August 25th. Newcastle 1 Sunderland 2 report by Rik

This is more of a "My Comments page" than a match report.

Ruud Gullit, surprised everyone by leaving Alan Shearer on the bench. The lineup consisted of half a team of fit first choice players along with half a team of 3rd choice players. The reason, primarily because of injuries to a dozen of the squad. To give you an idea I have listed the squad in positional pecking order, with injured players in Red, selected player in Black, player on subs bench in Purple

Looking at the squad above, you must sympathies with the manager. We have a real crisis in defence, having to use Tommy Wright is not an ideal situation. The centre backs are an even bigger problem, Goma is not 100% fit, but fit enough to play, the same goes for Ferguson up front, still not 100%. As for Shearer and the biggest talking point, Why did he not start?, well Robinson has been showing better form so why not use him? Why should he be any different to any other player?

Midfield is a crisis waiting to happen, Dyer as we know is also still not 100% match fit. Maric still hasn't settled and McClen is not really ready yet. If anything happened to either Nobby or Speed , we would have even larger problems. We really need to strengthen this area with a new signing. No matter who is the manager we are men short in this department. Any one who has seen Robert lee in the reserves will have seen that he is a shadow of his former self. Re instating him make look like a good idea , but can he still play? I am not sure on this one he won't want to play in the reserves, so may not try too hard in those games.

For the Sunderland game, Gullit chose what he considered to be his best team. The nerves on the pitch in the first 20 minutes were really bad. Everyone was making poor mistakes, luckily Sunderland are not a good team, they really were very poor a decent team would have crucified us. The annoying thing is, we were no better. Dyers goal was a good one, he took it very well. As I have stated elsewhere all the geordies in St James' park went mental. All that is except Shearer, he had no reaction to the goal, it was as if he didn't want Newcastle to win if he weren't a part of it. By half time we were playing quite well, but the weather was deteriorating. Most in the ground thought that Shearer would come on at half time all fired up.But with Newcastle still in the lead Gullit stood by his original selection. The ground was getting heavier by the minute, and it took it's toll on Robinson who was playing mainly by himself upfront.

Ferguson came on , but could do little, he was marked by two of their players for most of the second half, and he seemed to have lead in his boots. Mind you the pitch by this time was a swimming pool . Newcastle still tried to play the ball on the ground but it kept sticking in puddles. It was comical watching some of the players trying to cope . Unfortunately Sunderland coped better than we did , and the inevitable happened, an equaliser. It came from a diagonal ball into the box, which was headed in by Quinn. Sound familiar? Goma's fault I'm afraid.

Things got worse after Shearer came on, he made no differance to the team performance at all. He was the fittest man on the pitch, yet spent half of his 20 minutes walking around the half way line as Sunderland attacked, waiting for someone to "service him". If he had been the single target man then fine, but Ferguson was in that position, we didn't need two up front when we were under pressure. Phillips got the winner for the MaKems, and despite Kevin Ball hitting his own bar and Solano firing wide, it was obvious what the final score would be as soon as they had equalised. The drenched crowd started to leave early, many cursing Gullit. Dyer, Wright Barton and Robinson earned their wages, the rest should give it to that new charity, "The sick toon fans foundation". We remain on a single point with only Sheffield propping us up. A thoroughly depressing night. I was lucky enough to have a dry seat, 15,000 others weren't so lucky. It was a monsoon, but they kept on singing. We deserve a better team to support.

As I said earlier both teams were crap and will both get relegated if they don't improve . The major differance is that we were having to play a weakened team due to so many injuries. we can also afford to strenghen our team (can't we?) They were virtually at full strength and don't like spending money. They won't get much better, we can. Newcastle are not likely to get anything from the next two matches, which will no doubt leave us bottom of the pile After that we have some winnable games hopefully with a stronger team .

by mid October we will all be wondering what all the fuss was about.

Links to reports from all HOME games will be On this page.

Links to reports of all AWAY games ARE HERE

Reports for games can be directly posted by any Newcastle United fan onto the match reports message board of TOONWORLD. A single report will be selected from that page and pasted here along with some pictures of the game.

THE Fixtures, RESULTS and LEAGUE TABLE are HERE