necessary to bring this to my attention unless he had something useful to add?

However, despite my quibble over this “backroom analysis” stuff, I do have to say that I very much like what they have done with the tactics screen. Instead of the previous thing, where you have arrows drawn forward and backward all over the shop to tell people to drop back (or run forward) depending on who has position, you know assign players to a particular role associated with the part of the pitch they are in.

For example, for a person playing right-hand side of midfield, you’ve got winger, right-midfielder or defensive winger: for your centre halves, you can decide who is a ball-playing central defender providing more deep-lying cover, and who is your stopper; there’s roles such as ‘ball winning midfielder’, ‘box to box midfielder’ and so on, and the number of different roles available to your centre forwards really need to be seen to be believed…

Of course, getting all of this right will improve how effectively your team plays, and might even result in you scraping past Coventry on a wet wednesday evening at the Ricoh. I suspect that this is one of these things that will eat up even more of your time as you attempt to tweak your formations and methods of play until it is just so.

So be warned: this game will take over your life; eat into all of your free time, and no doubt put a strain on your ability to carry on a meaningful relationship with anyone but your computer. But if you’ve played Football Manager before, that’s just the way (ah-ha ah-ha) you like it.

Get the game, get playing, and I’ll see you on the other side.

England have generally performed very well against the lesser nations: the defeat against Ukraine can be accounted somewhat by the fact that they were down to ten men (but Rio Ferdinand’s mistake which led to Robert Green’s red card needs to be considered: unless he’s going to demonstrate he can concentrate, is he a potential liability in South Africa? — although he did play pretty well tonight) and also the fact that we had already qualified as group winners by this stage.

Against Belarus, England’s performance was pretty much par for the course in this qualifying tournament (if you ignore the Ukraine blip): looking comfortable at times, looking lackadaisical in others, but generally making sure to take advantage when they were on top and ending up with a fairly comfortable 3-0 win in the end, which could have been even more comfortable if either Milner or Beckham had managed to squeeze their shots inside, rather than onto the post in the last few minutes.

Beckham again proved his worth for England: he’s remarkably comfortable on the ball, and capable not only of adjusting the tempo but has quite an amazing range of passing over various distances, as well as the known danger from free-kicks. But — apart from the injustice of Peter Crouch being passed over for man of the match to bit-part Beckham, despite scoring two goals and playing well — the bigger question must be is Beckham fit for South Africa?

It seems to me that Capello is reluctant to start with Beckham, instead offering him cameo appearances for 20-35 minutes to bolster his already impressive appearance record. But is it really worth taking Beckham as a supersub? To be honest, I’d probably answer yes — at the moment. But that all depends on who wouldn’t be going instead. I’d be disappointed if James Milner didn’t make it (and I fail to understand how the Newcastle hierarchy didn’t understand what a quality player they had at the time: the fans knew it*).

*Oh wait, they probably didn’t watch him play; they just saw a few YouTube clips or something…

However, the ease in which England qualified for the tournament (like they always do: let’s just pretend McClaren and Taylor didn’t happen) suggests that really these qualifying games are, for the most part, too easy for England. It’s like seeing Rangers and Celtic in the Scottish league: they suffer on the bigger stages because they don’t get to play enough competitive games against higher-quality teams.

However, the fact England qualified so comfortably does not really mean much in terms of how we’re likely to do in the World Cup. We qualified as group winners, which ought to see us in the first pot of teams, which also ought to see us given a group we can get through — and if we can top that, I’d expect us to make it through the second round as well. Which takes us to the quarter-final, and that’s where the problems start.

England are amongst the best of the world’s footballing nations. That is not the same as the best. When we come up against others from this elite group, we have shown a tendency to struggle: we’ve reverted to a long-ball type of game which is less effective against teams who have defenders capable of soaking up pressure; we’ve developed a bit of a hoodoo in relation to penalty shoot-outs which presumably means that going into them now, we won’t be nearly as confident.

That is where the real test for Fabio Capello will start. If he can produce an England team capable of beating Holland, Germany, Italy or Brazil, then we might well have a chance of success. One of the things which will surely count in our favour is that we will be playing in the South African winter, as opposed to international tournaments when we usually have to play in much hotter conditions than the players are used to.

Can Capello prepare them well enough to beat the better teams? Are we capable of winning the World Cup? I think the answer to both questions is yes. But that’s still a very different thing from saying that we will win it: there is much that can go wrong (and knowing us, probably will) between now and then.

But for now, we’ve done all that we would have asked for at the start of the campaign. We’ve qualified, and we’ve qualified comfortably. That will do until next summer…

Like some others I expected that this was a load of nonsense — if the club did go into administration, Ashley would just become a creditor like the rest of them and the value would be worth a lot less to him. On that basis, on the assumption he had other monies around somewhere, it would make better business sense for him to prop the club up against a higher value in a future sale.

However, irrespective of this, what I didn’t understand was fans who seemed to have the point of view that Keegan shouldn’t take any money out of the club. Bollocks. If he’s been constructively dismissed, he’s entitled to compensation. That’s what the purpose of the tribunal is for. Just as anyone else — including jobs where they are paid from public monies and so theoretically cost all of us — is entitled to a claim for constructive dismissal if such is appropriate.

And, lo and behold, the tribunal did find in Kevin Keegan’s favour and awarded him £2 million. When I saw the award was for £l;2 million, I did initially wonder whether some elements of the claim had gone against Keegan, but from what I can tell, there was a rather key part in his contract, which limited compensation to £2 million, and so this obviously came into play.

The case centred around the club’s signing of “Cheesy” Nacho Gonzales, who turned out to be mostly injured with a side helping of not-particularly-that-good-anyway. Keegan hadn’t wanted to sign him. Wise / Ashley had, citing that the loan deal was a necessary financial deal — that despite paying over £1 million out, this would be of financial benefit to the club in the longer term, as it was a favour to two South American agents. Nacho was signed against Keegan’s express wishes, and he resigned.

The bit however that I found most damning to Ashley et al is the bit where they state that all of their public proclamations to the fans (in The Times, The Independent — and others) about Keegan having the final say on transfers were not actually true, and that this was done as a public relations exercise seems to me to be saying “it’s perfectly okay to lie about the state of the club to the fans if it makes us look better”.

The Club’s explanation for these statements, which, on their case, were simply untrue, was that they were nothing more than an exercise in public relations carried out so as not to undermine Mr Keegan’s position and made necessary, in the first place, by statements made by Mr Keegan himself to the press. We found this explanation to be profoundly unsatisfactory. [...]

Thirdly, for the Club to have made these statements, when they were, according to the Club, untrue, was, in our view, simply to store up trouble for the future.

Premier League Manager’s Arbitration Tribunal

You got that last one right.

But the idea that was shouldn’t trust Ashley and Co is, frankly, is the opinion that most fans have now developed of their own accord through having listened to what has come out of the club since Ashley took charge. But it is damning how willing Ashley and the club are to admit it: it seems to be something of an indication that Ashley knows his position with the fans is untenable and not salvageable and just wants out.

Well, I’d like him out too. And while I’d rather someone backed with a rather large wedge of cash comes into the club, I’ll settle for anyone who will run the club properly and be honest with the fans.

And although while Chris Hughton has done a marvellous job since the summer and it would be really unfair to replace him after a takeover, I’d replace him after a takeover. For two reasons: firstly because the owners should be ruthless in doing what is right for the club in the longer term, whether or not it is nice; secondly because it appears that if you are a caretaker manager in the North East you are capable of doing a good job until such a point in time as you are given the job permanently, at which point it goes downhill rapidly (Roeder at the toon, Sbragia down the road).

As an aside, is there really any point to Mark Lawrenson?

I heard him being interviewed on Radio 5 and he had no idea why Keegan was only awarded £2 million, saying something along the lines of ‘who knows how the tribunal arrived at that figure’. Well, I did, Mark, because I’d actually read about it an hour or so before. You on the other hand appeared on national radio and demonstrated your ignorance about events relating not only to the sport you’ve made a career from, but also your colleagues. It’s not like the tribunal decision was hidden, since a link to it was posted on the home page of the Premier League’s website.