I went to St James’ Park last night , to witness the worst game of football I’ve seen for years. To be fair to Newcastle and Sporting Lisbon it wasn’t really their fault but I’ll come to that later. 28017 fans turned up at SJP, an excellent crowd you might suggest, hmm I beg to differ, a week before Christmas for a table decider at £20 per ticket I’m not surprised their was only 28017 there. I find outrageous that NUFC Plc charged this amount why? You might well ask I can only assume that UEFA charge a levy on individual matches for ticket prices so quite rightly NUFC will expect to make some cash by charging what they do on top. I think you have to go deeper than that once again the governing body (in this case UEFA) have to appease the so called “BIG” clubs of Europe and by doing this and of course horror from horrors some of the so called “BIG” clubs find themselves in the UEFA Cup, the governing body have decided to have a champions league format with a preliminary round to get rid of you’re dead wood then a first round to introduce the bigger clubs then scrap the second round and place two sides who are obviously going to go through one which may upset the balance and two sides who won’t get through. So Five teams in a group and they only play each other once, then UEFA get rid of sixteen teams and replace them with some Champons league drop outs (eight in all). Which jobs worth decided this? You had a dead wood game last week between Panionios and Dinamo Tbilisi which is currently under investigation due to irregular betting patterns around Europe. Last night you had Athletic Bilbao beating Standard Liege 7-1 AWAY from home now I’m not saying that this game is under review for Betting purposes but let’s just say that this result wasn’t on the cards before the game started an away win maybe but not 7-1. Last nights game was pointless really (well a point apiece was gained which was enough for the Geordies to win the group and enough for Sporting to qualify for the next stage) Newcastle struggling with injuries put out a very young side and the performed poorly whilst Sporting just coasted through as if it was a friendly because that’s what it felt like. Newcastle were booed of at the end personally I think it was a collective dig at UEFA as well as NUFC Plc and it was bitterly cold. |
