Was Titus Bramble really as hated at Newcastle as his later move to Sunderland makes us all seem to remember? Well, yes, frankly. Bramble was signed from Ipswich with a massive potential tag on him - not least thanks to Sir Bobby Robson's enduring faith in him as a future England international - and he did have spells of brilliance in the first team. Scoring an acrobatic scissor-kick against Chelsea should rank high for all fans in the positives column. The problem was that Bramble was a schizophrenic player: for every well-timed tackle and solid 89 minutes, he would have disastrous 1 minute periods that would usually cost the club dearly. It wasn't just that he was accident prone, it was that he was calamitous in such a fatal way that every mistake looked explosive and ended up being over-blown by fans and media until he was a clownish figure.