After running the default WordPress theme since transferring this blog over from Blogger, I’ve finally found a nice 3-column theme that I can tinker with. It’s called Atahualpa and you can get the latest release from BytesForAll‘s web page.
I’m having a little fun with it – I’d like to have the categories across the top, but it won’t sort them into alphabetical order (although it’s meant to) and I have too many of the things anyway.
Please do let me know if you like it or if there are any niggles. Next (tedious) job is to categorise 650+ posts that I wrote in the days before categories and tags. Argh.
Well, despite results elsewhere going in our favour I guess it was bound to happen. As I downed several bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale, Newcastle United downed themselves. There’ll be countless dissections of our season, but it all comes down to the fact that we didn’t get the results required. Simple as that.
Over the last 16 years we’ve gone from being The Entertainers and everyone’s second club to a team which struggles to score goals or hold onto a manager for more than a few months at a shot. The blame is bound to be apportioned somewhere, but it doesn’t take a lot of effort to figureout where to point the finger.
It’s certainly not Shearer. True, he doesn’t have the managerial skills required. But to have taken the job on when he knew the state the club was in took some amount of guts. Talk about being dropped in at the deep end. At least he had passion and obviously wanted to win. He’s probably one of only a couple of people involved in the running of the team who wanted victory for more than purely financial reasons.
It’s tempting to blame some of the players, too. After all, they’re the ones who weren’t performing on the pitch – the one thing they’re paid vast amounts of money to do. Thing is, they don’t care what happens to the team to a large extent. It’s common knowledge that relegation simply wasn’t considered when the contracts were drawn up. As a result, their wages will be unaffected – the only way we can tighten the purse strings is to offload a bunch of them or renegotiate contracts (and that won’t happen).
We could point the finger at bad refereeing, but that’s just not the case. You find me a team in the Premier League that didn’t suffer at some point in the season due to poor decisions. The fact is, as always, this does balance out over the course of the season. It’s not an excuse. Results around us conspired to, on the whole, help our cause. We, however, didn’t take advantage.
No, if there is any one place to lay the blame it’s squarely on the doorstep of the man at the top of the management structure: the owner, Mike Ashley. Sure, he can claim to be passionate about the club but let’s be honest – he’s only ever cared about the financial end of things and in trying to oneupmanship Wigan Athletic‘s Dave Whelan.
There is no denying that Ashley is a successful (if documentedly dodgy) businessman, but it has become painfully obvious that he doesn’t have the first clue about running a football club. By far and away the biggest mistake he made was to bring in Dennis Wise and effectively refuse Kevin Keegan the control he needed (and demanded) to effectively manage his squad. If there was a bigger error, it was in being stubborn and refusing the ditch Wise thus forcing Keegan’s hand and giving him no choice other than to leave.
That was the turning point. The chances of getting the train back on the tracks with such a swift change in management were ridiculously low. It’s been bad enough over the last few years with managers barely getting a full season under their belt before being given the heave-ho, but we then went through four managers in one season. Admittedly, this was partially due to Joe Kinnear‘s ill health.
However, the fact remains that we should never have been in that position in the first place. Ashley jumped in with both feet, thought he could tinker with something he had no knowledge of and destroyed any chance he and we had of any success. By all accounts his actions were typically Ashley – pig-headed, bullying and arrogant. At least he did make some attempt to sell the club, but couldn’t find a “suitable buyer”. In other words, nobody was offering him enough money.
Well, look where that’s landed him. He should have taken what he was offered a couple of months ago as the club must surely be worth a hell of a lot less now. Which means, in all likelihood, he’s stuck with us and we’re stuck with him. We’re also stuck with a squad full of players we likely can’t afford due to the aforementioned lack of relegation wage deduction.
I’m glad to see, having done a quick Twitter search, that most people who’ve expressed a tweet are hoping we come right back up. Even a few Sunderland fans. For that, I thank them. I don’t think we will – I give us 2-3 seasons, maybe. Financially we need to completely restructure. Alan Shearer may work for free (I’d not put it past him), but nobody else will.
For those who were happy we dropped, screw you. The reasons I’ve heard are plentiful. I can understand the mackems being happy – it makes sense when your rival suffers. I’d have been glad to see them go down. It’s the southerners and the pundits and those with no real beef against us who annoy me the most. These are the self-same people who probably cheered us on as we nipped at the heels of ManU all those years ago. Fickle bandwagon-jumpers.
The most idiotic ones are those who say we deserve to go down as we’ve not achieved anything in 40 years. Yes we have. We rocketed out of the old third division into top flight in record time, winning titles on the way. We provided one of the best nights of Champion’s League football when we – against all odds – progressed from the first group stage after three losses. We beat Manchester United 5-0 and Sheffield Wednesday 8-0. We have one of the best stadia in the country – this I have heard from many visiting fans. We have some of the most passionate and loyal support. Under Keegan we earned and deserved that “Entertainers” badge. We gave people ninety minutes of great football.
Is that not an achievement? But for some reason we’re not allowed to class ourselves as a “big club”. If we weren’t, then why would there be so much media coverage? Why would so many people care about our survival or lack of it? Because we are a big club. Certainly not on the world stage any more, or even on the English one right now. But the simple fact that we’re constantly covered, even in a bad light, by the media says that we’re bigger than they care to admit.
But no club is too big to suffer defeat and bad times. “Bigness” is not measured in success, it’s measured in its effect on the footballing world. And the fact that our drop has caused so many people to have their say about it – positive or negative – proves we’re bigger than they want to pretend.
So am I upset about us dropping? Of course I am. But on the positive side, it’s a whole new challenge. Different teams, different financial issues, different problems trying to get coverage of the matches, different grounds to visit should I be able to afford the time and money.
Life goes on, those who are bouncing when we went down will grow up (eventually). With any luck, Ashley will palm is off onto someone with two ounces of common sense and a decent bank balance to help us rebuild.
In the meantime, I’m still wearing my Newcastle shirt; still have the tattoo; still use the crest as my avatar on just about every message board. That’s what it means to truly support your team. You don’t give up, even when they do. But those who’ve had a giggle over the last few weeks just wouldn’t understand that.
Anyone else here bricking themselves about today’s little kickabout? I’ll likely be in a pub in Dundee that sells reasonably-priced Brown Ale and as near the comforting arms of my better half in case the worst happens. And which sells comfortable-priced Brown Ale and is near the celebratory arms of my better half should the best happen.
Realistically, sorry Sharon, Boro are down – short of some excessive goalscoring. Other than that I’d say it’s even stevens between us, Hull and the forces of darkness as to who takes that third Place of DOOM.
Anything could happen not accounting for massive goal difference shifts):
We lose, we’re down. End of.
We draw and Hull lose, Hull are down.
We draw and Hull draw, we’re down.
We win and Hull lose or draw, Hull are down.
We win and Hull win and mackems lose, mackems are down.
This is it unless Hull can overcome a 5-goal goal difference as compared to the scum, in which case a draw could be enough for them to push the mackems down. It does depend on Chelsea winning by five or more clear goals…
I’m actually shaking slightly as I type this. Nerves or excitement, I don’t know which. Perhaps just blind panic.
Another (well, the second) Dan Brown adaptation and already things are wearing thin. I will confess that Angels & Demons is a better film than The Da Vinci Code, partly because of the beautiful scenery in Rome. However, the stilted dialogue still glares and a couple of the plot points from the novel are missing for no readily apparent reason.
Plot-in-a-nutshell: A new Pope is being elected, but the four main contenders have been kidnapped with a threat to kill them publicly released by the culprit. So of course, The Vatican calls in a symbologist. As you do.
The film is fairly close to the novel aside from the aforementioned slight discrepancies. Unfortunately, this means there’s a lot of scientific inaccuracy and a plot which is – to a large extent – fairly predictable. Oh, and awful dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, Dan Brown, or at least his publisher, is owed a thank you for bringing his type of novel into the popular mainstream. However, there are many authors who’ve done a better job of it than he has. His stories are good, but his writing’s dreadful. By keeping the film so close to the book, these weaknesses also transfer over.
Obvious differences are references to the events of the first film. Obvious as the original Angels & Demons novel was actually published and took place beforeThe Da Vinci Code. If there’s anything more forced it’s that the film studio have offered Brown a fortune to write a third novel just so they can film that as well. Please, no.
Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad film, as such. It’s just – like the novels – it could have been so much better. The story’s pretty good, the history (apocryphal or otherwise) is a good basis, the set pieces are well done but it’s just hand-holding story-telling. It’s A to B to C to climax with laborious explanations at each turn. In a novel, it’s easy to make this an aside but more of a challenge in a film. As the whole story revolves around historical events, there’s no end of explanation. Interesting, but very stop/start.
The cast are OK but like the film just nothing special – all by-the-numbers. Tom Hanks can do so much better and Ewan McGregor needs to pick one accent and stick to it. His Irish/Scots/English mash-up is just painful.
So as an adaptation, it’s not one of the worst being quite faithful to the original material. As a film, though, it’s a bit of a let-down.
I was messing about on Yahoo! Answers earlier and received an error 999 when I tried to post a response. The advice given infers that my IP address was being used for spam or that I had a virus. Yahoo! told me to run a virus scan or contact my ISP for help (yeah, right).
Kicking the router to give me a new IP address didn’t work, and as I’m running Ubuntu the chance of having a virus or anything is somewhat remote. After some digging, I found that Yahoo! also use error 999 as a cover for spam-protection of a sort. As well as checking IP address, they also prevent multiple posting of web addresses. I’ve seen this on Answers before, where some ****** posts the same URL to multiple non-related questions.
Thing is, my reply didn’t have any URLs in it. One page advised me to split my response into sections. Post one paragraph, then edit my answer to add the next and so on.
What do you know, it worked. And since doing it, I’ve not had the same issue on any further questions. It sounds like a fault in their spam parsing software, but at least there seems to be a simple way around it.
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