Match Day Thread Newcastle vs Arsenal

That's the thing it is all about opinions, and unfortunately the person whose opinion mattered most on Saturday is well known for his style of refereeing.
Was it red card or not, the debate can go on and on, personally, I'm not sure, but, I can understand why Marriner saw it as red from where he was standing.

Some of the other bookings were shear stupidity that in my opinion, was indiscipline - players need to know the Referee as should the Manager and I'm not sure they did. It was obvious, Marriner was going to hand out yellow cards once Sissoko was first to go in the book.
Anita had a few bites before he was booked, and Mbemba had only just got away with bringing Sanchez down, when he virtually repeated the offence a couple of minutes later - no surprise to me.

In the context of what we've seen over the past two years and playing with 10 men for so long, I thought it was a decent backs to the wall performance, more a case of damage limitation. Sorry, I couldn't see it as a great performance, but, hopefully those performances will come given time and playing with a full team.

 

26% possession, 1 shot on goal, 0 shots on target, 0 corners.

Tells you everything you need to know about whether we played well or not. Even for being a man down, that is poor. Battling performance, yes, and they deserve credit for that, but we were hopeless with the ball.

 

Did you notice a lot of people in white coats at the place you were at ?

 

The thing for me is that we said before we played United that we would struggle for points in the next 7 games. In our last two, we worked our backsides off against United and deserved a point away from home. Against Arsenal we pulled our sleeves up and worked our backsides off after the 16th minute and only lost to an own goal.

I might only be looking at the positives here, but after the season we had previously it's 100 times better. Our position in the relegation zone doesn't reflect our performances this season. There are more than 3 teams in a worse position with a worse squad than we have!

 

I disagree about our position in the table. We have the points we have deserved - at a stretch you could argue for 2 more vs Southampton but our defending didn't really offer any hope of that. Keeping it in perspective we have possibly met 4 of the top 8, 2 certain to be in and around the top 4. It was going to be tough because we are not going to be in the top 8 ourselves. Better teams beat lesser teams most of the time!

I think there is a positive. Effort. We have lacked this previously, and lacked a bit of fortitude. When the chips have been down we have folded. This season we have toughed it out. As the season gets long, if we keep doing that, we will be ok. We have better quality I'm sure, we just haven't displayed it yet. I'm sure McClaren will work his bollocks off to sort out our ball retention. Its a glaring issue and no better than previously. His coaching reputation however is very good and I think it is fair to expect improvement rather than hope for it.

The positive of effort has also garnered a response from the support. The atmosphere at the two home games has been much much better. Imagine when we actually win a few.

 

Agree with Donut bar the final point, but Pouchy has nailed it for me. we certainly lookmore resilient and there is far better teamwork going on. We look far more disciplined in terms of team effort, but general discipline is still a major issue. Far too many reckless/needless challenges snd bokings/red cards for my liking.

With the opening games we'vd had, the set up has been defensive. Understandable to a degree given the fixtures. Hopefully Maclaren will start to make more use of the attacking options as we face teams who are more 'beatable". I'd like to see Aarons, Pereez, DeJong snd maybe Roberts get more opportunities to fit in.