When Newcastle surprisingly beat Liverpool at home this weekend, the TV cameras gleefully panned around the stadium to find happy Geordies, stopping to take in two kids dressed in Halloween costumes with "Pardew Back From The Dead" and a group of lads with a BackPardew.com banner. The media marvelled at the turnaround Pardew has masterminded, poking fun at the "fickle" fans who would supposedly berate Jose Mourinho for failing to win a few games, but then call him the messiah for a few wins. Reputable journalists decided to troll social media, like Paddy Barclay, saying it was a shame for the "Pardew Out Brigade" that we were winning - fundamentally missing the point of just about everything. Celebrating isn't blind endorsement Mr Barclay, but you can't remove emotion from football no matter how much it moved towards being a global business. And that's precisely the point, isn't it? But what the media hilariously failed to notice was that the BackPardew.com banner that was so proudly framed on TV screens was a trick - anyone navigating there will find an immediate redirect to SackPardew's homepage. A clever deception designed to play on the fickle cliche we inevitably attract. And inevitably, everyone missed the point. And then of course there's the glorious BackPardew.org website - a genuine organisation, with a genuine Twitter account (with 113 followers) - whose owner has just rather suspiciously just been outed as a former resident of Sunderland now living in Manchester. https://twitter.com/pjwhitfield/status/529209757438337025 He might be a Newcastle fan, as he does claim, but the point is that the wider media have ignored that the SackPardew "campaign" has not gone away. It's still not right that the manager has won more points in the past four league games than he managed in the previous four months, and all Newcastle fans who choose to vent their frustration at that should be allowed to do so without accusations that they're fickle. Because for the majority of Pardew's detractors, the damage runs a lot deeper than a few wins could possibly fix immediately.
