Pardew: “Hello, we’ve got all this and now we’ve got these as well”
Posted on August 7th, 2011 | 27 Comments |
Alan Pardew may have been conspicuously silent up until the end of last week, but he’s making up for it now.
In an interview with The Sunday Sun, he has been countering his earlier, rather pessimistic statement – in which he intimated that Europe is beyond our grasp for financial reasons – with a slightly more upbeat assessment of things.
When asked about where he thinks we’ll finish this season, he said:
“To be honest I’m not going down that line until such time as I see one or two players coming in. Our expectations I will gladly give you on August 31.
“We need one or two in for the squad to say ‘Hello, we’ve got all this and now we’ve got these as well’.”
Eh? Not really sure I understand that last bit, although it’s a cracking quote that had me spluttering Earl Grey for a while. Still, never mind, I’ll look forward to his estimate of our expectations on August 31st (I wonder if he fancies entering our Prediction Competition … I might email him).
He then goes on to talk about the players we’ve already added and his hopes of adding more:
“We have introduced a couple – or two or three – very good players. And we’re going to add to that.
“Once we see the team settle down, and I don’t think that will be in the first three or four games if I’m honest, we’re going to see a strong side.
“We’ve still got some very, very good players here. Cabaye will certainly be a big, big player for this football club. We’ve got Cheick Tiote still at the football club when everyone thought he would be going – we’ve got Coloccini here, he’s one of the best centre halves in this division.
“We’ve got three goalies who could be number one, we’ve got Gutierrez still at the football club, Enrique still at the football club, we’ve got Danny Simpson at right-back still learning his trade, we’ve still got a lot of assets outside of what’s gone on this week.”
So it seems that according to our manager we could be in for a tough start to this season. That would match the way our pre-season friendlies have gone if you happen to believe that friendlies are any sort of indication about the season ahead.
I think he’s right actually. We have a much-changed midfield and a new striker and it’s going to take time for the players to ‘click’ and read one another correctly. We have to make sure we do enough though, as at the start of a season a few bad games can plant you at the root of the table, which has its psychological downsides.
Pardew is adamant that we’ll be adding to the squad though. And previously he’s stated that he hopes we’ll add to it before we play Arsenal, so it could be an interesting week in terms of transfer speculation.
He’s adamant we’ll be adding to the squad. He’s been adamant about lots of things since he came to Newcastle and it has all turned out to be hot air. Why believe a word he says? Has something changed?