Pardew – ‘Lost The Plot For 20 Minutes’

I always used to love hearing Sir Bobby and KK talking after a match, win or lose they would give an honest assessment of the ninety minutes, tinged with an emotion and obvious feeling because it clearly meant so much.

Heaving city centre pubs would be brought to silence in seconds as the TV was turned up and everybody hung on their ever word.

Far too soon for Alan Pardew to be talked of alongside those two but as well as doing a cracking job I always find him to be great value after a match, plus I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything he says.

Speaking after the Fulham match he had this to say;

“The game got away from us in a quite extraordinary fashion, we were so dominant in the first half, it’s difficult sometimes to prepare for what happens. Their first goal certainly changed the course of the game, it looked like a really soft penalty. Then we had a really difficult period in the game where we didn’t handle the game very well.

I can’t complain about my team, they’ve been brilliant all year and we’re in a fantastic position in the league. For 20 minutes today we just lost the plot and conceded, for us, poor goals. They were the type of goals we haven’t conceded all year.

I would have liked a second goal in that first half, I thought we deserved a second.

We couldn’t have played any better in the first half, we’ve had a complete contradiction in terms of our performance today.

First half was as good as we’ve been and second half was certainly as bad as we’ve been. We’ll have to work hard on the training ground now to make sure it doesn’t happen again”.

I couldn’t have put it better myself, a definitive game of two halves with United outstanding in the first and shocking in the second. Though as the manager says, the home team got decisive decisions which Newcastle then compounded with poor defending.

I know it is an obvious thing to say but no need to panic, just need to acknowledge the strengths yesterday and work on what went wrong.