Quality over quantity.

Alan Pardew has given us another little insight into what he has planned with regard to summer transfers at Newcastle United.

The emphasis will be on quality over quantity as Pardew looks to strengthen the squad whilst retaining some of our current key players. He views our tight squad as something that should be harnessed and complimented rather than being ripped apart and started again from fresh, which is fair enough if the current players who need new deals - namely Joey Barton and Jose Enrique - actually do sign a new deal at the club.

Pardew told the Daily Mail: "I don’t want to necessarily increase the size of the squad too much, but I do want to increase competition for places. At times, we lack that. In terms of the starting eleven, most Newcastle fans would pick the same side and that’s a worry for me as a manager."

"I don’t need two players in every position but somebody like Phil Neville at Everton who can play left-back, right-back or centre midfield. They call them utility players and they save you a lot of money."

Now I'm not that big on utility players and I prefer to have able cover in every position. The fact is that even though a player is dubbed a 'utility player' they will still have a preferred position in which they tend to achieve their optimum performance. To use Pardew's example of Phil Neville, I view him as a right back. This was evident when Everton beat us at St James' Park as, despite the scoreline, Kevin Nolan ran rings around the former Manchester United man at times, and it's not often that Kevin Nolan runs rings around anyone!

Now with regard to keeping the squad small it makes sense to sign a utility player. Whether I like them or not is largely irrelevant on this score as the fact that adding one player who can do two jobs will decrease the need for players is pretty hard to argue. It's simple maths. Is this what Pardew is aiming for? Keeping the group together? It certainly seems so. Pardew continued:

"I don’t want to lose the focus of the group. We need to protect the spirit. I want to keep it tight and relatively small and easy to manage. I made that mistake before at West Ham when the squad got too big and it was difficult to focus the group."

Make of it what you will, but to me it looks like we could see some evolving of the squad over the summer. By that I mean that we'll probably add a few faces, but we'll also lose a few faces, and hopefully they will be the ones that are surplus to requirements like Alan Smith, Ryan Taylor, Xisco, Ryan Taylor, Sol Campbell and Ryan Taylor.

To be honest it kind of makes sense. We have the 25-man squad rules to consider, so signing players whilst not expecting anyone to leave is folly. We'll probably sign the four, five or six players that keep getting thrown around, but we'll possibly lose two or three along the way.

What matters is losing the right ones!