Update: The official site now confirms that Pancrate has signed a deal that will see him spend the rest of the season at Newcastle with an option to extend.

When Barry Moat‘s Newcastle United takeover bid failed, a lot of supporters feared that without money to invest in players, we’d struggle to add to our already depleted squad. The current Newcastle squad is probably just good enough to get out of the Championship, but without further investment, it’s looking bleak for our future Premier League survival.

One thing that we’ve lacked this season is pace. Only Lovenkrands possesses any kind of natural speed, and in games where other teams shut up shop, a burst of speed can often make the difference. Fortunately, a French bloke called Fabrice Pancrate looks like he’s got bags of pace, which Chris Hughton has certainly picked up on during training and Pancrate’s debut against Hartlepool reserves earlier in the week.

Hopefully this deal can go through, and Hughton has gone on record saying he’d make a decision by the end of this week, so it looks like we’ll find out soon enough.

The Telegraph are reporting today that a takeover bid, led by Tyneside businessman Barry Moat is close to completion.

Unfortunately, there are no sources or quotes that are directly attributable to anyone, so we have to consider this latest piece of ‘news’ regarding Newcastle’s takeover like we have done with all the other ‘close to completion’ news – it’s a load of bollocks until we know otherwise.