This blogger's beloved (though unsellable) Newcastle United moved ten points clear of the relegation zone and up to twelfth place in the Premier League after an entertaining win over Southampton at St James' Park thanks to Ayoze Pérez's first hat-trick for the club. This blogger was already fairly certain that United were going to have a good day when, on Saturday morning, he spotted a tiding of Magpies (well ... two of them, anyway), looking for worms in the garden of Stately Telly Topping Manor. One for sorrow, two for joy and all that. Liverpool Alabama Yee-Haws subsequent win at Cardiff City on Sunday meant that - with three games remaining - this blogger's bonny Magpies are now mathematically safe. Which was nice. Ralph Hasenhüttl's Saints survived a second-minute appeal for a penalty after Pierre-Emile Højbjerg appeared to handle in the area but, much to Rafa Benítez's chagrin, referee Anthony Taylor, waved away appeals. If Newcastle's manager was mildly irked about that, he must have been downright disgusted, appalled, shocked and stunned when James Ward-Prowse escaped with a yellow card after a horribly cynical and nasty body-check on a rapidly counter-attacking Miguel Almirón. Considering that Ward-Prowse was the only remaining marker between the Paraguayan and Angus Gunn's goal, everyone wearing black and white was convinced it was the denial of a clear-cut goal-scoring opportunity and an automatic red card. Given that the bodycheck was so blatant it was arguably worthy of a dismissal in and of itself and there was a real sense of justice being done when Pérez scored two goals in quick succession to put Th' Toon in charge at the break. However, Southampton have also been playing well and they were transformed after half-time, substitute Mario Lemina coolly slotting on to halve The Magpies' lead. After Ki Sung-yueng hit the post for United and Angus Gunn pulled off an outstanding save from Isaac Hayden - and despite losing Almirón and Fabian Schär to injury - Pérez wrapped up the points for Benitez's side. The victory leaves Newcastle with forty one points from thirty four games. Pérez had scored four in his last seven homes games as well as the winner at Leicester last weekend and he continued his fine run of form with a superbly taken hat-trick. His first was a perfectly placed clipped shot, kissing the inside of the far post after Hayden had won the ball back in midfield. He followed that up two minutes later as his determination to meet Salomón Rondón's low cross ahead of Ryan Bertrand bought him a second goal. He completed his hat-trick with four minutes left, poaching a close range header after Matt Ritchie had bravely dived in to win a Southampton clearance. Pérez now has ten Premier League goals this season, the first Newcastle player to do so since Georginio Wijnaldum in 2016. Pérez's burgeoning confidence crowned a strong performance from Newcastle who, after a tenth place finish last season, are chasing down the top-half of the table once again.
Elsewhere, Sheikh Yer Man City returned to the top of the Premier League table on Saturday while Brighton & Hove Albinos inched further away from the relegation zone. Phil Foden's goal gave City victory over Stottingtot Hotshots in the early kick-off to send Pep Guardiola's side one point clear of title rivals Liverpool Alabama Yee-Haws. Brighton ended a run of four successive defeats with an unsurprisingly unadventurous goalless draw at Wolves. It moved The Seagulls three points above eighteenth-placed Cardiff. Brighton had goalkeeper Mat Ryan - who played an impressive holding role behind the back ten - to thank for a string of fine saves at Molineux, where the draw meant hosts Wolves slipped to ninth place. Aleksandar Mitrović scored from the spot as already relegated Fulham won at Bournemouth - their first away win of a horrible season for The Cottagers - while Gerard Deulofeu netted twice as Watford saw off bottom side Huddersfield. The Terriers' defeat means that they have now lost fourteen home Premier League games this season, a joint record in the competition's history with Blunderland in 2002-03 and 2005-06. Harvey Barnes grabbed a point for Leicester in an entertaining two-two draw at West Hamsters United, after Lucas Perez had put the Hammers in front with ten minutes to go. Michail Antonio had headed in for the hosts in the first half, before Jamie Vardy's neat finish pulled The Foxes level. On Sunday, Everton gave The Scum a pants-down twanking at Goodison Park, a four-nil thrashing which saw in an incandescent, red-faced Gary Neville on Sky Sports using the words 'shameful,' 'rotten,' 'rancid' and 'embarrassing' in the same sentence and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer issuing a grovelling public apology to The Scum's supporters. So, that was funny. Later, Liverpool's two-nil win at Cardiff left Whinging Neil Wazzcock's Bluebirds mired deep in the relegation clarts. Crystal Palace continued their recent fine form with a three-two win up The Arse.
Incidentally, dear blog reader, this blogger - as he has made clear on many previous occasions on this blog - has what he believes to be a good understanding of the way in which the universe laws of karma can have a way of coming back and biting one, hard, on the arse in relation to football. Very much a case in point; at the start of this current season this blogger's beloved Newcastle had an appalling run of results which meant that, after ten games, they were rock bottom of the Premier League with but three points (gained from three goalless draws). The fact that six of those ten games had been against Sheikh Yer Man City, Liverpool Alabama Yee-Haws, Stottingtot Hotshots, The Arse, The Scum and Moscow Chelski FC did not seem to factor into much ill-informed media and Interweb speculation relating to The Magpies' chances of hauling themselves clear of the drop zone. Rafa The Gaffer, at the time, noted that the Premier League is a marathon rather than a sprint but still, in those dark days of late September and early October 2018, one would have been hard-pressed to find many outside of the Greater Tyneside area who didn't have Th' Toon marked down as bankers for the drop. At the same time, this blogger was being bombarded by some, frankly, sneering posts from a - now extremely former - Facebook fiend who wanted to know what Rafa The Gaffer had been playing it at in selling Aleksandar Mitrović to the now former Facebook fiend's own team, Fulham. 'Mitro is our hero,' this individual crowed. 'We can't understand why you let him go.' Six months later and with Fulham about to return to the second tier with but six wins all season and a total of a mere thirty three goals scored (and seventy six conceded) the time is, perhaps, now appropriate to conclude that one man does not make a team. And, that if you're going to have a right sneer about how great your own side are at the expense of someone else, it is probably an idea to wait until towards the end of the season when you're mathematically safe before doing so. The actual reason that Mitrović was sold, of course, at least in part was because he had developed a nasty habit of getting himself suspended - usually for crass and violent off-the-ball incidents - at times when Newcastle could least afford to lose one of the few fit strikers they had available to them. Rafa, to be brutal, seem to feel he could not longer trust Mitrović. Subsequent events suggest he may well have been correct in that assessment.
As the grim spectacle unfolded in San Marino last month - a performance so utterly awful that even the captain Andy Robertson described it as 'rock bottom' - the Scotland fans, already bruised and battered from the calamity in Kazakhstan a few days earlier, started to crank up their anger, from good old fashioned booing to something more vitriolic. They went after the board of the Scottish FA, demanding, rather optimistically, that they all be fired. Mainly, though, their thunder was reserved for Alex McLeish, the beleaguered manager at the heart of another horror-show. 'You're getting sacked in the morning!' the fans hollered. In fact, it took a further twenty eight days before McLeish ultimately left his position. After twelve games in fourteen months featuring forty nine different players and an incalculable amount of negative comment, McLeish this week ifnally lost his job. At some point, soon, some of the same people who tried to appoint Michael O'Neill, whom they reportedly couldn't afford, before turning frantically to Walter Smith, whose patience they exhausted and who then gave the job to McLeish, will appoint a ninth Scotland manager of the millennium. It's fair to say that supporter faith in their judgment headed South a long time ago. Currently, it's residing somewhere in Antarctica. Poor performances did for McLeish, but there was more to it than that, more than mere losses which chipped away at his credibility. Controversial formations, mass player defections, odd pre and post-match comments - it all unravelled quickly. The be fair McLeish needed to be remarkable to win over the doubters from day one, the fans who never wanted him in the first place because he walked out on the Scotland job previously, because his recent track record in club management was poor, because he was seen as an unambitious and uninspired choice by a board - Alan McRae, the president, in particular - who seemed to be putting the appointment of an old pal ahead of the national interest. McLeish did not deserve to be left dangling in uncertainty for the past month - Scottish FA prevarication did him no favours - but there could only have been one sensible conclusion to this who fiasco. The last shred of faith in his ability to take the team forward - and to take advantage of the red carpet to Euro 2020 that is the Nations League - had run out. It was an unhappy fourteen months, pockmarked by bitterness, rancour and suspicion. Before his first game, at home to Costa Rica, McLeish said that he wanted his team to play with the kind of swagger they had in his first incarnation as Scotland manager. They were booed off after a one-nil defeat. In fairness to McLeish, he was never slow in giving players a chance, partly because he had no choice given all the call-offs he experienced. In that Costa Rica game, he gave debuts to Scott McKenna and Scott McTominay. Getting the Manchester United player on board might yet be seen as McLeish's biggest legacy. He won his second game, against Hungary, but then the grim decision-making of his employers conspired against him. An end-of-season trek to Peru and Mexico was needed like a firm kick to the knackers. Key players withdrew in rapid order. Against Peru, McLeish gave debuts to seven players - Lewis Stevenson, Lewis Morgan, Chris Cadden and Dylan McGeouch among them. They lost two-nil to a team readying itself for the World Cup. It finished one-nil against Mexico - another side finishing preparations for the party in Russia. Given the ridiculously trying circumstances, the results were actually quite credible, but they were damaging at the same time. Those two defeats added to the greyness around the Scotland squad. What McLeish could have done with next was a gimme, a handy friendly to boost the morale, not just of his players but of the support. He desperately needed to win them over. What he got was a game against Belgium - the third-best side in the world at the time - and a thumping four-nil loss at Hampden. Four defeats in five games and just one goal scored. Only twenty thousand punters turned up to watch. As was to be so often the case, McLeish didn't exactly help himself before that Belgium game when he said his team were 'good enough to go toe-to-toe' with Eden Hazard and co. Nobody believed him when he said it. It made him look silly when the World Cup semi-finalists, unsurprisingly, took his team to the cleaners whilst barely getting out of first gear. Only then - in September 2018 - did McLeish get his first competitive game, a Nations League tie at home to Albania which Scotland won two-nil. It was a decent performance albeit against a desperately poor side. Perhaps the most revealing thing that night, though, was the size of the crowd - fewer than eighteen thousand. 'I'm building a wall, not papering cracks,' McLeish said. Saying that was all very well so long as people can see the blocks being put in place. A month later, they collapsed to a two-one loss in Israel, a nation with a world ranking that was fifty five places below Scotland. McLeish lost John Souttar to a red card after an hour, but they were in all sorts of trouble even before he exited. The scoreline did not flatter Israel who had only on win in their previous ten games. The only teams they had beaten in their own stadium in four years were Liechtenstein and Andorra. Scotland, frankly, made them look like France. By now the ire of the fans was being directed at the Scottish FA as much as it was at McLeish. They flew the team to Israel the day before the game, then experienced a delayed flight which saw McLeish having to hold a training session at 10.30pm local time. The logistics off the field were almost as wretched as the performances on it. McLeish was getting pelted with flak for persisting with his three-five-two formation, a square-pegs-in-round-holes set-up which made the team looked utterly perplexed as to what they were supposed to be doing. In the aftermath of the Israel loss, a BBC Scotland poll asked if the defeat was the biggest embarrassment in the history of the national team - thirty eight per cent of responders said that it was. Those grey clouds had turned black when Portugal turned up in Glasgow and strolled to a three-one win with what was, effectively, a B-team. It was a sixth defeat in eight games for McLeish in front of a half-empty Hampden. Once more, McLeish was left defending the players who had cried off. Robert Snodgrass, Matt Ritchie, James McArthur and Tom Cairney - one hundred and twenty four appearances between them in the English Premier League this season - disappeared off the Scotland radar. If they did not want to play, why? If they did want to play, then where were they? There was brief respite when Scotland, inspired by James Forrest, won four-nil in Albania before beating Israel three-two at Hampden to top their Nations League group. Even then, though, it was not straightforward. Scotland played pretty well but, in the dying minutes, Allan McGregor had to make a magnificent save from a Tomer Hemed volley to secure the victory. Had Hemed scored, Scotland would have been out of the Nations League and the cries for McLeish to be out of his job would have been deafening. It was only postponing the inevitable. Scotland went to Kazakhstan without some important players, most notably Kieran Tierney, Robertson and Ryan Fraser. It was a footballing Armageddon. Kazakhstan were ranked one hundred and seventeenth in the FIFA rankings, but they were two-nil ahead inside ten minutes and added a third later. Once again a new historic low had been reached. McLeish incredulously claimed that Scotland had 'started the game brightly,' a jaw-dropping suggestion given that his team were two-down so early on. It was another bewildering comment in a long line of them. It provoked anger but then, anger gave way to indifference and apathy. The fans had simply had enough. San Marino was the point of no return, a hopelessly laboured win against the worst team in international football. It was a nervous and timid performance, another day that screamed of the need for a new direction. Now, it is over for McLeish, but having seen him as the solution when so many things told you he wasn't, there will be anxiety about who these people at Hampden come up with next.
Fleetwood Town manager - and arch nutter - Joey Barton says that he 'emphatically denies' allegations he assaulted Barnsley boss Daniel Stendel. Police are currently investigating an alleged tunnel altercation after Barnsley's League One win at Oakwell last Saturday. A man was subsequently arrested on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence and racially aggravated assault. He was released on bail. Police did not name the individual involved and, frankly, most people were completely in the dark as this person's identity. Barnsley later complained to the Football Association and English Football League about the alleged incident. After the game, Barnsley player Cauley Woodrow claimed on Twitter that Stendel had been 'physically assaulted' and left with 'blood pouring from his face.' Woodrow later deleted the tweet. In a statement issued on Thursday, Barton said: 'With regards to the alleged incident on Saturday following our game against Barnsley, I emphatically deny the allegations made.' He said it would be 'inappropriate' to make any further comment at this time. The arrested man attended a police station on Wednesday and has been bailed until May. South Yorkshire Police have appealed for any witnesses with footage of the incident to come forward. They said: 'Officers investigating the incident would be keen to speak to anyone who may have caught the incident on camera or who may have mobile phone footage immediately before or after the incident occurred. We would ask members of the media and the public to refrain from speculation in relation to this incident, as it could potentially harm the investigation.'
Millions of punters are reportedly using 'easy-to-guess passwords' on sensitive accounts, a study has suggested. The analysis by the UK's National Cyber Security Centre found '123456' was the most widely-used password on breached accounts. The study helped to uncover the 'gaps in cyber-knowledge' which could leave people 'in danger of being exploited.' The NCSC said that people should string three random but memorable words together to use as a strong password. Much as this blogger does with 'moist', 'lugubrious' and 'floccinaucinihilipilification'. Oh ... did Keith Telly Topping just say that out loud? Forget those three words, dear blog reader. Please. For its first cyber-survey, the NCSC analysed public databases of breached accounts to see which words, phrases and strings people used. Top of the list was '123456', appearing in more than twenty three million passwords. The second-most popular string, '123456789', was not much harder to crack, while others in the top five included 'qwerty', 'password' and '1111111'. The most common name to be used in passwords was 'Ashley', followed by 'Michael', 'Daniel', 'Jessica' and 'Charlie'. When it comes to Premier League football teams in guessable passwords, 'Liverpool Alabama Yee-Haws' are champions and 'Moscow Chelski FC' second. 'Blink-182' topped the charts of music acts. People who use well-known words or names for a password put themselves people at risk of being hacked, said Doctor Ian Levy, technical director of the NCSC. Whose own password, if you're wondering, is 'iknowwhatimtalkingabout01'. Probably. 'Nobody should protect sensitive data with something that can be guessed, like their first name, local football team or favourite band,' he said. The NCSC study also asked people about their security habits and fears. It found that forty two per cent of respondents 'expected to lose money' to online fraud and only fifteen per cent said they felt confident that they knew enough to protect themselves online. It found that 'fewer than half' of those questioned used a separate, hard-to-guess password for their main e-mail account. Security 'expert' Troy Hunt, who maintains a database of hacked account data, said that picking a good password was the 'single biggest control' people had over their online security. 'We typically haven't done a very good job of that either as individuals or as the organisations asking us to register with them,' he said. Letting people know which passwords were widely used should drive users to make better choices, he claimed. The survey was published ahead of the NCSC's Cyber UK conference that will be held in Glasgow from 24 to 25 April.
