Newcastle: Alan Pardew States The Bleeding Obvious About Newcastle

If it was desperate, Alan, why are you still here?

By Simon Gallagher / October 22, 2014

Desperate times call for desperate measures. But not at Newcastle, because professional football managers aren't really supposed to say anything is ever "desperate" apparently, and the manager clearly thinks that a solitary win against a newly promoted team qualifies as significant enough of a change in tides to acknowledge how bad it was getting. Alan Pardew has finally acknowledged what every Newcastle fan, every football fan, and every uninitiated casual hater of football could have told you three games ago: that things were fundamentally broken at Newcastle before the Leicester game. Instead of harping on about the value of possession stats (zero, when it doesn't turn into goals), and saying everyone was working really hard and fighting, and allowing his players to call him fantastic in public, Pardew has admitted today that he was consciously deceitful with his language, because he owed more to an imagined code of managerial conduct than to the fan-base craving honesty and acknowledgment.

One of your points when you get a pro licence is never use the word desperate but we were and there was no hiding place. We were desperate but we had to be professional about it. When they made two forward changes I said to John: We have to win this game. I knew theyd push and try to open the game up. In a way that kind of helped us.

Ignoring for a minute the hammer-blow obviousness of that need to win the game - which should have been top of the agenda for the entire game, not just when Leicester made a change - the revelation about the pro licence is a ridiculous thing. Why is admitting there are problems unprofessional? Isn't admitting there's a problem the first step to solving it? But then, probably not when you're protecting yourself from criticism as much as you're claiming to protect your team. And if it was unprofessional, why admit it now publicly? If the club was up in 8th place looking back at the desperate times at the start of the season, you might willingly share the joke with the manager: "yeah Alan, it was desperate wasn't it, thank God we got away from it, eh?" The fact is, we're still in the same place, still under threat of relegation, and there has been nothing in the past week other than bluster and false optimism that suggests any corners have been turned. Clearly the intention is to open up a sense of time between then and now, to draw a line and suggest that things have now changed, but it's impossible to accept that when it clearly hasn't.