All quiet on the North Eastern Front

With two days to go until pre-season training begins for our Championship season, there is depressingly little news coming out of St James Park.

With Hughton and Calderwood reportedly taking charge of pre-season, and with only Owen, Lovenkrands, Viduka and Edgar so far out the door, there really is precious little to report.

What's frustrating in all of this is that there is still no news on the sale of the club, no news on the appointment of a manager and no progress on signing any players to boost our promotion prospects, it remains a fairly depressing state of affairs. Hopefully the next few days might see some progress on the sale of the club (from which surely everything else will flow), but as things stand it's a pretty grim start to what could be a long hard season ahead.