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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

So Newcastle have got off to a good start in the Championship: five wins and a draw saw them topping the table by two points over the international break, but with a tough game away to Cardiff coming up tomorrow, there is no guarantee that they will remain there. But at present, they are playing [...]

I’m not using the phrase ‘rest in peace’, because I’m working on the assumption that if there is an afterlife, Bobby won’t be doing any resting: he’ll already be taking training for the Heaven XI and sorting out tactics for the crunch match against Lucifer United. Sir Bobby Robson was born in January 1933, and [...]

I am a Newcastle United fan. I have been a Newcastle United fan before I was even interested in football: during my childhood I remember a spell where I couldn’t stand football at all, but was still absolutely convinced that if I was going to support a football team, it would be Newcastle, because that’s [...]