Anger management!

I’ve been trying to limit the time I spend on Newcastle blogs, Twitter and rumour mills the last month or so, not wanting to get caught up in the transfer frenzy.

I used to like rumours but people can take them to seriously and berate the club for not tying up transfers that were never on the cards or (like Crouch) criticising for something that may not even be true. Since the friendlies have started I’ve been back on though, and generally it seems that the mood is low. Why?

We haven’t spent any money!

This grates me. Why do we need to spend on transfer fees to improve? We compare ourselves to the scum whenever we can, but I for one much prefer how we are going about things for us. We tried the spending money to buy success and look where it got us. I sometimes feel like if we had spent £25 million on the signings we had made people would have been so much happier just because we are ‘spending money’.

Our squad is too thin!

Yes we need a few players, but we have over a month of the transfer window left. I don’t particularly want to bulk our squad out too much with Wes Brown and Seb Larsson type players as they have reached their peak and aren’t going to improve. It would be much more productive handing squad roles to our youth players.

We have no ambition!

If someone had said a year ago that we would have signed: Cheik Tiote, Hatem Ben Arfa, Demba Ba and Yohan Cabaye we would’ve all been over the moon.

We can’t rush things. If we do too much to quickly then whatever is left of the team spirit will be gone. Say we sign a right midfielder, where would he play? Even if we play five midfielders it would mean leaving out Joey Barton or Jonas Gutierrez. Not really a great reward for a terrific first season back in the Premier League.

The players want to leave!

Let them leave. The players are playing on our angst to try and win favour and improved contracts. Jose Enrique crossed the line with his Twitter comments.

Lets be objective about it. We've had four seasons of Enrique, his first was poor, the next saw us relegated, one saw him play very well in the Championship, followed by three quarters of one very good season in the Premier League. Is that worth a pay rise? We signed him as a Premier League team and he has only given us one good season in that league. I don’t think that is enough to be held to ransom. We saw how he played the last few months of the season and his attitude is clearly a bit sh!te.

Routledge backing him his ‘no ambition’ claims, well honestly Wayne, if that was true why are you still on our books?

Basically since we got promoted we have signed some genuine class. We have seen the emergence of players like Leon Best, Tim Krul and Shane Ferguson. Without injuries our starting XI against Arsenal would have seen a minimum of three new faces from our main team last year (including Ben Arfa). I think one striker, a back up left back and a back up right back are all we need so lets not get all doom and gloom when we have actually made huge strides in the last year or so.

Howay the lads!

A very positive outlook on things by Solanos Trumpet!