The tipping point?

Another derby and another pathetic defeat under the stewardship of Alan Pardew. Not good would be an understatement.

You've probably noticed the lack of a match report following on from that game. It's intentional. As much as I try to take the rough with the smooth I'm not willing to put myself and everyone else through it all again.

Perhaps that is my inspiration for this article? As you can see I've called it 'the tipping point' because that is the point I feel I've reached with everything at Newcastle and feel that now we are stuck in a position we'll never get out of.

It sounds bad having a moan and may even come across as reactionary after another defeat to Sunderland. It's not at all. They fully deserved the win on the day. This is a culmination of many things.

Alan Pardew

I've been stuck on what to think of him for ages now. On one hand I do feel sorry for him having to work under the constraints those above put on him. On the other hand I'm guessing he knew the deal when he signed up.

Motivationally speaking the guy just doesn't get it. After the derby he said perhaps we were too pumped up? Balls. That isn't what I saw. Instead I saw a group of players who didn't look up for it at all.

Players have suffered under him. Papiss Cisse has been a 1 in 2 striker throughout his career yet we are unable to give him the service or chances regularly enough.

Hatem Ben Arfa is another who seems to have gone backwards as has Sylvain Marveaux while there are plenty who have stagnated as footballers.

If part of our philosophy is to buy players and develop them, does it not fall down with the coaching and, ultimately, the manager?

Mike Ashley

It's pretty clear what the aim of the club is. We are to sit in the Premier League without aiming for the Europa League because it's an inconvenience but with no chance of ever going for a Champions League place due to the amount of money it would take to give it a go. Also a domestic cup is out of bounds as it just doesn't benefit the balance. Sod trying to win things.

Now I'm not blindly saying that Ashley hasn't done anything for us. Our finances are tip-top and they needed sorting out with the losses we were making at the tail end of the Freddy Shepherd era. Those figures are there in black and white and are not the result of some propaganda machine.

However there comes a time when sitting on a load of cash and selling top players has to end. I read somewhere that our net spend over the last five seasons is something like -45 million quid. True a lot of that is inflated by the sale of Carroll and Cabaye and the picking up of players at knockdown prices but it's still staggering if true.

In this game you need to spend to stand still and we just aren't going to do that. In fact the last and only time we've seen a rush of transfer activity was when our Premier League status was on the line which says an awful lot about the ambition of the club.

Joe Kinnear

What does he do apart from chat a load of lies? He is supposed to be Director of Football but at the moment he's just basically doing nothing. I didn't think we could get worse than Derek Llambias but it just shows how wrong I was.

In conclusion change has to happen from the top but how can it be engineered? A stay away protest? Generally I'm against things that harm the team but being as we're pretty much safe, which is why in my eyes we've not invested again, why can't we also use that reason to stay away?

We need to get our point across somehow...