Meet Jose Enrique's potential replacement.

One of the most important things this summer will be to try and tie down some of our current players who are approaching the end of their current contracts.

One of those players is Joey Barton, and the other one is Jose Enrique. As our only real senior left-back, it is vitally important that he is tied down to a new contract, although there is a growing suspicion that the Spaniard could be off in the summer.

This is why Alan Pardew is apparently lining up a replacement for Enrique should he decide to leave the club in the summer, and it appears that a name has been identified should the worst case scenario happen come the summer transfer window. That name is Cheikh M'Bengue.

It's been rumoured that Graham Carr and Alan Pardew have both been at a couple of Toulouse matches recently, and with M'Bengue currently playing for Toulouse it could be he that our staff were taking a closer look at.

This isn't an original link as we were linked with the 22-year-old in the summer and a fee of around £4 million was mooted if I recall correctly. Being honest, I'm not going to fob you guys off and claim to be a fountain of knowledge with regard to this player, but a quick bit of digging around leaves me a bit feeling a bit apprehensive if we were to firm up any interest and sign the lad.

He'd probably be best described as a 'tough tackler', and I say that because of his past disciplinary issues. In the 2007-2008 season, M'Bengue was banned for 13 games for seriously injuring an opponent from the Monaco youth team after a dangerous tackle.

Then in 2009, he was banned for a further three months for seriously injuring a Monaco senior player. The tackle only got a yellow card at the time, but the suspension came later which kind of makes a mockery of the Premier League when they claim that FIFA say they can't take action if the referee has seen the incident.

Maybe he just doesn't like Monaco for some reason? ;)

It is slightly worrying though isn't it? I mean we have a habit of picking up yellow cards anyway, so could you imagine what it would be like with M'Bengue and Tiote in the same side? I would hazard a guess that we would be at the bottom of the fair play league anyway!

So it's just a rumour, but it does hopefully indicate that Newcastle are at least planning for the summer. Hopefully, it won't come to this as Enrique will sign a new deal and everything will be happy ever after.

Until then though, the speculation will continue.....