Ton-up Pardew still has work to do

100 games in charge for Pardew. Alan Pardew celebrated his 100th game in charge of Newcastle United last night with a much needed win over struggling Aston Villa.

However if you look at his record during his time at United you will see there is still plenty of room for improvement for the former Reading, West Ham and Southampton manager.

The stats will show that Alan Pardew has guided his team to victory on 37 occasions, overseen defeat in 36 matches with the other 27 fixtures ending in a draw leaving his with a winning percentage of 37%. I'm not going to compare his winning percentage to different former United managers as we're in different times with very different circumstances to previous managers.

Just to give a quick example, people will instantly drag up Chris Hughton and his record without mentioning that the vast majority of his games were played in the second tier of football. Kevin Keegan also has the benefit of playing some games in the second tier. It's hard to compare different people, different personnel, different owners and different times using just a statistic.

In defence of Pardew though, even thought the stats aren't that good, there have been mitigating circumstances. I'm not making excuses for the man as he is perfectly capable of doing that himself, but the things that stick our for me are having to play for half a season without a striker thanks to the sale of Andy Carroll, plus there is this season where a bit of motivation from the board in the summer would have seen us higher up the league than what we sit currently.

However this isn't purely a defence of Pardew and there are many areas where he can improve upon. It's just important to remember that he can only really work with what he is dealt and I have the feeling that will be the same for any manager that is employed under Mike Ashley.

Certain tactical decisions have left me wondering what is going on and some substitutions have been worrying, but then I don't proclaim to be a tactics guru like most other people seem to be and I've not played Football Manager in years so perhaps it's just something I'm not seeing. They are the kind if decisions that get praised when they work and the team is winning but get questioned when circumstances are reversed.

So in summary his first 100 games aren't bad, but there is definite room for improvement which will hopefully come now we have a squad with some quality and depth in it.

This team has potential, it's now up to Pardew to help realise it.