Wednesday brought the - extremely unwelcome, if not entirely unexpected - news that this blogger's beloved (though, tragically, unsellable and now, seemingly, relegation-bound) Newcastle United had appointed Steve Bruce as their new head coach. Which has proved to about as popular on Tyneside as the last recorded case of diphtheria was. Bruce has signed an initial three year contract and is joined by coaches Steve Agnew and Stephen Clemence, with the trio en route to China to take charge of the club's second Asian Trophy tie on Saturday. Bruce's former club Sheffield Wednesday soon put out a statement, suggesting that they were pure-dead pissed off about this here malarkey. They stated that compensation had not been agreed between the clubs and that they were taking 'the appropriate legal advice.' This one, dear blog reader, could run and run. United are the eleventh club of Bruce's managerial career, since taking charge of Sheffield United in July 1998 - his most recent top-flight stint ending in 2016 when his Hull City side were extremely relegated (to be fair, he did get them promoted the following year at the first attempt but then, immediately, decamped for pastures Villa).
This blogger has already made his own feelings about Bruce's - lack of - abilities as a manager clear in previous bloggerisations both on From The North and our sister blog, Keith Telly Topping's World Cup Trivia Page so there's not much point in going over the same ground again. Instead, this blogger will leave it to the lads at NUFC.com whose apparent sighing disillusionment seems to match this blogger's own. 'All the talk of progressive football and has sacrificed on the altar of expedience and we're now saddled with a John Carver/Steve McClaren reboot,' they began. 'We don't really care about [Brice's] club-hopping or the plight he's left Wednesday in; the Mackem connection or his perception as an Old Trafford apologist is of little consequence ahead of the 2019-20 season. And, even the claim that the man who allegedly "bleeds black and white" once preferred to join Norwich City doesn't particularly matter - "football is a lie," as his predecessor was fond of saying. Regardless of your viewpoint of Rafa though, this cannot be seen as anything other than a retrograde step - a man who previously boasted of his dislike of tactics. This is the very opposite of ambition, but an appointment that nicely mirrors our grubby, unloved, derided shell of a football club. We have appointed one of the game's greatest mercenary managers. Acutely aware of the frosty reception awaiting, Bruce has accepted the job with open arms knowing that the worst case scenario is a multimillion payout in time for Christmas. The job title given to Bruce of Head Coach seems significant: with just over three weeks to go until the transfer window closes, let's hope that whoever is actually in charge of recruitment on Barrack Road has a coherent and credible plan to avoid what looks like nothing but a relegation fight. Whether the club have shown some foresight in appointing Bruce remains to be seen; perhaps they've merely acquired a manager with promotion to the top flight on his CV thirteen months before he's needed.' Bruce himself has claimed that he may 'find it tough' at St James' Park. No shit, mate? That might be the understatement of the decade. And, to those other prime lick-arse Ashley-apologist scum at Sky Sports whose coverage of United's opening Asian Trophy hiding to Wolverhampton Wanderers on Wednesday included both the commentator Martin Tyler and their alleged 'expert' Andy Townsend (actually, a risible waste-of-space plank previously sacked from a similar job at ITV to the delight of millions) opining that Newcastle supporters 'have to get over Rafa,' thank you gentlemen. Thank you so much for telling working men and women who pay good money to watch their football team what they have to do whilst you're sitting there getting paid to talk such shite about stuff you know nothing about. You pair of disgraceful abject smears. Meanwhile, citing 'Sky Sports' as a source, the Daily Scum Mail claimed that Bruce was given the job 'despite being eleventh choice and not even on Newcastle's original shortlist.' This may be true. What is certain is that Bruce wasn't their first choice since, for the second time in his life, that odious obese buffoon Sam Allardyce has undermined a fellow manager by publicly revealing that he had been sounded out for the job and had turned it down. The Sun, meanwhile, quoted Alan Shearer as saying he had dinner with Bruce three weeks ago and had advised Bruce not to take the job should he be offered it. 'I said: "Why are you going to be any different to Keegan or Benitez? If you take it, you must be mad because you know how it works there." He was not Newcastle's first choice to replace Rafa. He might not even have been their second, third or fourth pick. He knows what is going on and what has gone on in the past. He knows how fed-up the fan-base is. He knows how the football club is run, it is not a secret any more. This is without a doubt the toughest and most toxic situation Steve has ever walked into. No job is impossible but this one is very, very difficult for so many different reasons.' Lick-arse Ashley apologists Sky Sports's claim that Bruce could have more than ninety million pounds to spend at Newcastle this summer probably needs to be taken with a highly unhealthy amount of salt given that a) Bruce is, reportedly, not going to have any say in whom the club buys since his job title in Head Coach rather than Manager; b) there is only a little more than a fortnight left in the summer transfer window the club having spent the last three months faffing around seemingly doing nothing and c) the word 'could' is a fantastically bland and unimpressive one in most contexts and, especially, in this one. Newcastle are reportedly to be 'in talks' to sign Brazilian striker Joelinton from Hoffenheim. The twenty two-year-old was left out of Hoffenheim's squad for a pre-season game on Wednesday and the German club have confirmed they are in 'concrete talks' with an - unnamed - Premier League club over a potential transfer. 'Some reports have suggested the fee could be as high as thirty six million pounds,' said Sky Sports News reporter Dharmesh Sheth. There's that word 'could' again. Unconfirmed reports state that Joelinton is currently on Tyneside to complete his medical.
Meanwhile, West Bromwich Albinos striker Salomon Rondon has followed Rafael Benitez to China to join his former Newcastle manager at Super League side Dalian Yifang. The twenty nine-year-old has moved for 'an undisclosed fee.' However much it was, it was more than poor, poverty-stricken Mike Ashley can afford. Allegedly. Venezuela international Rondon spent last season on loan with this blogger's beloved (though unsellable) Magpies where he proved to be extremely popular with supporters, scored eleven goals in thirty three appearances and won the club's Play Of The Season award.
Fleetwood Town manager Joey Barton has been charged with causing actual bodily harm following a post-match incident in the tunnel at Barnsley on 13 April. Police say that the incident, after The Tykes beat Fleetwood four-two in a League One game at Oakwell, left a man with facial injuries. Barton has previously 'emphatically denied' accusations that he confronted Barnsley manager Daniel Stendel and, you know, stuck one on him. The thirty six-year-old has been bailed until 9 October. Barnsley complained to the Football Association and Football League in April about the incident. At the time, South Yorkshire Police also appealed for any witnesses with footage of the incident to come forward.
Stevenage have been fined five thousand smackers after admitting a Football Association charge of sexist chanting towards a female official during a home game in March. About seventy five to one hundred home fans chanted for several minutes as fourth official Lisa Rashid replaced an assistant referee midway through their match with Bury. The League Two game had been chosen as Stevenage's 'women in football' day. Oh, the irony. 'We will impose significant bans on any supporters found guilty of such behaviour,' claimed chairman Phil Wallace. 'Financial penalties really hurt small clubs like ourselves and this is a real blow to us as we fight financially to build a winning team.' Stevenage breached Football Association rule E20, which states 'the club had failed to ensure that its spectators and all persons purporting to be its supporters or followers, conducted themselves in an orderly fashion and refrained from using abusive and/or insulting words which included a reference, whether express or implied to gender, whilst attending a match in which it was involved.' The Hertfordshire club have also been ordered to implement a fifteen-point action plan - though the FA concluded they were 'not at fault' for the behaviour, or the way it was dealt with on the day. The FA say that the chanting against Rashid was 'extremely offensive, both blatantly sexist and in vulgar indecent language.'
Welsh champions The New Saints will bank close to a million quid from European success this season following a win which could also be priceless for domestic rivals. New Saints' three-two aggregate victory over Feronikeli saw them progress to the Champions League second qualifying round to face FC Copenhagen. They are already guaranteed around eight hundred and thirty grand in prize money. But, just as valuable is that Wales should now retain four European places next season. Cardiff Met and Barry Town were both eliminated in the Europa League preliminary rounds. Defeat for TNS could have seen Wales drop in UEFA's coefficient ranking systems that decide how many European competition places are on offer to each domestic league, with Wales under threat of losing one of their Europa League entries. 'I think [our] win has probably ensured Wales keeps all its UEFA spots for next season,' New Saints chairman Mike Harris told BBC Sport Wales. 'I'd like to think the rest of the league was behind us because of that - and certainly there were some nice comments on social media from fans of other teams. As a league we don't want to lose any spots because the cash it brings in to the teams can be paramount.' Saints now face Copenhagen, with the Danish champions visiting Park Hall for the first leg on Thursday 23 July. The New Saints - Welsh Premier League champions for the past eight seasons - could earn a further four hundred thousand knicker if they pull off an unlikely win against a side which includes six current Denmark internationals. 'It was always going to be one of the tougher ties but we're looking forward to it,' Harris said. 'The prize money exceeds our annual playing budget. As a club with all the other things you now need to do with licensing and academy, it ensures we go a long way to breaking even which has to be the aim of every club, to live within their means. I wouldn't say it's a lifeline but it's money that's well needed. We don't attract TV deals or naming right sponsorship like other leagues so it is tough out there. I was speaking to the president of Feronikeli who said their playing budget was 1.6 million Euros, which is nearly three times ours. It's tough but hopefully we can give (Copenhagen) a scare. We're very much underdogs but we always back ourselves at home.'
Connah's Quay Nomads beating Kilmarnock is 'one of the biggest upsets in the history of Europa League' and a 'bigger result' than Barcelona losing four-nil at Liverpool, according to manager Andy Morrison. The Welsh part-timers set up a second qualifying round tie with Partizan Belgrade after a stunning - and completely unexpected - two-nil win at Rugby Park overturned a two-one deficit from the first leg. Six of the Nomads team, who will get home at 5am, had to work on Friday. 'What we've achieved is something quite remarkable,' said Scots-born Morrison. 'You could see for large periods what a good team they are, but we were too savvy and too clever and worked them out. We always believed we'd get a chance and we took them.' Callum Morris' seventy ninth-minute penalty was the decisive goal and came after Ryan Wignall opened the scoring just after the interval. One imagines Kille's new manager, Angelo Alessio, wasn't doing a couple of choruses of The Proclaimers' 'The Joyful Kilmarnock Blues' after that fiasco. It was a third win in Scotland inside ten months for Connah's Quay, who beat both Falkirk and Queen's Park in the Challenge Cup last season before losing to Ross County in March's final. However, the side who finished second in the Welsh Premier League last term and attract an average attendance of around two hundred and seventy, needed a penalty shootout to beat Edinburgh City five months ago. 'I heard some stuff before the game - I think it was the Queens' Park manager who said "it'll be six but I wouldn't be surprised if they get ten,"' Morrison told BBC Scotland. 'There's a little message for them there. You don't write off teams of men. My skipper is thirty seven years old, Michael Wilde is thirty five, but they have the hearts the size of lions and never back down. It's a monumental achievement by them all. The lads are going to get back home at five in the morning, six of them have work tomorrow and then we've got to get ready for Serbia next week.'
The Confederation of African Football president Ahmad is coming under growing pressure as FIFA investigates allegations of impropriety against him. Separately, an investigation by the BBC revealed that Ahmad received two sets of expenses, claiming to be in two different countries, for the same nine-day period during the 2018 World Cup. According to documents seen by the BBC, the FIFA vice-president twice claimed for payments from African football's ruling body, CAF, for work carried out between 23 June and 1 July. First, the documents indicate that he signed for daily allowances which stated he was in Egypt for this period - before later adding his signature to a document alleging he was in Russia at the same time. As a vice-president of football's world governing body, Ahmad should have been paid his daily World Cup allowance of four hundred and fifty dollars by FIFA since they organise the tournament - meaning he may have received three sets of payments for the nine-day spell in question. CAF, whose headquarters are in the Egyptian capital Cairo, had no role in organising the event. 'President Ahmad took [sic] contact with the FIFA administration to support him in its action for CAF's reforms and to get the process more transparent,' CAF replied to BBC Sport in a statement. 'The details of this cooperation will be announced very soon. For now, as the President have [sic] a very deep respect of the institutions, he keeps his answers for FIFA's teams, which will lead the future audit.' In June, FIFA and CAF announced that FIFA will install its own Secretary General to 'oversee administrative reform' in the governance of African football's ruling body from 1 August. The decision to appoint Senegalese Fatma Samoura as a General Delegate to CAF is unprecedented in the one hundred and fifteen-year history of FIFA, which has never had recourse before to take over the administration of a confederation. Ahmad, who took charge of African football in March 2017, is currently being investigated by both FIFA's Ethics Committee and by French anti-corruption authorities - with an unusual kit deal involving a French gym equipment supplier among the lines of inquiry. The fifty nine-year-old from Madagascar, whose organisation is currently hosting the Africa Cup of Nations in Egypt, has strenuously denied any and all wrongdoing in previous statements. In early June 2018, Ahmad travelled to Moscow to attend both the FIFA Congress on 13 June and the World Cup, which ran between 14 June and 11 July. Documents seen by the BBC indicate that Ahmad flew from Russia to Egypt on 23 June for a four-day stay before heading back to Moscow after a trip home to Madagascar between 27 June and 1 July. Nonetheless, the documents suggest that, on 28 September last year, Ahmad collected over eighteen thousand dollars from CAF for a forty one-day stay in Russia between 7 June and 17 July. His signature can be seen at the bottom of a page detailing the expenses, which came under the heading 'Mission: World Cup Russia 2018.' Three weeks earlier, on 9 September, Ahmad had collected four thousand and fifty bucks from CAF for a nine-day period between 23 June and 1 July, which came under the heading 'Visit to CAF Bureau'. The BBC states that Ahmad 'may have been in neither Egypt nor Russia for the period 27 June to 1 July but in Madagascar,' as documents suggest he 'intended to travel home at that time.' The BBC specifically asked Ahmad and CAF if it could confirm or deny that he was in the island nation at the time but received no response in the statement it was given. Nor did FIFA answer a question about whether it paid Ahmad for work undertaken on behalf of FIFA in Qatar between 23 and 25 October 2018. Despite travelling to the host nation of the next World Cup on behalf of FIFA - with these expenses labelled 'Mission FIFA - Qatar' on a CAF document - it appears that Ahmad claimed expenses, amounting to thirteen hundred and fifty dollars from the African football body once again. Shortly after taking charge of CAF in March 2017, Ahmad told the BBC that he would not be taking a salary from CAF 'for the simple reason it doesn't respect good administration. The salaries of all CAF employees, from administrators to the executive committee and president, all have to be transparent,' he said in May 2017. The BBC also revealed that just two months later, Ahmad agreed to receive a monthly salary of forty grand, amounting to some four hundred and eighty thousand dollars per year, with an annual bonus of eighty thousand dollars. While this figure may have been determined by Executive Committee members without his input, Ahmad did not reject the salary nor did he make it public. Ironically, the man whom Ahmad displaced - Issa Hayatou - had gone without a salary for most of his twenty nine-year reign. The Cameroonian, who ruled CAF with an iron fist, took charge in 1988 but only accepted a salary, equivalent to thirty thousand dollars per month, in July 2016 - just eight months before the end of his decades-long rule. He had however received a 'representational payment,' which had grown to ninety thousand dollars per year by the time he left office. Ahmad, who took charge of CAF in March 2017, has two years left of his four-year term.
The Football Association is to appeal against the six-week suspension and seventy five grand fine handed out to Daniel Sturridge for breaching its betting rules. It believes the former Liverpool Alabama Yee-Haws striker deserves at least a six-month ban having been found extremely guilty by a regulatory commission of giving his brother inside information on a possible move to Sevilla. Sturridge's six-week suspension from all domestic matches came into effect on Wednesday. The former England international is currently without a club following his release by Liverpool and, with the final four weeks of the ban suspended, will be free to resume his career from 31 July. He will, therefore, not miss any competitive football unless he breaches betting rules again. The FA charged the striker with misconduct in November 2018 and, according to the Gruniad Morning Star, 'expected a more severe punishment for a guilty verdict. The authority has announced it will appeal against the independent body's findings and has informed Sturridge's legal team of its intentions. A date for the appeal has not been set. It confirmed in a statement: 'The FA respectfully disagrees with the regulatory commission's findings and will be appealing against the charges which were dismissed and the sanction which was imposed.' In the published findings of the hearing - some of which are redacted - the FA states: 'A sanction of any shorter duration than six months would wholly fail to reflect the gravity of the case.' Sturridge was cleared of nine of the eleven charges he faced relating to his transfer from Anfield in January 2018. On two accounts, however, he was found to have told his brother, Leon, to bet on a possible move to Sevilla. The club were ultimately unable to agree the terms of a loan deal with Liverpool and Sturridge joined West Bromwich Albinos until the end of the 2017-18 season. In the event Sturridge played only six times for the Albinos between February and May 2018 without scoring a single goal. Leon Sturridge did not put on the Sevilla bet. Another relative, Anthon Walters, lost ten grand betting that Sturridge would join Internazionale who, along with this blogger's beloved (though unsellable) Newcastle, were also interested in signing the forward. When Inter's interest emerged Sturridge's uncle and agent, Dean, allegedly messaged him to say: 'Fuck it, stay out of squad.' Sturridge responded: 'Cool with me.' Liverpool beat Sheikh Yer Man City four-three at Anfield two days after the exchange without Sturridge in the squad. The total sum wagered by people directly or indirectly connected to Sturridge was over thirteen grand returning then thousand seven hundred and sixty two knicker and fifty six pee. There were attempts to place a further twenty thousand five hundred and sixty smackers worth of bets on his potential transfers in January 2018 but these were refused by betting companies. If accepted - and successful - they would have returned an extra three hundred thousand notes. Sturridge, who denied all the charges, said it was 'extremely disappointing' to learn of the FA's appeal and that he would 'defend his position.' He described the past fifteen months as 'very tough' and added: 'I am pleased that nine of the eleven charges were dismissed and that the panel found me to be an honest and credible witness and that my actions on one particularly difficult day were out of character.' The FA's findings do describe Sturridge as 'an impressive and credible witness' but also claim he gave 'a misleading account' when first interviewed about his brother's betting and of his knowledge of it. The FA's statement said: 'Sturridge faced eleven charges. Nine of those charges concerned alleged breaches of the inside information rule, in that, it was said, Mister Sturridge had provided inside information to friends and family about his possible transfer moves in January 2018, which information had then been used for, or in relation to, betting. Those charges were dismissed by the regulatory commission. The regulatory commission found proved charges three and four, which alleged that, in that same transfer window, Mister Sturridge had instructed his brother, Leon, to bet on a possible move by [Daniel] to Sevilla FC. In issuing that instruction, the regulatory commission found that, as a matter of fact, Mister Sturridge had provided his brother with inside information for that purpose.' Sturridge has been training this summer in Los Angeles, where he has a home. The former Moscow Chelski FC and Sheikh Yer Man City striker has interest from clubs in the United States, China, several European teams and Premier League suitors including Aston Villains.
Once, his many lick-ass friends in Fleet Street were pushing his case to be the next England manager. But, Roy Hodgson got the gig instead. Now, the only jobs that Hapless Harry Redknapp can get are some crap adverts and opening a toilet block in Bournemouth which had been closed for five years. 'Scores of residents gathered outside the facilities yesterday morning as the King of the Jungle arrived to pose for photographs and sign autographs before cutting the ribbon and unveiling a plaque,' the Bournemouth Daily Echo reports. Hardly surprising; one imagines that most of them were bustin' for a slash after five years.
