Eddie Howe over a Newcastle ‘sack cycle’ and Arteta a ‘genius’ to get a tune out of Arsenal rabble

Editor F365
Mikel Arteta must be a 'genius' and Eddie Howe remains the man for Newcastle.

Newcastle are heading for a ‘sack cycle’ if they get rid of Eddie Howe and Mikel Arteta must be a ‘genius’ given his ‘weak ensemble of Arsenal players’.

Send your thoughts to theeditor@football365.com.

 

Eddie Howe over the ‘sack cycle’
As a Toon fan with growing but still tempered aspirations, I’d like to echo some of the earlier comments about Eddie Howe and how he has the backing of a huge % of the fan base, myself included. Ultimately he’s like the CEO of a company, who having come into a basket case has through hard work (& yes, some shrewd if not glamorous investments) transformed them into a business competing with the big boys who have spent a lot more and started with a much stronger workforce, and an office that isn’t falling apart (Man U aside). NET spend is often laughed at but it does make sense as a metric to examine, but not in isolation. Eddie was spending against a squad built with the hand of Mike Ashley, not Roman or the UAE.

Yes we’re on a bad run, but with the injuries we’ve had and the bench, or rather lack of we were always going to have a bumpy ride. The Eddie sack talk is concerning, he’s already taken us so far and unlike our other oil backed rivals we’ve come into a league with the strongest FFP rules ever, in part AIMED AT US. Replacing Eddie would be the biggest gamble of all and for a PiF group who have done a lot to get Geordie’s on side, would be the first potential bump in the road of what has so far been a completely positive relationship, human rights violations aside.

A lot of my Man-Yoo mates have already started on the ‘Joelinton is a good player’, ‘Almiron is decent’ ‘Longstaff is a decent Prem player’ stuff. But how good are they really? Pre Eddie they showed very little to suggest they were top 6 or even top 10 material, it’s largely down to him where they are. I’m not scared of the unknown, but I am scared of throwing the away the last 2 years on a high-profile or at the risk of sounding like a PFM, flavour of the month foreign manager. Or worst of all, the Jose hire…. buy 33 year olds on 200k 4 year deals……isolate key players….complain….sack cycle.

Naturally if we lost to the Mackem’s and a few more Prem games against weaker opposition, there’s a conversation to be had. But for those fans who genuinely think we’d likely be better off without Eddie, think about where we’ve come from. With more money, less time and less injuries think where we could go.
Tarqs, Woolwich. Unofficial Eddie Howe PR Man

 

Reactionary Arsenal fans
I know us Arsenal fans can be quite a reactionary bunch, or at least the most vocal ones can!  But it seems that there is something about Arsenal and Arteta that brings out the over reactionary in all fans.  Matthew (ITFC) has dissected Arsenal’s first choice 11 and in summary he finds 7 of the players to be worthy of criticism and useless and a further one on the brink of that criticism.  With such a weak ensemble of players Arteta must be a genius for getting them so close to the title last year and top this year until admittedly 2 bad results?  But yet Matthew says Arteta isn’t a genius.  So which is it?  Do Arsenal have good players who Arteta should be winning the title with, or does he have/has he bought poor players and therefore he’s doing really bloody well with such a rubbish team?  Or, is it somewhere in the middle of the constant over reactionary fan take and Arteta has done a pretty good job of building the side he has and now needs to push on to win the big trophies – which by the way is also really difficult because only 1 manager in the last 6 years has managed to do it over the behemoth of City and Pep, and he certainly wasn’t a rookie manager in his first job.
it is almost like non-Arsenal fans will create various arguments to declare Arsenal and Arteta as losers no matter the situation and will flip flop between them to suit their straw man.   If you’re bitter enough you could literally do this with any team apart from City and Pep because they won the lot.

When your mail contains criticism of the Declan Rice purchase as unnecessary as there was no CM problem when a) you’ve seen him be so good this season, b) the player he replaced (Partey) is constantly injured, c) we sold another CM this summer (Xhaka) and d) our only other CM options are Jorginho and Elneny then it is clear you have an agenda to drive home no matter the logic and counter argument staring you in the face! At least Matthew had the possibly unconscious humility to start the email asking ‘IF I’ve got this right…’  No, No you haven’t
Rich, AFC

 

Franca and Palace
From the decision to televise a match between the two Premier League managers who care least about the FA Cup, to the turgid way they set about trying not to win the game, it feels like we were being trolled last night.

*For both Crystal Palace and Everton, there was a lot of upside to this draw: a team they could be confident of beating, but also a team they could lose to without the excessive attention of being a giantkilling. Win the tie and you get a morale boost heading into the winter break, lose it and you can look forward to time off during future rounds. In fact, the worst possible outcome for either side was a draw and a replay. Oh.

*The Palace squad is banged up and feeling the effects of fatigue, so naturally Roy Hodgson resisted the urge to make wholesale changes to his side for a cup game he wasn’t bothered about. Instead, he made two forced changes: Jordan Ayew has gone to AFCON, so Jeffrey Schlupp came into the side for him, and Michael Olise, not long back from a hamstring injury, has suffered another hamstring injury; Matheus França started in his place, for the first time.

There have been suggestions at times this season that Hodgson has not always seen eye to eye with his medical staff. Eberechi Eze’s return from an achilles injury was closer to the manager’s timescale than the medical team’s, and it’s entirely possible the same has happened with Olise. At the very least, it’s clear that some players have played because the manager has placed greater emphasis on their importance to the team than the medical advice about the ramifications for their longer term health. Of course, this would be less of a problem if the club had acted back in the summer to, for example, sign an exciting Brazilian attacker or promote some attacking prospects from the under-23s to the first team squad.

*França was one of few bright spots for Palace last night, there were a few moments where he impressed with control or his ability to take on and beat defenders. He’s still very much a work in progress, as he needs a lot of help in defence and he’s very slight, which is why he got bumped off the ball last night a few times. He’ll make greater improvements if he plays more regularly though.

*VAR corner: pundits need to stop saying that referees make decisions because “it looks worse when it’s slowed down”; what makes things look worse is seeing the same three seconds of footage on a loop repeated at high speed, without any context. Based on how much contact he actually made, Dominic Calvert-Lewin can consider himself unfortunate to receive a straight red card. However, the clampdown on tackles like that – where the impact with an opponent is with the studs – is nothing new. It’s a bit like rugby union with head contacts or ice hockey with high sticking, if you want to eliminate it from the game completely, you set the entry level for punishment lower and make everything above the entry level a more severe offence.

A couple of comments online – including from former F365 writers – pointed out that this will have season-changing consequences for Calvert-Lewin and Everton, but this misses the point. Nathaniel Clyne didn’t complete the 90 minutes, possibly as a result of being a victim of studs-up contact, and the reason the authorities are taking a strict stance on such things is because they can have season-changing consequences for the victim.

All the controversy about the red card also misses the point that Calvert-Lewin should probably have had a yellow card for a late challenge on Marc Guehi a few minutes earlier; had he done so, he would have probably received a second yellow for the challenge on Clyne.

*Hindsight being what it is, it looks increasingly like after Palace’s win over Brentford would have been the perfect opportunity to end Hodgson’s contract on a high note and bring in his successor: last night would have been a free hit (or a chance for fringe players to impress) and the squad could have used the winter break to get up to speed on the new manager’s methods. Instead, there was yet another underwhelming performance from players who are a combination of exhausted and complacent about their place in the team (França aside).
Ed Quoththeraven

 

European Super League rebuttal
Hi Matthew.I’ll use quotations from your mail, if I may?

* ’20 places … decided by domestic performance’.
The other 44 qualify automatically.
EUFA have the 3 winners qualify automatically and 113 (main competition)/ 275 (total [I’m not sure either]) qualifying through domestic performance. Which system is more merit based? Which gives smaller teams more opportunity?

*[Teams] ‘will be promoted and relegated’.
…but most of them will automatically qualify.

* ‘champions of “lesser” nations would not be at the top table, but they are only nominally so [now]’.
Some chance is better than guaranteed zero chance. Nominal is debatable, but still better than 2+ years of battling for promotion, to get a shot at prying the ‘big’ trophy out of the hands of a few hyper-clubs who’d consider it their personal property.
Is it a coincidence that the ‘super’ league started being pushed again since Real stopped winning the CL every year?

* ‘bigger teams… will be cosseted to some degree ‘.
To some degree? It’s the whole purpose of the exercise. To funnel more money into a few clubs to allow them to continue to be badly run.

* [They’re] ‘cosseted now’.
Yeah but not as much as they would be. It’s a false equivalence.

* ‘less of the dead rubbers’.
Why? It’s a more drawn out league format leading to knockouts. A 14 game league could be decided by game 8 or 9. That’d be 5 rounds of dead rubbers instead of sometimes one.
I’m not surprised it’s ‘free’ to air. Who’s gonna pay to watch a mid table clash in Blue League 3 between Viktoria Plzen and LOSC?
( Absolutely no disrespect intended to either of those fine, historic clubs: 6 Czech titles; 4 Ligue Un titles btw)

* ‘allow for teams from “lesser” nations to actually win things’.
Qualifying is narrower and harder. It’s offering 3 tiered trophies and if you win the lesser ones you get in the comp above. Sound familiar? Except with no history or substance.

* ‘the names aren’t really that important ‘.
[Spits out tea] I beg to differ.
They really, really are very important. Champions League, Premier League, EUFA cup have meaning, history, lustre. Does Blue League?
More than that it speaks to the attitude behind it all; their view of fans. It’s dangling car keys to distract a baby. I mean ‘Star League’ is painful. They’ll have to provide a sick-bag with every programme.
It’s like having Elvis in the Las Vegas years repeatedly smashing a fist full of sparklers on my head screeching, ‘its shiny, it’s bright! It’s shiny, it’s bright!’ …I gaud it!
They’re desperate to make their thing seem big and sparkly, and people love Stars right?
Oh, how I’d love to have been in the meeting when it happened, when someone breathlessly intoned ..’ I’ve got it!… Star League…’. And the rest clapped their hands like performing seals, ‘brilliant sir Geoffrey!’
It’s the most anodyne, insulting, hollow, transparent, emetic piece of not shiny marketing horse sh*t I’ve ever heard.

* ‘the devil is in the detail ‘.
Indeed it is, and I can’t wait for them to offer some – tbf they’ve only had two years to copy the U.S. system – however, maybe God is in the big picture.
A22’s site says they want to, ‘..ensure a level playing field between participating clubs’.
This would be more believable if the main players behind it had shown any inclination to do just that in their own domestic leagues over the last few decades.
If anything it’s not un-level enough for them. You used the word cynical. I’d say this scheme is a cynical attempt by a few already massive football institutions to financially insulate themselves from their own incompetence.

Big love and a Merry New Year!
Hartley MCFC Somerset (Why worry about being, ‘ripped a *new*  one’, if ‘change is invariably good’?[!])

 

The things I hate about football
1. Discussion about why Southgate and England;
Every single time there’s a new international squad people will be outraged about the same things. Firstly there’s the picking players on form argument. You can’t just pick 23 players based on form. There has to be a blend. There will be people complaining that Anthony Gordon isn’t currently being called up when he didn’t even start playing well until October and there’s been only one international break to call him up. You’ll still hear people complain about it even though there isn’t another one until March, as if Southgate is suddenly able to create one in that 4 month period. I also hate the argument that certain players wont get called up because of who they play for when he’s called up countless amounts of players from smaller teams and even had two of them starting as his pivot for the entire Euro 2020. My final hate about the England squads is the desire to constantly change the team. Do people not realise you need cohesion and a consistent group of players? You can’t chop and change all the time. 12 months ago Rashford was great, 6 months before that he was shite. Now he’s shite again. Or maybe he’s somewhere in between. But you can’t just build a squad and keep taking players in and out. It’s also fair that certain players stay in because they’ve built up enough credit in the bank. I can remember Sterling getting so much stick for starting in the last WC and even the Euros. Now that he’s not in people are going mental, forgetting the fact he’s actually declined a call up (or two I believe) over the last year. Southgate clearly loved him and stuck with him and now people are crying about Southgate having his favourites.

2. Arsenal Related Talk
I’m an Arsenal fan so I’m going to throw this in. Ben White was brilliant last season. He’s been worse this season but he’s still playing well. The discussion that he’s a centre back playing right back is so boring? And what? He’s done well there and has all the attributes to succeed there. He’s genuinely played better there than he did at CB and our two CBs are brilliant. It’s like complaining that Cancelo is playing LB, or Stones, Gvardiol or Gomez are playing full back.

The Raya/Ramsdale talk is so infuriating. I don’t think people would be even talking about it this much if Ramsdale wasn’t English and didn’t have buddies in the media. We went out and got a better goalkeeper. Ramsdale was struggling. He was absolutely woeful vs Brentford and cost us the game with his error against Fulham. His form is declined at the end of last season. Proper football men moaning about the fact we signed him for being better with his feet are somehow ignoring he’s better at pretty much everything else too, especially collecting the ball from crosses. He’s an upgrade but he hasn’t been as good as I thought.

The striker narrative. Last season we scored the more goals than we got in the Invincibles season. We didn’t have a 20 goal a season striker. City won 2 of the last 3 league titles without a player getting above 15 in either of those seasons. Liverpool won it without any player getting 20 and their striker was nowhere near it. Benzema was not hitting 20 goals when Madrid were taking up CL titles pre 2020. The blame Jesus has been getting is annoying. I get frustrated with the chances he misses but he’s an unbelievable player. He was our best player in the first half of last season when we were absolutely unreal. We already know he’s not good at scoring but the problem is that those around him have stopped scoring now. It’s so lazy to say we need a striker to score loads of goals. Well that would be handy but they’re not cheap and they might not even fit the system. Jesus fits it perfectly. A different striker last season would not have solved anything. Our output was brilliant, our defence cost us. I don’t think our forwards are worse players now, I just think they’re not in good form. They’re not old or over the hill, they’ll be back.

3. Non Football Discussions
This is mainly related to the mailbox and I’m not saying you shouldn’t discuss these things but it ruins my day when I just scroll through the whole mailbox to fail to find actual discussions about football. Whether that’s 5/6 in a row talking about VAR, Henderson on LGBTQ or whatever. It genuinely just bores the life out of me. I hate watching a game of football and Neville, Carra etc spend 45 mins after the game talking about refereeing decisions. Then I look at social media, the mailbox and it’s the same crap. Id rather read someone talking about squad numbers or some nerdy tactical stuff than Jordan Hendersons beliefs. There’s only a certain amount of times you can talk about it. He was supportive of the community, then he took dirty money. There we go, that’s it.
Dion, Ireland. 

Aaron Ramsdale, Arsenal, November 2023
Aaron Ramsdale applauds Arsenal fans after win

 

Performance enhancing drugs
I find it interesting that Jim & Paul in Thursdays mailbox both mention the use of performance enhancing drugs in baseball & American football when discussing cheating going on in other sports but nobody ever raises the same accusations around proper football. Is it a case of not in my back yard?

Why does football get a pass over the incidents where football clubs have been involved with doping allegations? The media never report or discuss these stories to any great extent.

Such as when Juventus were investigated by the Italian authorities in the 90’s, allegedly their training ground was ‘equipped like a small hospital’ with 281 different drugs and where the Juventus doctor Riccardo Agricola was sentenced to 22 months in prison after being found guilty of providing a performance enhancing drug. Riccardo Agricola was acquitted a year later due to the fact the use of EPO could not be proven. Juventus went on to bring him back to the club in 2017 despite leading haematologist Giuseppe D’Onofrio stating at the trial it was ‘practically certain’ they had players using EPO.

Cycling is the sport which had the most scrutiny around doping and the investigations had links to football clubs. Operación Puerto was based around the doping network of Doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, who was reportedly ‘indignant that only cyclists had been named and said he also worked with tennis and football players’ but the judge allegedly prevented him from naming any other athletes from other sports.

Fuentes allegedly worked with several la Liga clubs, including Real Sociedad where plans were seized which showed how the teams performance was planned to have been enhanced at pre-defined points throughout the season. Iñaki Badiola, the Real Socieded president in 2008, made claims which backed up the allegations as he stated that Real Sociedad had spent over 300,000 euros on products supplied by Eufemiano Fuentes via the black market.  Le Monde also reported in December 2006 that they had possession of documents of Fuentes detailing ‘seasonal preparation plans’ for Spanish football clubs Barcelona and Real Madrid which used the same symbols as in the Real Sociedad document, planning when players would go in & out of peak performance.

Of course, I am deliberately leaving out any allegations linked to clubs or players in England. This is a PL based site & nobody ever wants to have a grown-up conversation about the topic, instead pointing fingers at rival clubs and feigning innocence at their own club’s links to such allegations. This is the same tribal behaviour found around any allegations to do with football clubs, such as the City fans who only come out of the woodwork to defend their 115 financial breaches.
Mick, allegedly of Cardiff

 

A contact sport
Football is a physical game, a contact sport. Just because contact is made, doesn’t make it a foul. Just because it’s in the penalty area, doesn’t make it more of a foul, and indeed shouldn’t make it less of one.

If you are fouled anywhere on the pitch, it should be a foul and punished equally, subject to the usual rules like last man. (I appreciate that it often isn’t, especially when it comes to shielding the ball out of play for a goal kick with no intent to get the ball – I have never got over seeing Sol Campbell get away with it quite overtly back in the day!).

If you have the advantage gained by riding a foul challenge then you have x amount of time – maybe this should be number of steps, maybe it is, I don’t know any more – to use or lose that advantage before it’s called back. If you ride a (very soft) challenge to find yourself in front of goal, and then crumple to the floor like you were shot, then it’s a dive; it doesn’t matter that there was contact, unless it took your legs, which clearly didn’t happen in this case.

Now, all those millions of times when a defending player has hold of someone in the box at a corner – and indeed the attacker on the defender – that ABSOLUTELY should be a foul too. You can go ahead and tell me why it isn’t, and you’ll be wrong because it’s literally impeding a player from getting to the ball. Don’t want to give a yellow each time? Fine… add a sin bin to the mix and let them go sit the next corner out. Same for tactical fouls a la any Pep team or Chiellini. Same for players kicking the ball away, taking a throw-in 50 yards from where it should be etc etc for any minor but irritating infraction.

And since I haven’t mailed in a while, VAR/PGMOL excuses are getting boring. Do better. And the first step is admitting you’re screwing it up. Let/make referees and assistants actually do their jobs or bin them off entirely and forget the pretense.

Final thought, has there been a season with more injuries across so many teams? I can’t recall one. I think it’s around 150 at the moment. If the VAR delays correlate to an increase in injuries, that needs to be resolved.
Badwolf