What Won’t Happen Tonight: Newcastle v Manchester Ctiy
Well it’s finally here, Newcastle play their first game of the new Premier League season away to Manchester City at The Etihad tonight. Much has been written about our lack of signings, City’s glamorous recruitment and our woeful record against City in recent years. But remember, this is football and anything can happen!
What frame of mind will Cabaye be in, followign Arsenal’s approach?
That being said, the pessimism felt by fans before the game is indeed understandable. Usually I do my best to throw a bit of optimism in to the ring but realistically speaking, Newcastle will do very, very well to get anything from tonight’s game.
I’m not particularly bothered if we lose tonight, this game will not define our season. However I am very bothered about our performance. As long as the lads turn out a committed display and try to produce some moments of positivity whilst keeping things as tight as possible at the back, I can have no complaints.
However I don’t want to see what we saw last season; I don’t think I’ll be able to put up with the constant, repeated mistakes we were so often subjected to. So I’m hoping Newcastle will surprise me tonight. How confident of that am I? Well let’s just see how many ticks I have on my checklist after the game…
Carrying Coals’ City Checklist:
- Cheick Tiote to get booked
- Papiss Cisse to miss a sitter
- Papiss Cisse to be offside 3 times
- Debuchy to give away a penalty
- Shola to come on in the last 10 minutes and do nowt
- Obertan to replace Ben Arfa with 20 minutes to go because Benny is overweight and can’t do 90 minutes, even though Pardew has apparently given his most rigorous pre-season ever
- Newcastle to concede at least 2 goals
- Pardew to mention ‘not being able to compete’ with bigger clubs because of finances in his post match interview
- Zabaleta and Clichy to put more balls in to the Newcastle box than Newcastle’s wingers put in to the city box
- Cabaye to have an absolute shocker because his head has been turned.
Hopefully of course, none of this happens, Cisse gets off the mark and we pull off a shock result. However I won’t hold my breath…
Good luck lads.
