Sat 9th St James Park 15.00 Newcastle 15th host Bournemouth 7th with only 4 points separating the sides with both sides coming off good wins in the last round of fixtures. Newcastle are without the overated S Longstaff through suspension, but other wise have pretty much a full fit squad. Bournemouth, however have injuries to Surman, Brooks, Daniels, Surrige, Stanislas, Newcastle old boy Dan Gosling and will miss Lerma through suspension. Newcastle fans will start thinking they actually aren't **** having been allowed to look like a side than can play football for 60 minutes by a well below par West Ham last week and will now foolishly believe they are good enough to take all 3 points against a far superior Bournemouth. The best thing Steve Bruce has done is be the first a manager to realise that Paul Dummett cannot play football. Newcastle fan favourite Saint Maximin will cause any side problems until he tires around 60 minutes into the game and sadly then the toon will be forced to turn to the hapless atsu. Bruce is likely to stick with Shelvey who has once again been getting smoke blown up his arse for scoring a free kick while getting no criticism for his lazy attempts to stop the two crosses from west ham leading to both their goals. Schar is now available , but I think it would be unfair to drop Fernandez or Clark and schar will be done no harm in getting more recovery time especially with the January transfer window just around the corner , so worryingly Bruce has a decision to make. Both sides and sets of fans will feel they can win this game, but Bournemouth are the better footballing side and have much better strikers and H Willson having been linked with us all summer will relish the stupid free kicks we give away and I can see him scoring, so I'm sad to say I'm picking Bournemouth for an away win 1-2. If Newcastle are to get anything from this game they will have to start taking chances because they won't get gifts like at west ham very often.
Score draw written all over it. Bournemouth are a slightly better team than us but they have injuries and it's at St James so I'd make us marginal favourites. That said neither team 'need' to win and would probably settle for a point a piece before kick off so lets not bother playing the game and agree a draw in advance.
there's a kind of ying yang think t how this works , so we need some delusion it's a fine balancing act for us
Bringing Bournemouth back to earth with a bang. 4-0 win for the Toon, Front three all getting a goal and Yedlin as I believe he is one of the only starting defenders not to score for us yet.
Better odds on a Shearer hat-trick than Almiron scoring. The problem I see it is how do we create two identities? Teams are naturally more cautious away from home, so we can't play counter-attacking football (can we?) - how do we then play more aggressively in front of the fans?
I agree. Its almost like we are set up better to play away. I think we actually need to be switching one of the midfield workers for Shelvey (although we had him anyway against West Ham). I would be tempted to switch Hayden for Longstaff M. very early in 2nd half if we can see that the opposition are sitting back. Our best hope of scoring though is probably telling St Maximin and Almiron to just run at them as often as possible and hope that we win plenty of free kicks in dangerous positions that our defenders can score from.