One of my favourite parts of football gossip is what is known as “the transfer rumour”. This is when your local newspaper links your local football club with at least three or four new players in every week in order to try and shift more copies because to be honest no-one is really interested in [...]

I’m generally in favour of the aims of the Newcastle United Supporters Trust (NUST). I’m a Newcastle fan, and I think it would be great for fans of the club to own a stake in the club (or even to fully own the club, if possible); I think it would be brilliant for there to [...]

When someone loses in some sort of a contest, it is generally deemed appropriate for them to say something positive about the other team. It doesn’t even have to be particularly gushing: “We might not have got the rub of the green today, but that’s not to take anything away from team X who played [...]

I’ve covered the issue of homophobia in football before in quite some detail, and so was interested today to see someone in another sport come out as being openly gay. 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, [...]

A couple of examples of high-quality articles from over the weekend, which again suggests to me that perhaps certain organisations need better poof reading… Firstly, here’s the Observer online: Championship Barnsley 1 Colace 53 Scunthorpe 1 Hayes 58 David Hopps at Oakwell guardian.co.uk, Saturday 12 December 2009 20.09 GMT The other membersof the Championship’s top [...]

Also known as ‘a number of rambling thoughts relating to the on-field activities of Newcastle United’. 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 [...]

…in the eyes of Newcastle fans would be a big task, but not an insurmountable one. 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 [...]

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 [...]

England’s qualification can be best summed up in two words. Job done. They have qualified for the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. To some extent, everything else — where they finished in the group, how they performed in qualification and so on — is pretty much immaterial. England have generally performed very well [...]

I’ve resisted talking about Kevin Keegan’s claim for constructive dismissal against Newcastle United up to now, because up to now it hasn’t been settled. I’ve bit my tongue — on this blog at least — as I’ve seen posts in other pages suggesting that Keegan mustn’t really love the club, not if he’s willing to [...]