At the moment, we have no option but to live in the moment … enjoy what we’re seeing in front of us and think about next season when promotion is confirmed. One step at a time.

For all of the enjoyment I felt at Saturday’s game, to tell the truth I had greater satisfaction in the previous week’s hard-fought win in the clarts of Vicarage Road. Watford(a) was exactly the kind of game United has been losing for most of my adult life. For Watford, read Wigan, so often in the higher division. For as much as I purred along with everyone else to the bravura displays all over the park from Gutierrez, Guthrie, Carroll, Lovenkrands, Nolan et al, I was still luxuriating in the glow of those 3pts away at Watford. I know I’m a miserable sod but pasting Barnsley at SJP, welcome as it is, is all very well, it is the grey days on our travels to “football’s outposts” © which will see us clinch or blow promotion. Doncaster, Reading, Plymouth, Bristol and Peterborough are a world away from the grandeur of St James’ Park and 40K+ Mags giving the game the big-match feel. But it is at those venues where we’ll need to do what we did last week at Watford - just the hard slog and relentless grind of getting the results we need to get us back to where we belong. More perspiration than inspiration from Hughton’s men.

I make Boro away on Saturday our toughest away fixture remaining. Boro place a lot of importance on this game (the Placca Derby) and they will be up for it. Some of them might even go to the match. Who knows? Anything could happen. Their team has had a difficult season. They are in a position, many (me included) imagined we’d be in - struggling with a reduced squad in a division many of the players know little about. But Saturday offers their manager and players an opportunity to buy a massive chunk of goodwill if they are able to stop what is increasingly coming to look like a machine moving towards its inevitable destination. The whole lot of them will be up for it. This is their Cup Final. That is what we’ll have to cope with but if confidence isn’t sky-high on the back of recent results, then it never will be. For me, Hughton needs send out a team which is tight all over the midfield and defensively strong. We have to stop Boro from playing and then win the game. We’ve been stronger than every team we’ve played this season (with the possible exception of West Brom at SJP) and that needs to continue at The Riverside. We will need to do the dirty jobs; the running, the covering, the shielding, keeping possession and the tackling. More toil than art.

But no matter what the tactics or the formation, we should expect to win. March can be the month when we all but nail promotion.

*

After almost three years of near silence, you now can’t shut Derek Llambias up. With everything at Newcastle United, every public utterance sets off a whole range of questions and whilst we’ll never get to know (nor should we) the minutiae of what goes on at the club, what people think, what the plan is etc some of the stuff he’s coming out with needs a response.

No.1 Interest free loans from Ashley are better than loans with interest but they are still loans and there will have to be a plan for Ashley to be repaid. What is that plan?

No.2 Ashley would not have had to make those loans this season had he run the club previously with any sense of competence. What exactly has changed? What has he learned?

No.3 Llambias repeats the statement that they know they have made mistakes but he doesn’t detail what those mistakes were.

Do they have the same view as to those mistakes as we do, namely the appointment of Dennis Wise and Tony Jimenez were utterly ridiculous acts of cronyism?

Do they agree that failing to bin Wise and Jimenez when the situation with KK became completely unworkable and stuck with his so-called Director of Football over our manager probably brought us relegation?

Do they agree that Joe Kinnear was an absolutely mad appointment?

Do they agree that being proven liars in the tribunal involving KK opened a wound that will never be healed?

Do they agree they treated Alan Shearer appallingly?

Do they agree that the ham-fisted attempt to re-name St James’ Park was an insult to the name of Newcastle United, the history of the club, its heritage and that of the city?

Can they guarantee that those efforts have been dropped completely?

Can they tell us what a successful Newcastle United looks like to Mike Ashley?

Can they tell us what will happen to the money going into the club from SKY, season tickets and merchandise if the club is not going to spend it on players?

Can they explain why the urgency for supporters to renew season tickets if there is not going to be any great outlay on new players?

How do they propose to build up a squad of young players when the relationship between Newcastle United and Boys Clubs in the local area is absolutely non-existent?

Can they tell us how they are currently scouting and assessing young players in and away from the North East?

Can they tell us how we can hope to remain in the PL without reasonable investment in the squad when it was the same lack of investment which got us relegated last season?

And on and on and on …

*

I must confess to be being irritated by Llambias’ constant reference to Portsmouth and administration - though he is completely correct to state without Ashley piling dough in, we’d be royally fucked - he fails to grasp that it was Ashley’s desperate decision making that got us relegated in the first instance. I am far from the only Mag who holds Mike Ashley 100% to blame for last season’s relegation. All of the main actors in that tragedy were screen-tested by Mike Ashley. This just seems to be a desperate grasp for legitimacy while Ashley plumps up United for a sale. Not on the market? We’ve heard that all before. Llambias told us there was never any risk whatsoever of administration in July 09. Why is he banging on about it in March 2010.

We don’t need to be told how badly the club was run under Hall-Shepherd. We were here. We know and it had been doing our nuts in for years before we had even heard of Mike Ashley. Buyer beware eh?

*

We must be getting close to a return to the PL because some of the whoppers of the national media are starting to write about us again. Not to apologise at statements SJP would be like a ghost-ship this season … that would be too much to ask. No, they are at it again, claiming when we are promoted Mags will expect to be competing for a CL place and all of the rest of it. Where do these balloons get their information from? It certainly can’t be from reading this humble fanzine or our comrades at The Mag. And wild optimism isn’t propagated by nufc.com either. The local press makes no such claims and online forums are a study in conservatism and reality. I’ve not yet heard a “we’re gonna win the league” chant yet and there isn’t a set of supporters with as phlegmatic a chant as “we are the Geordie Boys … we’re gonna win fuck all again, we’re gonna win fuck all .. We still follow United!” in the land is there?

But still they write their shite. Rod Liddle of The Times you can forgive. Obviously he’s a self-styled gunslinger (cough) of the football press and Britain’s most controversial columnist. So, he is almost duty-bound to write a whole load of shite about us and others - guess what? He accused Scousers of being burglars and thieves not so long ago. I mean, how fucking lame can you get? Playground stuff.

More disappointing was Bob Cass, a native of the North East and a veteran of the football scene. He should really know better but he must have been living in the press box bubble for too long and be desperate to be bessie mates with the whoppers he meets on his travels. Try out this pearler:

“There is a lovable gullibility about United fans borne out of a misapprehension their club should be up there mixing it on a level playing field with the big guns“.

What a patronising creep. If Cass can put one match-going Mag in front of us who, on the basis of our current and likely playing staff, ownership, infrastructure and manager believes we can compete with Man Utd, Arsenal, Liverpool, Man City or Chelsea then I will show my big, white spotty Geordie arse in Fenwicks’ window. It is lazy bilge put out by someone who is wholly out of touch.

That’s not to say, supporters don’t yearn for success. And Cass clearly overlooks the history of our club at home and in Europe, its pulling power and the magnificence of St James’ Park - one of the continent’s greatest stadiums. But yearn we do. We long for the club to be run competently and for it to punch its weight but we know we can’t hope to compete with Abromovich or the Arabs or the global behemoth that is Man Utd or both Liverpool and Arsenal with their snouts stuck long and deep into the Champions League trough. Weknow all about the cartel straggling the life out of the PL as a competition. But when we look at how clubs like Everton, Villa and Spurs are supported their stadiums etc … we can justly hope to have a club that can compete with them because only a short while ago, those clubs were cast in our shadow. Or is there something Bob Cass knows that we don’t. Even hope is off limits for us now is it?

Fuck them all.

Have a great week.

Keep On, Keepin’ On …