Pardew hopes to keep new signings with trophies.
Posted on July 4th, 2011 | 56 Comments |
Earlier today, Newcastle United manager, Alan Pardew, gave a rare interview to BBC Radio Newcastle’s ‘Total Sport’. Including quite a few questions from the fans as well as questions from the studio, it was long and very revealing. I have endeavoured to transcribe some of the interview for your reading pleasure below, and will have a crack at the rest of it later on. From the top!
Total Sport: “One name who keeps cropping up is Jose Enrique. Is he staying? is he going? Have there been bids for him etc? What’s the latest situation with the left back?”
Alan Pardew: “Well no one’s more keen for him to stay than myself. He was a terrific player for us last year and terrific for the club. We’re trying to persuade him to stay, but with a year running on his contract his desire really to play Champion’s League football at his age it’s gonna be difficult to keep him. It’s one of those situation’s where we’re just going to have to keep watching and hoping that it falls our way.”
Total Sport: “Presumably it doesn’t help you either in terms of preparing for the worst case scenario which is he leaves the football club. The situation with Neil Taylor at Swansea isn’t really developing. At some point, if Jose Enrique leaves the football club, you’re going to have to get a replacement in, aren’t you?”
Alan Pardew: “Well of course, you know it would be foolish of us not to have a backup plan, which we have, and that will kick into operation if Jose does leave.”
Total Sport: “You’ll probably listen with interest to hear that Gael Clichy has moved from Arsenal to Manchester City. Sometimes when a player in a certain position moves it does trigger other transfers doesn’t it? So maybe that will have some effect on what happens to Jose Enrique?”
Alan Pardew: “Yeah, I don’t really think that helps the situation to be honest. There’ll be alot of speculation about who’s going to replace him at Arsenal and then the knock on effect from that. No, that hasn’t helped our cause but, you know, there’s a big part of me thinking that he isn’t going to return for the first day, but he is going to be here and that’s good news.”
Total Sport listener ‘Nick’: “Have the new players been told a bit different to what we’ve been told because the last we heard from Derek Llambias was the club will aim to be in the top ten year after year and that’s hardly going to convince the likes of Cabaye who’s a double winner, French International etc to join us. I think the main worry for fans is that we could turn into a bit like a Wigan only with a bigger stadium, where players use us as a shop window. Have you been given any assurances that this isn’t the case, and would you believe them? Because we’ve been told in the past that Llambias and Ashley repetedly and intentionally mislead the fans.”
Alan Pardew: “OK, well I think that’s a good question. I would start by answering it like this: When I joined the club I said that we need to have a strategic plan of what we’re gonna do, and how we’re gonna break just into a cycle where we can be competitive with the top teams. As it stands financially at the moment, we can’t compete with those top teams in terms of trading players, but of course, we can compete on the football pitch so what we’re trying to do is bring in players who we feel have an improvement in them and a desire to play for Newcastle and that’s why we’ve targeted the players that we have. Now the most important thing to keep those players is to put success in front of them and when you’re building a new side it has to have progression and that’s something we’re going to need this season, in our form, in our consistency to get as close as we can to those top teams. Now if we see that I think we can keep them another year, and then when we go into that second / third year, then you really need to be very very close, because then they’re going to start looking, as Jose is now at 28, looking for them trophies and I think we can do that, and the likes of Tiote, Cabaye and people like that, we’re going to have to have success on the pitch to keep them, 100%.
As I wrote earlier, I shall endeavour to transcibe the rest later, but if you can’t wait, you can find the audio version here….
NUFCBlog Author: workyticket
workyticket has written 1078 articles on this blog.
Ta mate!