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Alan Pardew Depressingly Plays The Shola Card Yet Again

11 years ago
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Yesterday was the first time we’d head from Alan Pardew for almost a month but to be honest I feel now like I’m reliving last season’s bumpy rollercoaster and it isn’t an enjoyable ride.

Back in the groove, the manager is throwing out the quotes right, left and centre and unsurprisingly it has woken up the Newcastle reporting journalists from their summer naps.

One of the manager’s latest  set of comments to the Shields Gazette surrounds the forward (scoring goals) situation;

“Both of those players (Remy and Bent) are on our list, I make no bones about that, but they’re under contract at other clubs. It is difficult, you have to be careful.

It is nice for our fans to hear names but I don’t want to disrupt other clubs’ preparations. We’ve a list of 4 or 5 strikers who’ll push Cisse, Shola, Adam Campbell and Yoan Gouffran because that will be important next season.

We do need two strikers and last year I didn’t think there was enough competition in that area for a Premier League team.”

This does make me think of last season and a lot of the rubbish Alan Pardew ended up talking in the void created by a lack of action from those above him.

These latest comments contain;

A little bit of bait/hope with a couple of strike targets named – ‘Remy and Bent’.

A bit of patronising patter – how it is ‘nice for our (simple) fans to hear names’.

Spelling out how desperate the situation is – ‘We do need two strikers…last year I didn’t think there was enough competition’.

Then the more depressing usual unconvincing spin of trying to get away with thinking we are all stupid – ‘…push Cisse, Shola, Adam Cambell and Yoan Gouffran’. You cannot include Campbell as a first team player, he is totally unproven and hasn’t come close to scoring a goal on his brief appearances. That doesn’t mean I think he (Cambell) is hopeless, it just means that an untried kid can’t have that kind of expectation/responsibility put on him, anything he contributes next season must be seen as a very welcome bonus.

As for Shola…surely the game is up, this is a striker who has scored 3 Premier League goals in two years, you can’t keep going around claiming that he is within a million miles of being able to play up front in the Premier League and is in any way an adequate fill in for Cisse or any other credible forward Newcastle sign. Just answer this; what type of club would Shola end up at if somebody took him off our hands? One thing for sure is that it wouldn’t be a Premier League one.

 

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