Skjaere9

Completely agree with this. Pope’s sometimes gonzo approach to aggressive sweeper keeping was our solution to Rafa’s old “short blanket” problem. Now with Dubs glued to his line, it’s back. Way too much space for our slow, injury-depleted defenders and midfielders to cover. Of all the injuries in this cursed season, Popey’s was the one that wrecked us. 14 goals conceded from 14 PL games with Pope; 23 from 9 with Dubs 😫 And it’s not like we didn’t have catastrophic injury/suspension problems during Pope’s run of games (Botman, Barnes, Tonali, Willock, both strikers and Big Joe in and out, etc) too. Get well soon Popey 🙏

I like pain. Just kidding, sort of. Growing up in Portland, Oregon, USA as a die-hard Portland Trail Blazers (NBA) fan, it's the same kind of club as NUFC really -- rarely terrible, typically decent, occasionally great, never quite getting to the mountaintop of actually winning something in my lifetime at least. (I was born a few months after they won their one and only championship in 1977.) Like NUFC, they've got magnificent fans -- the support is better than the team, usually, and the decades of suffering and delayed gratification will surely make it all worth it when/if we finally win something? (For both clubs?) So when I got to spend a couple years living in the UK in the late 90s, right after the Keegan glory years, of course NUFC were the club I gravitated towards. Loved Shearer, loved the black and white stripes, loved the Brown Ale on the shirts, instinctively hated Man Utd as the obvious team of lame American glory hunters... and if that all wasn't enough, I think losing the glorious heartbreak of losing the FA Cup final twice in a row probably is what hooked me for life. Later came to know and love some Geordie expats and fell in love with the city and the North East, too. But my god most of the last 15 years of waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning Pacific Time to watch Mike Ashley's diabolical football has been a test... loving the last year though, already slightly annoyed thinking about the new army of Yank plastic fans who will be joining us at dawn in the pub in the future... for now it's pure joy though.

Very much hope you're right. PIF's $2Bn "investment" in Jared Kushner smells even worse today than it already did, but hopefully NUFC at least can just stay well clear of the muck. Just want to be able to enjoy the football now that there's finally so many good things happening.

As an American Toon supporter watching the increasingly absurd news roll in from Florida tonight, I have to say I'm starting to have a bad bad feeling that NUFC is somehow going to get caught up in Trump's downfall. One of the more plausible seeming explanations for what's going on might be that Trump did some light treason with our nuclear secrets and laundered the payments via... the Saudi PIF? Which presumably would reopen the whole awkward "is the PIF separate from the Saudi state" question again in a way that could easily end very badly for us? Hoping I'm very wrong but if Donald Fucking Trump somehow manages to destroy this football club, just when we finally have something to be hopeful for, after already destroying most of whatever good was left of my country...

Charles Insomnia and Yohan Kebabs