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Those Pesky French Let Newcastle United Down Again

11 years ago
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After the Liverpool debacle the club and Alan Pardew reacted furiously when the Telegraph’s Luke Edwards claimed that there was a split in the Newcastle camp, with the culprits our French imports who apparently/allegedly didn’t understand how important staying up was and that they’d simply happily move on to another club if relegation happened.

(To feature like Jim, send in your letters/articles for the magazine/website to contribute@themag.co.uk – write about anything NUFC related – past, present or future)

The public slanging match has continued ever since with the club banning both journalist and newspaper until they remove the offending article and apologise.

Quite ironic then that our couldn’t care a less Frenchmen were the ones scoring the goals that ensured Newcastle stayed up.

In fact the Newcastle fans were so disgusted with the attitude of the players from across the channel, that they insisted on voting Ben Arfa and Gouffran second and third respectively, in our man of the match vote yesterday.

The, once again, excellent Coloccini was way ahead on 40% of the vote but for their excellent contributions and attitude, Ben Arfa picked up 24% and 14% respectively. While Debuchy, Mapou and Cabaye all contributed to varying degrees, less said about Obertan the better.

The French split story was simply destructive and simply daft to group a load of players together just by nationality. Obviously they share a language but as far as I know they don’t all live on the same street/estate/row of mansions and are forever popping in each other’s houses to borrow a cup of sugar. It’s well known that Cabaye and Debuchy are best mates but just like any factory/office, players will have a handful of others who they are better friends with because of shared interests etc.

We have seen plenty of shirkers at Newcastle over the years and others with simply a bad attitude, the odd one might even have been French.

However, throwing five players from another league/country into a relegation fight with no time to bed in carried massive risks, but this was out of necessity due to not buying players last summer.

Without those January signings we would have been fighting it out with Reading and QPR for the title of worst team in the Premier League, thanks to the French cavalry we belatedly avoided that fate.

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