Interestingly, it was not Pardew’s assessment that prompted me to write this but the following excerpt from Dominic King’s column in the Daily Mail regarding Liverpool post-Carragher:

‘Though Toure is not in the age profile of players Liverpool sign under their American owners….there is an understanding that experience needs to be added to the dressing room following on from Carragher’s departure’.

Now, I am not sure if this is true, or if Brendan Rogers has any interest in pursuing Toure’s signature, but to me the statement and idea makes sense. Of course there should be a recruitment plan in place and a profile in which NUFC require a new recruit to fit. However, this should not be set in stone.

There will come a time when you need to add someone to your playing staff who has something a young, foreign prospect can’t give you. Experience.

With Harper now gone, that is a hugely experienced figure of stability departed the dressing room. With mutterings of Colo, Ameobi and even Simpson (who was pretty much an ever present in the season when finishing 5th, making 35 appearances in the league) all potentially out the door, this just brings the issue to the boil even more.

Add to that Ryan Taylor on the long-term injury list and the situation starts to look a bit alarming.

We have an excellent scouting and recruitment system at St James Park with a valuation and profile system that has blessed us with many impressive and promising players within a very cost effective structure…but let’s not follow it to the letter every time Mr Ashley.

At the awards night earlier this week, Ferguson predictably won the top award but other managers were also interviewed at the event, including Newcastle’s past and present managers, Chris Hughton and Alan Pardew.

This is part of what United’s manager had to say;

“Our form dipped and confidence dipped with it and we lost momentum, that’s a dangerous thing to lose in the Premiership.

We managed, with the signings we did in January, to get it back on an even keel.”

Watch the video and see what Alan Pardew, Chris Hughton and Paul Lambert had to say about the season just gone.

Click below to view.

Watch this video on YouTube.

We then collate the thousands of votes and publish all the results in the summer special (out on 8th June – pre-order in our online shop – only £3) of our magazine.

Contributing to those totals, each day we’ll be asking you to vote via the website on a single question, we’ll leave it open for 24 hours and then let you know what the website voting has been.

So today we are asking you about the club’s new sponsor. The subject prompting much debate when it was revealed that the payday loans company was going to be both shirt and stadium sponsor.

How do the fans really feel about the deal now the dust has settled?

Is the Wonga deal good for Newcastle United – vote now.

We then collate the thousands of votes and publish all the results in the summer special (out on 8th June – pre-order in our online shop – only £3) of our magazine.

Contributing to those totals, each day we’ll be asking you to vote via the website on a single question, we’ll leave it open for 24 hours and then let you know what the website voting has been.

Yesterday we asked On A Scale Of 1 To 10 (10 = Very Likely), How Optimistic Are You That NUFC Will Bounce Back Next Season?

We thought it would be interesting to find out how hopeful fans of feeling as they look ahead to next season.

The answer I’m afraid is that we aren’t a happy bunch at the moment. Some of that of course is down to previous disappointments and also not to get our hopes up so anything good that does come along is a massive bonus.

The results saw the five most popular choices as between 3 and 7, with a minority of people going for the extremes of an optimistic 8 or more out of 10, while true of a total despair 2 out of 10 or less.

Taking everything together, the fans of Newcastle United currently are a fraction over 5 out of 10 when it comes to their hopes for next season.

The people running the show at St.James’ Park look to have a long way to go in convincing fans that next season is going to be a whole lot better.

Let’s hope it is for all of our sakes and I just hope this pessimism doesn’t translate into empty seats when the season kicks off.

Thanks to the thousands of you who voted and watch out for our next Fans’ Poll question coming up shortly.

Following that coming together, Derek Llambias has now talked about the meeting and some of what they discussed.

Speaking to the club’s official website, the Managing Director had this to say;

“Everybody connected with the club was disappointed to finish where we did last season, particularly on the back of such a fantastic year prior to that.

Our discussions on Wednesday were very constructive and pinpointed a number of factors that contributed to a season which fell below expectations.

We’re now looking forward and are entirely focussed on the forthcoming campaign, with an expectation of at least a top ten finish.

There’s been a great deal of speculation in recent weeks but our desire, as we announced back on September, is to bring long-term stability to the Club. It is now up to all of us to work closely as a team to ensure next season sees us competing in the top half of the table again.

We’d like to thank the fans for their continued support and assure them we remain committed to providing affordable football at St.James’ Park.”

So what have we learnt?

Firstly, that finishing outside the top ten would count as failure for Mike Ashley, as well as the fans.

Secondly, though it isn’t spoken aloud, clearly Alan Pardew will remain as manager.

Thirdly, the club are quite keen to get in as many mentions as possible of our fifth place in 2011/12.

Fourthly, they are keen to remind fans that the prices at St.James’ park are relatively reasonable.

As to what their transfer strategy is going to be, we will still be guessing for some time yet.

Sky Sports are reporting that the President, Matias Lammens, has claimed that Newcastle should now ‘..think about what is best for the player, that need to go back home.

Lammens said;

“I have the intention of meeting with Fabricio and talking about the conditions of his move to San Lorenzo.

We understand Newcastle don’t have too much interest in the summer other than keeping Coloccini in their squad.

They’ve managed to escape from the relegation zone, so they’ll now think about what is best for the player, that need to go back home.”

I must admit to not holding out great hopes for our captain staying, when he was prepared to walk away from a relegation battle halfway through a season then surely the writing is on the wall.

However, we live in hope.

Just as we do with San Lorenzo whose behaviour was shocking in January in terms of doing their best to make the situation as messy as possible to seemingly try and get Colo for next to nothing.

These latest very public comments don’t suggest there has been any improvement in the behaviour of our friends at San Lorenzo.

The manager actually said;

“In the last 15 games we were a mid-table team and that was probably us this year but we need to improve on that.”

Could this be true?

Well if you those last 15 Premier League matches the outcome was;

W6 D2 L7 which gives 20 points at an average of 1.33 points a match which if sustained over a season would have meant 50 points and a finish of eight in the league, one point ahead of West Brom.

However, if you take the results of the 14 matches previous to the last 15 you get the following results;

W2 D2 L10 which gives 8 points at an average of 0.57 points a match which would have equalled 21 points over a season and a humiliating relegation.

If you take those last 29 matches together you get;

W8 D4 L17 which gives 28 points at 0.96 per match and a return of 36 points over a season, the same number as relegated Wigan finished on.

So even though we didn’t know it at the time, our first 9 matches were to be the highlight of our league season with W3 D4 L2 (average of 1.44 points per match which equals 54 over a season – still behind seventh placed Liverpool on 61).

Two things stand out for me;

Firstly, if we hadn’t signed players in January then that mid-season from tells you we would have almost certainly been relegated, as before the lift given by Sissoko and others in matches such as Villa, Southampton and Chelsea, we never looked like pulling out of our nosedive.

Secondly, if the January signings had been signed in the summer, when they should have arrived, then the statistics suggest that Newcastle’s early season form could possibly have been even better and then being maintained with the extra players available to cover injuries.

In theory at least, the team would have had every chance of matching the previous season’s tally of 65 points, especially if with the better form and ambition showed by the club, Demba Ba may have stayed instead of escaping a relegation battle.

The record of Yoan Gouffran now reads fourteen starts in a Newcastle shirt and in thirteen of them he has been dragged off by the manager. Gouffran also made one appearance as a substitute himself, during the Liverpool fiasco, but just about managed to stay on the pitch for the 45 minutes after he came on at half-time.

All very bizarre because it isn’t as though he’s like Shola who at times looks as though he’s shuffling along to collect his pension at the post office rather than a young man playing professional football. Gouffran works his socks off and when played in a more central role has suggested he could link up well with Papiss Cisse – especially compared to the other options we’ve had since Ba walked away.

Add to this the three goals Gouffran has contributed since his arrival, which makes him look almost prolific considering our lack of goal threat overall. The French striker has actually only played 1058 minutes for United and so really his record equates to 3 goals in around 11 matches in terms of time on the pitch, plus for most of that time he’s been played in a withdrawn role on the left.

Clearly something is amiss rather than simple mismanagement, so we’ve put our top investigative team on the case and they have already unearthed the following leads to explain the Gouffran substitution mystery…

The numbers sign the fourth official holds up has allegedly a fault and automatically puts up the number 11 no matter what buttons you press.

Gouffran’s mam doesn’t like to think of him being taken advantage of by the Geordie womenfolk so insists he’s back home by the final whistle.

There is apparently a scandal due to break, as it has been discovered that for years in the French league they have only been playing half an hour each way.

Shola has warned Alan Pardew that Gouffran has been running around too much and thinks the French striker must do himself a mischief if he’s allowed to stay on.

We should be told…

The main point he was making was that the blue half of Merseyside had finished the previous season (2011/12) strongly and then carried that form into the one just gone (2012/13).

The manager hoping his team could replicate that late season form to lift Newcastle into a respectable league placing and points tally, improving morale for everybody connected to the club. I’ll let you into a secret, it didn’t happen.

Now Alan Pardew has chosen the red half of Merseyside (Exeter, Hong Kong, London, Singapore…) as the latest example to follow.

The manager saying to the Evening Chronicle;

‘We need to strengthen, even with our best team out I think we would have finished below Liverpool and we want to threaten them, so we need to improve.”

The manager’s message was possibly not helped by the Chronicle sub heading including the words ‘reds to be the blueprint for his (Alan Pardew’s) magpies’.

It is a bit like a dodgy episode of ‘Stars In Their Eyes’ when you’d get some really shocking people who looked and sounded nothing like who they were meant to be impersonating. I can hear Alan Pardew’s voice in my head; “Next season Matthew, we are going to be Everton/Liverpool/Real Madrid…”.

Just saying something isn’t enough to make it happen, it takes actions not just words.

Even though they are a pale shadow of their all conquering 70s and 80s team, if you finish above Liverpool next season then you’d be very likely to be in the top six.

However, as I’ve said, you need to put the building blocks in place to make this have a realistic chance of happening. Newcastle were massively reliant on Ba and Cisse for goals two seasons ago, so Ba’s mid-season departure would have sent us down in my opinion if anything had happened to Cisse. No other team, including those who went down, looked less likely in the relegation run-in to get goals from their top scorer’s teammates.

Newcastle don’t necessarily have to spend as much as Liverpool but just like the red scousers and indeed the blue ones, Newcastle need to make sure we have adequate (don’t have to be world class) cover, instead of ending up with players on the pitch who wouldn’t have got a place in any other Premier League club’s squad.

I’ll leave you to make your own list of who they were/are.

I have had a myopic approach to the tail end of this season, wishing endlessly for the final whistle against Arsenal in the hope that it would bring the salvation of Premier League security. Even that hope was quantified, knowing that it gives us a chance to sort ourselves out for a better crack at the top flight next year, but potentially it may just be exposure to another 12 months of pain.

I don’t like some of the things I’ve found myself and those around me doing lately.

The first instance involved a mass cheer going up in the pub when Wigan’s Emerson Boyce put Gareth Bale’s shot into his own net, earning Spurs a draw at Wigan that gave us potential breathing space before a disgraceful surrender to Liverpool.

Since then we have faced the unpalatable prospect of preferring sunderland to beat Villa (which they emphatically didn’t) before sitting, sweating and palpitating as the fine men of Swansea City won at the DW to prevent our own club sliding into the bottom 3 with only 2 games to play. Whatever happens, do not let hindsight rob you of the memory of how important this result was for Newcastle United. The breathing space created and the pressure it kept on Wigan and relieved us of, meant the subsequent win at QPR was made all the more possible and decisive.

Incidentally, we probably also owe the fixture computer for drawing us penultimately against this basket case of a club and Jose Bosingwa for his clown show that went some way to awarding us the points that day.

The theme above is one of debt, not of achievement from within our own ranks. You could also add to that list the name of Demba Ba, whose goals from the first half of the season contributed the majority of our pre-Christmas points haul, as well as ensuring he finished our top league goalscorer by a clear margin, despite only a 4 month stint.

People might point to the flaw in that statistic that Cisse may well have overtaken his countryman had it not been for disallowed goals. However, I think the percentage of genuinely disallowed versus actual miscarriages has been exaggerated, as well as the most glaring occasions coming in the Europa League. Counterbalance this with the 3 occasions when we won matches with winners deep into injury time and the safety margin just continues to look all the thinner.

Given the above and a consistent barrage of comments that raise concerns as opposed to inject confidence (latest one ‘Liverpool are our blueprint for success’ WTFF??) and I am not at all convinced that the manager has the capabilities to correct things to the levels of the 2011-12 5th place season, or really even to the point of avoiding a relegation scrap.

Rumours persist that certain key squad members are unhappy with him and it’s there for anyone to see that training methods are flawed, given the amount of injuries, the ineptitude at set plays and the apparent lack of any team gameplan.

I question the current regime’s willingness to admit to these flaws and appetite to correct them, and if these doubts are valid, I’m afraid a change is necessary.

There’s a crucial summer upon us. I sincerely hope we are not looking back from a January position of disorganised bedlam and bemoaning the fact that Rafael Benitez was available but once again Newcastle United strode confidently down the calm path toward chaos.

Happy holidays, watch out for mackems at the airport.

Follow Jamie on Twitter @Mr_Dolf

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