IT will be an L of a start to the Premier League after our mid-winter break - Leicester and Leeds. However following rapidly on the heels of what we hope will not be a Christmas hangover is the opening of the January transfer window and, boy, does that get the juices flowing.
Most Newcastle fans with one eye on the World Cup finals are also looking elsewhere and speculating on what United will do next. The new regime have been fab when wielding the cheque book but with the transfer market always something of a lottery where you back your hunches can the run of success be continued?
Kieran Trippier, Bruno Guimaraes, Dan Burn, Nick Pope, Sven Botman. The Fab Five. Alexander Isak still to really arrive at sixty million notes of course. On we go. The proposed names are endless. Of course they are.
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Please, however, do not foist upon us one of the greatest players ever to walk the soil of this planet. Cristiano Ronaldo is up there jostling for position with the likes of Pele, Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff, Alfredo Di Stefano, Ferenc Puskas, George Best, and Lionel Messi but I want not one of them. Why? Every sell-by date is well gone including those still lacing on boots.
Ronaldo is 37 for goodness sake. His ego does not allow him to see the facts. No player, even those great and gifted, can defy time however much they have looked after themselves physically. Ronaldo is not who he was. Will someone tell him?
He cannot press like Newcastle do. He is not a team player either in the dressing-room or on the field. He is not bigger than anyone at NUFC even if he believes otherwise. He would destroy everything that Eddie Howe has carefully built up.
If the world's most famous unemployed person is destined to pocket Saudi gold let it be from one of their prominent clubs and not from the owners of Newcastle.
I care not what Piers Morgan and Roy Keane think. Ronaldo was fabulous but is now due to the passing of time a shell of the man he was.
I remember being told quite a while back by an over enthusiast football follower that a Magpie winger of that time was as good as Tom Finney.
"Maybe," I replied, "but Finney is 75!"
Surely we have learned what mistakes have taught us. Ian Rush and John Barnes were two of the finest players ever to wear the Liverpool red but by the time their old mate Kenny Dalglish signed them for United they were miles past their peak.
Other examples? Patrick Kluivert was no longer the superstar he once was and Michael Owen had lost a crucial yard in pace and a load in desire by the time he was shuttled out of Real Madrid.
There are not many like Kieran Trippier who has carried relentless plusses into his thirties. Peter Beardsley of old most certainly but not many.
We not only reject Ronaldo but anyone like him. This is not about signing fading marquee names but those who can unerringly move United forward.
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