As a Newcastle United fan, I’m used to our local paper — the Evening Chronicle — churning out this sort of information. But as I’ve criticised this in the past for linking us with fifty-three different players and when we eventually sign one, triumphantly announcing “we told you first” — conveniently ignoring the 52 times they were wrong — I’ve been delighted to uncover an even less reliable source of information.

This is known as the Sky Sports Rumour Room, where people are supposed to send in the latest transfer rumours they have heard, only it appears to be a mix of existing transfer speculation mixed in with local rivalry, wishful thinking, and complete and utter bollocks.

And obviously, I’ve been having fun with it…

Looking at Jermaine Beckford — currently at Leeds United, 26, linked a lot with Newcastle recently, out of contract at the end of the season, untried above League One — what have people heard he’s up to? (remember, this is supposed to be rumours not “fantasy transfer window”)…

(Rumours all as at 12th January)

So firstly, I’d like to offer my congratulations to Jermaine Beckford, for having been responsible for 1/6th of all transfer rumours — that’s quite an astonishing return for a league one player. However, he is obviously remarkably busy, having managed trips to Newcastle, London and Glasgow all in one day. Unless one or more of these sources is telling porky pies, of course…

It’s obviously noticeable that he’s previously been linked with Newcastle, so anyone linking him with Newcastle — unless they have anything new to add — is just regurgitating existing gossip. On the other hand, the fact that virtually everyone (with the exception of Leeds fans) who talk about him seem to want him to sign for their club (I particularly like the ‘barcodes out of the running’ which suggests that the person knows something, followed by the impassioned plea ‘come to a big club with ambition’ which then suggests the person hasn’t got the foggiest what Beckford’s plans are after all).

But some of the funniest bits are people who obviously don’t know the details of a particular player, yet aren’t going to let that deter them from. There’s the people (#14, #19, #23 –who seemed to feel that selling a player out of contract in 5 months would finance about seven signings, #25) who seem to think someone is likely to pay over £3.5 million for a player they could get in the summer for free (over 24, will be out of contract). At least do some research before making up blatant transfer bollocks.

Although on that note, the best one I saw doesn’t involve Jermaine Beckford at all. It’s this one, from a Sunderland fan–

My uncle works at the stadium of light and he said that bruce might be taking in 3 players such as a £3 million spending on mario melchiot. A £4 million transfer for Hull city’s Hunt, and a end of season loan to buy for LA Galaxy striker Donavan.

Hmm. The only LA Galaxy striker with a name like that I can think of is Landon Donovan, but he signed for Everton last week. If your uncle does work at the Stadium of Light, I really hope he’s not part of their scouting team, otherwise Steve Bruce is in trouble…

But I also like the people who add the words “(RELIABLE SOURCES)” or “FACT!” to their blatant nonsense, just so people know that it must be true, because it’s not actually possible to write that sort of thing if you’re lying. I think. Unless it’s just that writing FACT! makes it come true. So I’ll just leave you with a rumour I recently heard…

Newcastle United will sign Jermaine Beckford, Matthew Kilgallon, Cesc Fabregas and Kaka, all funded by the £1.4 billion Real Madrid will pay us for Kazenga Lua Lua… and I’ll win the Euromillions. FACT!

In fact, I think this would be a good thing for every football club. Putting rivalries aside for a moment, in general fans have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the directors of their respective clubs. Basically, fans are treated as a cash cow for the club to milk by whatever revenue stream necessary (TV, gate money, merchandise) in order to ensure that the club makes a profit to pay large sums of money to players, directors and shareholders.

Okay, it doesn’t always work that way, but who wouldn’t prefer to see their club run by the fans, for the fans?

And that’s why, despite being a little sceptical that they would be able to raise the amounts of money required, I’ve been firmly behind NUST up to now. Until what I can only see as misinformation coming out of their mouths at the expense of Mike Ashley.

I’m not a fan of Mike Ashley: I don’t see that he has the best interests of the club at heart, and I’m sure he’ll sell up as soon as he finds someone who will meet his asking price. But that’s precisely why this information coming from NUST looks completely bonkers. If I give them the benefit of the doubt and say that it’s not deliberate misinformation, then it looks like stupidity… and frankly neither of them look particularly good for someone who thinks that they would be able to run the club better and more openly.

What they said was this:

sources have told us that Mr Ashley is making up to £7m profit out of our club every monthNUST: Supporter Survey

Note that they’ve chosen to include the quote (they could easily have skipped it if they felt it was nonsense) — so either they attach credence to the sources or at very least they want the reader to — and they’ve associated it with a survey suggesting that the fans should buy the club from him.

If Mike Ashley was making £84 million pounds per year out of the club, do you really think he’d have tried to sell it only six months ago for around £100 million? There may be better businessmen out there, but I can’t imagine he’d want to sell an asset for only a tiny smidge more than it makes in profit per year.

In the Premiership (when we were making considerably more in TV money), the club had a turnover of £100 million, with £73 million on wages. That year, the club made a loss of £34 million (source: The Guardian, Jan 2009). This means that the other outgoings of the club were around £60 million.

Now, even if you were to assume that all club outgoings were down by two-thirds (a frankly ridiculous scenario), and that income was exactly the same (again, nonsense), then Newcastle would still not be making £7 million per month.

By allowing this sort of information to be associated with their cause without any justification (fine, if they’ve got figures to back up this level of profit, but it seems extraordinary so I’m not going to accept it on their say-so), NUST have made exactly the same false assumption about the credulity of Newcastle supporters that many others have made in the past — and they’ve pretty much destroyed their credibility in the process.

Of course, if they can back up this claim, then I’ll apologise…

But I’m more inclined to believe what I read from the independent NUFC Finances site, which looked into published finances:

A year ago the comment on this site was “In summary what Shepherd left was a club that was losing over £30m a year, had debts of £70m, had no assets they could borrow more money against, and had a set of players on long, lucrative contracts. Ashley can get rid of the debt but the £30m annual losses with over paid players will take longer to sort out.”NUFC Finances

NUST have a lot of explaining to do if they want to regain any credibility. And may I suggest that one of the first things they do — unless, as I said, they can back up that quote — is to apologise to Mike Ashley. He might have done many things wrong, but without him the club would be in a much bigger financial hole.

If you sound bitter, it sounds very much like — as Baldrick would say — “a bag of grapefruits to me”. And it also makes me glad that you didn’t win, because if you’re such a bad sport, then maybe either you’re not fit to take part in such a contest, or you’re an arrogant son-of-a-bitch who is expects to win, and therefore needs to be spoonfed a whole heap of humility through a few defeats (the heavier the better).

And that’s one of the reasons that I’m delighted Rage Against The Machine got the Christmas number one. Additional reasons would include that I don’t like the X-factor, I don’t like being forced to listen to whichever good singer (because let’s be fair, they are) meets with Simon Cowell’s approval this year (I like musicians who can play instruments, instead) and also I like Rage Against The Machine.

And, whilst I’m happy — for obvious reasons — that Newcastle beat Middlesbrough yesterday, Gordon Strachan’s post match comments have made me even happier about it. I’d always had a lot of time for Gordon as a manager, and I accept he’s under pressure at the moment, having managed to accumulate only 0.67 points per game in his 9 games so far, as opposed to the manager he replaced who was managing a 1.77 per game over 13 games which was not deemed good enough. So yeah, I’d say he’s under pressure.

But really, if you can’t be gracious in defeat (and in victory), then you shouldn’t be allowed to play the game. My kids would be told off if they had a temper tantrum just because they didn’t get their own way and maybe someone ought to have a word with these people. Just have a read of these quotes and tell me how sour, exactly, their grapes appear to be:

SIMON COWELL has blasted the campaign to get RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE to the festive top spot – branding its supporters “a hate mob”. He says the Facebook crusade to keep this year’s X Factor winner from being the Christmas No1 is akin to bullying.The Sun

This — and the next statement — were both before the winner was announced. Simon, Cheryl, if you can’t stand the heat, you know what you have to do…

I cannot bear to see him lose out to a mean campaign that has nothing to do with his efforts. If that song, or should I say campaign, by an American group is our Christmas No 1 I’ll be gutted for him and our charts.Cheryl Cole, quoted in The Guardian

I particularly like the Cheryl quote, coming as it does with slight overtones of jingoism bordering on racism. Bloody foreigners, coming over here, taking our Christmas number ones…

I don’t recall her complaining about any other non-Brit being top of the charts at any other time, so I can’t help but wonder whether there’s perhaps more to it than she’s suggesting.

And then contrast that with Joe McEddery, who was the one who actually came second in the Christmas chart battle:

McElderry, 18, praised the campaign, adding: “It’s been exciting to be part of a much-hyped battle and they definitely deserve congratulations. [...] This time last year I never thought for one minute that I’d win The X Factor, never mind about having a debut single out, so I’m just delighted to be in the charts.BBC News: Rage Against The Machine Beat X Factor In Charts

That is how to lose graciously. Good luck for the rest of your career, Joe.

But back to those ungracious bastards. Middlesbrough lost to Newcastle yesterday. During the game, Alan Smith of Newcastle was forced off by injury after being repeatedly fouled by Boro players; later on in the game, Pogatetz clearly handled the ball in the penalty area, denying Newcastle a third goal.

Yet did Gordon Strachan see these things as “evening themselves out over the course of a season” (or even possibly a match, in this case?). Well obviously not.

Everyone agrees there was a blatant shove in the back in the build up to the goal. That is what happens when you are Newcastle and everything goes with you. It was a penalty too. It was a good save from Taylor. He stretched his hand and fingers out to get it.Gordon Strachan, quoted on Vital Football

Yes, the ball struck Steven Taylor’s hand near the goal line. Whether or not it was deliberate (I think probably not, he was just turning to face the play), it probably should have been a penalty. Also, there was certainly contact between Ameobi and Pogatetz — whether a foul I’m less sure as Pogatetz seemed to go to ground very easily. But there was nothing at all wrong with Newcastle’s second goal — which is presumably why Strachan doesn’t mention it.

Not once, anywhere, in any of the press reports I have read about the match, have I heard Gordon quoted to say anything remotely positive about Newcastle (the context that the quote “They have experience. It’s a man’s team” gave the implication that Newcastle were better at cheating). Nowhere have I heard him mention the clear penalty Newcastle should have had. Nowhere have I heard him mention Newcastle’s undisputably fine second goal. Nowhere have I heard him mention any of the decisions that went for Middlesbrough. Sour grapes. Bad loser. I don’t have anything against Boro (beyond obviously wanting Newcastle to win); I know Boro fans and I have a great deal of sympathy for the fans because Newcastle have been through pretty much the same mill over the last year or so (although we’ve been ahead on ‘national laughing stock’).

But until Gordon Strachan learns how to lose graciously, and accept that sometimes his team, or his players, or his decisions weren’t as good as those of the opposition, I’m going to keep hoping he loses, because obviously he needs more practice at losing to stop him being such a bad loser. And you can add Grumpychops Wenger to that school while you’re on…

Compare this to Chris Hughton’s comments after Newcastle lost to Nottingham Forest earlier in the season:

We paid the price for a poor first-half performance when they were much better than us. I just wanted to get the players in without conceding a goal and see if we could change and improve things. But Forest scoring just before half-time left us with a bigger challenge and although we responded to it, we just could not get the break. BBC News

Again, he’s getting over the point that he feels his team were unlucky, but he also actually is prepared to give the victors a certain amount of credit: – “they were much better than us”. That, Gordon, is something you could learn from.

This is the former British Lion Gareth Thomas, who is something of a high-profile player (ninth highest ever test try scorer) even if at 35, he is presumably coming towards the end of his professional career.

I don’t think anything more positive (or negative) about Gareth for this. Basically, if he was playing for my team, I’d support him. If he was playing against my team, I’d want him to play badly. His sexuality has — as he himself says — got buggerall to do with the sport…

“I just happen to be gay,” he added. “It’s irrelevant.”Gareth Thomas, quoted on BBC News

I don’t want to praise Gareth for coming out, simply because the idea that he has to be brave in order to come out rather demonstrates that we still expect ingrained homophobia in professional sport. But perhaps we are wrong to expect this, as can be demonstrated from the reaction he encountered from some team-mates:

“But they came in, patted me on the back and said: ‘We don’t care. Why didn’t you tell us before?’ Two of my best mates in rugby didn’t even blink an eyelid.” Gareth Thomas, quoted on BBC News

Perhaps we are finally growing up after all. I’d like to think any other homosexual player in professional football would receive the same response from their team mates and — with luck — from the terraces, although I think you might need a few idiots ejected from grounds first.

And if that wasn’t a big enough sporting revelation for one day, it also transpires that Newcastle’s manager, Chris Hughton, was formerly a columnist for the newspaper of the British Workers Revolutionary Party. No, that isn’t a joke.

In his youth at Spurs, he used to write a weekly football column for The News Line, the paper of the British Workers Revolutionary Party, although he says that this was because a mate of his asked him to, and he wasn’t really bothered about politics, just liked the idea of having his own column. Yeah, and the fact that he seems to have introduced a kind of a workers’ collective at Newcastle for making decisions is entirely coincidental, is it Chris …

I knew there was something I liked about him…

I’m deliberately excluding the off-field activities as it appears that Ashley and Llambias are attempting to replicate, entirely by themselves, the Millwall chant “no one likes us, we don’t care”, and as well as being somewhat depressing, retreading the same old ground with those two is also somewhat boring.

Instead, I’ll just look at what we have so far achieved this season with a paper-thin squad which was plainly not good enough for the top-flight last year and has been severely depleted since.

One of the key things I can see is that there is a significant lack of flair in the second tier. Newcastle’s much maligned defence are currently the meanest in the division, having conceded only 10 goals (only Chelsea and Leeds in their respective divisions have conceded less goals, and Chelsea have conceded more per game) simply because most teams do not have flair players who can produce a magical pass or shot to unlock a mean and well organised defence. This is somewhat different to the top flight…

At the start of the season, I certainly wasn’t entirely convinced the club would be capable of mounting and sustaining a promotion challenge (I’m still not convinced about sustaining; I think the squad far too thin to cope with injuries), but I have to say that Chris Hughton has done a marvellous job in getting the players to play reasonably well (or at least, even if we play badly, still be hard to beat), and while I wasn’t, and I’m still not, convinced that he is the right man to lead the club forward in the long term, I have been impressed with not only how he has handled the role this season, but how he has spoken to the media (and therefore the fans).

He seems to see that the main goal is not to attempt to win the league: it’d certainly be nice, but from interviews it seems quite plain that for now at least his ambition is one place lower: automatic promotion. And that’d do. I think any fan offered that now would accept it, and most would have bitten your hand off if offered that at the start of the season.

We may not always be pretty: but Hughton has got them at least trying to play football; he’s got us conceding few goals, well organised and actually playing for each other. Almost as if they were a … oh, what’s the word… a team. Which is quite a new and refreshing concept, given the last few years.

So I’d like to wish him the best of luck, and remember that first and foremost we need fifty points. That’d keep us up. Once we’ve got that, if we can get another forty after that, that should guarantee us automatic promotion (over the last five years, only one team has needed 90 points to take second place). Of course, I’m saying this before we play Watford, so things could go terribly wrong here…

And then we’d just need about ten or eleven new top quality players to stay there.

Newcastle fans have a lot of problems with the Ashley regime, pretty much all of which have been documented here, there, and elsewhere, so I’m not going to go into them again. But one of those problems is the constant state of uncertainty which has surrounded the club since Mike has been seemingly trying to sell the club for quite some time.

Now reports suggest Ashley is getting fed up of waiting for someone to actually put up the money to buy the club (I don’t blame him, I’m fed up with it too) and is contemplating taking the club off the market. It appears from the outside that this would only be a short-term measure, but does it have to be?

When Ashley took over the club he was hailed as a hero by most fans from rescuing the club from the Shepherd/Hall regime which most fans were thoroughly fed up with. He seemed to enjoy mixing with the fans, and having fun meeting with them, discussing things with them, and being part of the Newcastle fanbase. It wouldn’t be easy, but he could get there again. If he wanted to.

Sure, it’s likely that some fans would never forgive him, but most fans would come around if they could see that, over a period of time, he was running the club as they wished it to be run. It appears patently obvious that there is no multi-billionaire potentially waiting in the wings to bankroll Newcastle the way Abramovich has bankrolled Chelsea, so what are our other options?

If we are to be bought out by someone who struggles to get the money to buy the club and ends up transferring that debt onto the club (in the way Manchester United and Liverpool were bought), does that really help our situation? Of course not.

Does Mike Ashley need to invest ridiculous sums of cash in order to turn around his pariah status in the eyes of fans? I don’t think so. What the fans want to see is a genuine acceptance of mistakes he has made and to put things in place to prevent this from happening again. If it can be demonstrated that the club is being run properly, then he’ll turn the public disapproval into neutrality and possibly back round to approval again.

So what does he actually have to do?

The first, and possibly the biggest thing is communication. Ashley and Llambias appear not to have understood the importance of talking to the fans, telling the fans what is happening at the club and so on. There was a second critical failure of this during the Kevin Keegan days (exposed by the tribunal) where Ashley and Llambias said that the club had deliberately misled the fans as a public relations exercise (which has now backfired in spectacular fashion).

So how to get round this? Firstly, talk directly to the fans. Let’s have an official Newcastle United blog, and possibly a twitter stream, posted directly either by someone in a senior position, or by someone who has access to these people. Ideally, let’s get an ordinary fan involved: give this fan the chance to sit in on meetings and report back to other fans. That would be a great way of winning back trust.

I am of course available to offer either my professional services or my personal ‘fan’ services for this, if they want to get in touch…

Secondly, let’s look at the issue of money. One of the greatest problems with Newcastle was the amount of debt they were carrying. I’m sure Mike Ashley would accept that the fact he did not conduct due diligence on the club prior to a takeover meant he received somewhat of a nasty surprise. But how do we fix this? Well, assuming that there isn’t a multi-billionaire around prepared to pour a limitless pot of cash into the club (and there isn’t), the club needs to be run on a sound financial footing.

Does this mean a wage cap? Almost certainly, for the time being. Does this mean an end to expensive imports? Yes. Does this mean scrapping around for cheaper players who might have potential, and bringing them through the youth ranks? Yes. Does this mean Newcastle fans will have to wait for success, and accept it won’t come overnight? Yes.

But all of this will help the club in the long-term. We have players on wages which are simply not sustainable for a Championship club. Should we be willing to let these go, if an appropriate offer comes in? Well, this is where it gets tricky.

Currently, the squad is paper thin and a few injuries or suspensions could seriously derail any possible chance of promotion. So how to solve this?

There are two options for solving this. The first is that you don’t; you gamble that the club will be promoted at the first attempt with a paper-thin squad, and we won’t be driven into administration by the wages of some players. The second requires someone — and here’s an opportunity for Ashley to redeem himself (to some extent) relatively quickly — to put some money into the club for transfers. But let’s make those transfers of people who are available at relatively low cost, for Championship-suitable salaries, and who are likely to have a reasonable resale value in a couple of years.

In other words, gamble on youth. It might not work, but as opposed to gambling on more established players on higher salaries with no appreciable resale two years down the line, at least this position is more sustainable.

We need a bigger squad; but at the same time we still need to try and reduce the overall wage bill.

But here’s the problem: if the fans see the club selling big-name players to buy cheap, they’ll see it as a further dismantling of the squad, crippling our chances of promotion. It would be a hard sell to convince the fans that is in the long-term best interests of the club. Which brings us back to communication: if a genuine fan was able to attend and report on meetings (as well as more public pronouncements and explanations from the hierarchy), we’d at least have some evidence that Ashley was trying to put right his mistakes. Back to communication again.

Thirdly, let’s look at ownership. Rather than looking to sell outright, why not look for additional investors as it appeared he was originally doing? If we assume the club is valued at £80 million, and someone has £40 million to put into it, that would give the club a value of £120 million — so for that stake they would get a 1/3 share of the club — and rather than going directly to Ashley, this money could be used to pay debts, buy players and so on: they might own a lesser share of the club, but the overall value of the club ought to have increased in comparison.

Allow the supporters trust to buy a share of the club in this manner, if they can put up the cash…

But, if there are no investors ready and willing to do that, let’s just have the club taken off the market and end the uncertainty. Let’s have Ashley undertake to say that he will not sell the club for x amount of time — say two years. Let the fans know what is actually going to happen beyond the next two months and end the uncertainty again. Back to communication. This actually allows people to start planning somewhat.

Finally, he needs to make sure that he has the right people. This is not about being nice; it’s about making the right decisions for the club (not the fans and not the owners), irrespective of how ruthless they may be. This comes back to the likes of Shepherd being the “man who shot Bambi” (showing that ruthlessness is sometimes the right thing to do, even if you demonstrate your lack of knowledge of kids films at the same time).

But this right people business is not just on the management and coaching side, but those involved in running the other aspects of the club. For example, Llambias might be a brilliant and astute businessman (I don’t really know) but he seems not to understand that someone at the club needs to be a bridge between the owners and the fans. If Llambias is appointed just to run the club, that’s fine, but someone else needs to be a public spokesperson for the board (and here we come back to communication again).

Ashley needs someone — an employee or otherwise — who is an active part of the club, and who is allowed to privately disagree with him and tell him he is wrong. There is a perception (whether true or not) that he is surrounded by people who will do what he wants (including stupid running-naked-on-the-pitch bets). This needs to stop. He needs an advisor who will tell him what he’s doing wrong, and what he should do.

He doesn’t actually need to be responsible for the day-to-day running of the club (and it’s obvious he doesn’t want to), but he needs to have the right people in place to do that job — and they need to be willing to argue with him, to tell him that the club needs more investment now, or that the fans need a public statement on such-and-such and issue, or whatever.

In short, run the club properly; run it for the fans as well as for himself, and he has the opportunity to redeem himself. If he can act as a trustee or guardian of the club for the fans; for the region, and not for himself, if he can demonstrate that he has learned from his mistakes then not only can he turn himself from a publicly vilified figure but, in time, he could turn himself into someone who actually is thought of with affection.

In short, he’s made mistakes, and big ones. But his best effort does not have to be “woefully short”. He can put it right.

If, of course, he wants to. But should he still want to, should he still have that spark of love for the club, then with the right actions — not all of which would be easy — this is all achievable.

Like some others I expected that this was a load of nonsense — if the club did go into administration, Ashley would just become a creditor like the rest of them and the value would be worth a lot less to him. On that basis, on the assumption he had other monies around somewhere, it would make better business sense for him to prop the club up against a higher value in a future sale.

However, irrespective of this, what I didn’t understand was fans who seemed to have the point of view that Keegan shouldn’t take any money out of the club. Bollocks. If he’s been constructively dismissed, he’s entitled to compensation. That’s what the purpose of the tribunal is for. Just as anyone else — including jobs where they are paid from public monies and so theoretically cost all of us — is entitled to a claim for constructive dismissal if such is appropriate.

And, lo and behold, the tribunal did find in Kevin Keegan’s favour and awarded him £2 million. When I saw the award was for £l;2 million, I did initially wonder whether some elements of the claim had gone against Keegan, but from what I can tell, there was a rather key part in his contract, which limited compensation to £2 million, and so this obviously came into play.

The case centred around the club’s signing of “Cheesy” Nacho Gonzales, who turned out to be mostly injured with a side helping of not-particularly-that-good-anyway. Keegan hadn’t wanted to sign him. Wise / Ashley had, citing that the loan deal was a necessary financial deal — that despite paying over £1 million out, this would be of financial benefit to the club in the longer term, as it was a favour to two South American agents. Nacho was signed against Keegan’s express wishes, and he resigned.

The bit however that I found most damning to Ashley et al is the bit where they state that all of their public proclamations to the fans (in The Times, The Independent — and others) about Keegan having the final say on transfers were not actually true, and that this was done as a public relations exercise seems to me to be saying “it’s perfectly okay to lie about the state of the club to the fans if it makes us look better”.

The Club’s explanation for these statements, which, on their case, were simply untrue, was that they were nothing more than an exercise in public relations carried out so as not to undermine Mr Keegan’s position and made necessary, in the first place, by statements made by Mr Keegan himself to the press. We found this explanation to be profoundly unsatisfactory. [...]

Thirdly, for the Club to have made these statements, when they were, according to the Club, untrue, was, in our view, simply to store up trouble for the future.

Premier League Manager’s Arbitration Tribunal

You got that last one right.

But the idea that was shouldn’t trust Ashley and Co is, frankly, is the opinion that most fans have now developed of their own accord through having listened to what has come out of the club since Ashley took charge. But it is damning how willing Ashley and the club are to admit it: it seems to be something of an indication that Ashley knows his position with the fans is untenable and not salvageable and just wants out.

Well, I’d like him out too. And while I’d rather someone backed with a rather large wedge of cash comes into the club, I’ll settle for anyone who will run the club properly and be honest with the fans.

And although while Chris Hughton has done a marvellous job since the summer and it would be really unfair to replace him after a takeover, I’d replace him after a takeover. For two reasons: firstly because the owners should be ruthless in doing what is right for the club in the longer term, whether or not it is nice; secondly because it appears that if you are a caretaker manager in the North East you are capable of doing a good job until such a point in time as you are given the job permanently, at which point it goes downhill rapidly (Roeder at the toon, Sbragia down the road).

As an aside, is there really any point to Mark Lawrenson?

I heard him being interviewed on Radio 5 and he had no idea why Keegan was only awarded £2 million, saying something along the lines of ‘who knows how the tribunal arrived at that figure’. Well, I did, Mark, because I’d actually read about it an hour or so before. You on the other hand appeared on national radio and demonstrated your ignorance about events relating not only to the sport you’ve made a career from, but also your colleagues. It’s not like the tribunal decision was hidden, since a link to it was posted on the home page of the Premier League’s website.

But at present, they are playing well, they are top of the league, and they have only conceded one goal in five games. Does this mean I was wrong to be tooning my back?

Well, no. The reasons I said I wasn’t putting any more money into the club while Mike Ashley is in charge of it remain pretty much exactly the same.

• The owner and managing director seem to feel that Newcastle fans deserve to be kept in the dark about what is going on at the club and/or fed misleading information (what happened to those ‘more than two bids of over £100 million’, then?).
• The continuance of the ‘no proper manager’ saga, although I have changed my stance slightly over Chris Hughton: while I still remain far from convinced he is ‘the man for the job’, he’s done well so far, and deserves credit for putting up with all the shit going on at the club. But we still need a permanent manager.
• The continuing drain on the playing squad: while I accept it was necessary to off-load some of the high-earners and bring some transfer money in, the squad was too thin last season, and we’re now supposed to play eight more games with about eight less senior players. We need more players: decent quality ones would be an advantage.
• The one thing Ashley was doing right was to invest in youth and bring in quality youth players we had to pay money for with the intention of saving the club monies in the long run. This seems to have stopped.
• …and we’ve still got that bloody horrible away strip

So thanks (and I’ll continue to support the club from whichever bar has the games televised), but no thanks.

Sir Bobby Robson was born in January 1933, and died yesterday at the age of 76, leaving behind quite an impressive legacy and record. For someone who picked up 20 caps for England, the fact that the majority of people don’t even think about his playing career is testament to his longevity and success as a manager, winning the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup, the Dutch and Portugese Championships; the Spanish and Portugese Cups and the European Cup Winners Cup.

But more importantly than that was the impression he left on the game. Bobby Robson was an anachronism; a gentleman in a game where gentlemen were few and far between. He not only demonstrated how the game should be played, he provided a model as to how people ought to behave. Not only that, but his enthusiasm for the game was infectious.

Bobby Robson probably was the sort of person for whom the phrase “has forgotten more about management than you will ever know” was coined. Except I don’t think he’d really have forgotten it entirely. He’d just have forgotten the name of it. And this was one of the things Robson was famous for — those verbal slips which led to his “genial old duffer” image.

For example, there’s the infamous Shola Ameobi interview:

Journalist: “So Shola, do you have a nickname at the club?”
Ameobi: “Not really no.”
Journalist: “What do the lads call you?”
Ameobi: “Shola.”
Journalist: “What does [manager] Bobby Robson call you?”
Ameobi: “Carl Cort.”

Ameobi interview reproduced in Daily Mirror Blog

And there’s a wide selection of other Robson quotes, including my personal favourite “we didn’t underestimate them; they were just better than we thought”.

But as genial old duffers go, it was only two thirds right. He was genial, and he was old, but was he really a duffer? His introduction to management at Newcastle would suggest otherwise. Ruud Gullit had just resigned after a defeat in the rain (lots of rain) against Sunderland. Robson took over, although he did not manage the next game — he simply watched a 1-0 defeat to Chelsea from the Stamford Bridge stands to take in a view of his players.

So that’s a demoralised disorganised shambles heading for the relegation zone. Robson comes in, inspires the players, and in the very next home game, the team beat Sheffield Wednesday 8-0, with Alan Shearer scoring five. Perhaps Newcastle should have approached him again last season…? He also changed the way Shearer played, accepting that he no longer really had and pace and would need to adapt his game to succeed. Shearer did adapt, and probably lengthened his career considerably as a result.

Robson also led Newcastle to the second Group stage of the Champions League in 2002/03 despite losing the first three games, becoming the first ever team to do so in a thrilling night in Rotterdam as we beat Feyenoord 3-2, and Juventus beat Dynamo Kiev to ensure we finished in second place (although a draw would have been sufficient).

His time at Newcastle didn’t end too well however: it appeared from the outside at least that some of the younger players (we all know who they are) didn’t have the proper respect for him, and seemed not to have the right attitude. Here his ‘niceness’ possibly cost him the job, as a lot of people felt he needed to be more ruthless in his treatment of certain brat-pack members. It was also possibly the only time his age counted against him: when Newcastle dropped two places to finish fifth (fifth? sigh), these issues with the attitude and behaviour of younger players seemed to be thought to be caused by his age, and many Newcastle fans began to wonder whether he was past it at seventy-odd.

This for me is the only occasion over the last twenty years when you can make a justifiable case that Newcastle fans were too impatient or too demanding of their manager. We had good quality football, and a good quality squad. But we were missing discipline. So Freddie Shepherd shot Bobby “Bambi” Robson. Unfortunately our follow up manager Graeme Sourness set about achieving discipline at the expense of good quality football and a good quality squad, which I can’t help feel was missing the point somewhat.

While he might have left us with a series of entertaining quotations, Robson can best be summed up by pointing out a few simple points:

• No-one, including many Sunderland fans I know, seems to have had a bad word to say about him
• Everyone loved his enthusiasm for the came
• He liked football to be played the right way — on the grass
• He was a man of honour and integrity: one of the best role models ever to have come out of professional football
• Once he’d established his managerial credentials, I think every club he managed was in a better state when he left than it was in when he took over
• Neither Newcastle nor England have had a better manager since (although Capello has got off to an admittedly decent start)

…or possibly he can be best summed up by realising that even just a few days before dying of lung cancer, he was able to turn up to the charity game. There’s a big part of me believes that he would have died earlier, only he wasn’t prepared to miss the match… now that’s a true football man.

Goodbye, Sir Bobby. Football, and the world, is a poorer place without you.

But to some extent I’m turning my back on Newcastle United at the moment. The club is a joke. For the entire last season, fans of opposing teams (many — but not all — of which support teams which aren’t necessarily where they are from, but — and no doubt entirely coincidentally — just happen to be successful and fashionable teams) have had great fun aiming barbs at Newcastle and their fans.

And what’s really unfair about the whole thing is that there isn’t much the Newcastle fans can do about any of this. All of the laughs aimed at what a joke the club is, how in many cases the behaviour of the players has dragged the clubs reputation through the dirt; how players don’t actually seem to care about the club or the fans but do care about picking up; how the team is basically a pile of crap; and how Newcastle fans are so stupid they will buy a revolting away strip: there’s not much to argue about there, because they are of course correct.

And, certainly as far as Sunderland are concerned, however painful it might be to admit, it probably is their turn to laugh at us. After all, we’ve had a few goes at them…

When Ashley arrived, it seemed to be a new dawn. No more Freddie Shepherd. Some people have suggested that they might want Shepherd back. No, no, no. Remember this. Newcastle fans deserve better than Shepherd.

Unfortunately, it also appears that we deserved better than Ashley. Personally, I don’t really have any objection to my football club being the plaything of some rich man. However, and I’ll stress this, because I think it’s important, as said plaything, I would expect the rich man to want to nurture and care for the club, rather than hide it in a corner and allow it to rot.

And unfortunately, irrespective of what intentions Mike Ashley had when he took over, he’s made an awful lot of mistakes. He’s gambled, and lost, repeatedly.

I’m not going to go over his mistakes in detail: we all know them, so I’ll just summarise: no due diligence, no communication with fans, backing Wise’s judgement over Keegan’s, trying to sell the club and appoint a new manager at the same time (which led to Chris “t, it’s” Hughton and “you must be” Joe Kinnear), not seeming to realise that if you sell all of your good players and don’t replace them, the quality (and indeed team) will go down, and then of course allowing that away strip to be chosen.

I mean, how bad must the other designs have been, if the club thought that was the best?

I’ll digress slightly here. I feel sorry for Chris Hughton. I don’t think he’s good enough to be Newcastle United manager. But nor do I think that’s his fault; he’s stepping into a job while it is not being given to anyone else and doing his best. For this I think the fans should thank him. Otherwise it’d probably be Llambias taking training.

But Ashley’s continuing to gamble not only with our beloved Newcastle United, he’s gambling with his own money. He originally seemed to want £400 million for the club. With relegation, he’s had to knock around three quarters off that value. Of course, if he’d actually been prepared to pump in around £25 million in transfer money over the season, we could probably have stayed in the top flight. He’d still not have got £400m, mind you, but the club would be worth more than it is now…

And now he’s making the same mistake again. It would appear that he’s playing “I’m in a huff, so I’m not doing anything at all until someone buys me out”, while at the same time playing “if you don’t give me all the money I want, I’m not going anywhere”. Which could well end up with Newcastle paying out more wages than they need to by not selling the big-money so-called ‘stars’, getting off with a really bad start to the season, finishing up in administration and relegation to League One.

And then he’d be lucky to get £100 for the club. He either needs to invest, and actually start something moving now, or simply accept whatever is the best offer on the table right now. Otherwise he’s going to gamble and lose again, and again the fans will suffer. The players will still get paid; the directors will still get paid; the fans will still get shafted.

And that’s why I am refusing to hand over a single penny of my money to anything officially Newcastle United while Ashley is the owner. I have not renewed my season ticket; I will not attend any games; I will not buy any merchandise because providing any money to the Ashley regime only decreases the rate at which the value of his investment is haemorrhaging.

And I think the faster he’s losing money, the more likely he is to sell.

Hmm. On second thoughts, that might not work. He might well gamble again, hang on in there, and gamble that if we sell any and all of our saleable players, Shola Ameobi will somehow score 90 Championship goals and we’ll win promotion. Which of course we won’t. We’ll end up in administration and League One.

But I’m not going to stick around and watch either of those scenarios unfold. I don’t see why I should pay out money to watch something I have not been enjoying for the past two years (“come and pay £30 for ninety minutes misery and frustration!”). I don’t see why I should help contribute to the wages of those running the club, when they were so quick to cut jobs for local employees.

In any other relationship, if one party treats you like dirt, you’ll leave them. Supporting a football club isn’t that different. You’re not going to fall in love with another, but until they learn to start treating you with the respect you deserve, you’re not helping them by remaining in that destructive relationship. They have to have a reason to change.

But more than anything else, I have no desire to watch, or to contribute financially to, our club being ground further into the dirt by people I do not want running my football club. I simply don’t trust them to do a good — or even halfway competent — job of running it. I’d be wary about asking them to run a tap. Of course, if there are any lawyers reading, I’d like to stress that I am simply illustrating my personal opinions here…

So I’m turning my back, and I’m not listening, for as long as Ashley remains in control. But when this changes — and regardless of which division we’re in by then — someone please do give me a shout when it’s over, will you?