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Not sure what people are seeing in present day Karius to be so convinced he's worse than current day Dubravka.

A player doesn't need to be forced to the ground for it to be a penalty either. Although admittedly it makes it more likely for the ref to blow his whistle. Unless you're Sean Longstaff.

Well, fair play for the accurate comments. The 2 minutes thing is funny, but entirely true. In the first few actions of the game we looked confident and purposeful. And then we didn't. My impression is the motivation was wrong - trying to overperform, leading to rushed passes, naive pressing and snatched tackles. Credit to Crystal Palace, they were really good tonight, which contributed to us looking bad. This was a long way from our worst performance this season. But in a way that makes it all the more disturbing that we were comprehensively outdone by them tonight. If there was a team here that you'd think would be making a champions league push next season, it certainly wasn't us. We were shifting momentum at the end of the first half and beginning of the second, and starting to turn the screw, but they had so much more zest and potency than us, ultimately - despite us having had 10 days of rest and training.

Yep. Thought he was trying to take responsibility and put himself about, at least.

Thought he was one of our better players. Anonymous in most of the first half, but worked himself into the game and dictated a lot of any decent tempo we had. Certainly not his best performance, but he didn't have much to work with around him.

I don't blame him for the penalty decision even though it was wrong. Wouldn't be surprised if it being Longstaff hitting the floor put him off. But what is the benefit of VAR, again? It's turned an "oh well nevermind" into a "what the fuck", as usual.

Really weak performance tonight. They had his number from the first whistle. Was hoping he'd pull it around with a crack from outside the box, but it never came. Glad Eddie took the initiative and withdrew him. Tonight was definitely not his night.

The club has done a great job of hiring players with the right mentality overall. Aided and abetted by many of our legacy players like Lascelles and Ritchie, in fairness to them.

Not too surprised, they've been together in videos since he joined us, but it is very pleasing to hear. Seeing how well Gordon comes across in the interview, you have to think Anderson has a similar/compatible mentality which bodes really well for him and us in the future. I think that's right. You just have to listen to the confidence with which he said "Newcastle is only going in one direction" when talking about his move here. He has total conviction in what we're doing, even if some of us here don't!

That's an eye opening sentence.

Yeah that bit always seemed mental. Possibly an indictment of whoever is/was responsible for overseeing the situation (Ashworth at the time?). But might instead be the fault of the Italian FA, in fairness.

Think the last report I saw, which was a couple of months after this one, was that he couldn't*... But it was always unclear. Guess we'll have a better idea after the Australia tour, as you'd expect he'd run out there otherwise. *Well, he was allowed to play in behind closed door friendlies, but not in front of a crowd.

Doesn't sound so bad when you put it like that! Pity about it stretching into next season mind. Seems hugely unnecessary to ban him from playing in pre season friendlies.

PIF you mean? To be fair, they've never worked in an industry with weirdly corrupt, profit limiting rules before where they're not the ones rigging the rules. To be clear, I'm not saying they're up to some Mike Ashley-style smash and grab to earn a few quid. But I could imagine them taking the view FFP means we need to move Bruno on, but also thinking the fans are too thick to understand that decision, and concluding they need to implement some preventative PR crisis management in advance.

Yeah totally, and I'm optimistic. Just, we've not really seen them in that kind of dilemma yet. Most of the original talk was about how the club needs to sell to finance other signings, so it's just interesting how lately the conversation has moved on to release clauses and 'can we keep him happy here?'. Like I said, hopefully what I was saying ends up being totally irrelevant, but it's always worth keeping in mind.