Apologies if this may sound terribly cynical, but when Mike Ashley announced that he was closing in on a deal to sell Newcastle United, possibly even severing his ties before the end of the month, it wasn’t easy knowing whether to take it at face value bearing in mind his track record for being – and I will couch this as politely as possible – slightly careless with the truth.
Ashley does, after all, have previous when it comes to blurring the facts for his own means and, by his own admission, there have been times in the past when the club’s idea of PR – spin, make-believe, call it what you will – has involved saying whatever they believe supporters want to hear. Newcastle’s fans have been here before. More times, in fact, than they would probably wish to remember since they started longing for the end of the Ashley era. Or, perhaps more accurately in this case, the end of an error.
On this occasion, maybe we can give Ashley the benefit of the doubt when, plainly, there is some kind of interest behind the scenes, even if we know very little about the relevant people, their credentials and the amount of finance they would have, in theory, to make Newcastle the kind of club their supporters desperately want them to be.
It was just strange, to say the least, to find the usually publicity-shy Ashley – a man, we were told, who disliked the way Amanda Staveley, one potential buyer, went public with her interest – chatting happily about a possible takeover under the lights of a Sky News television studio when it might be reasonably assumed these kinds of deals have an expectation of confidentiality.
Ashley clearly wanted to get it out that talks were “at a more advanced stage than they have ever been” and, intentional or not, the timing has certainly worked in his favour bearing in mind Newcastle play Wolves on Sunday, live on television, and large numbers of supporters were planning to stay away from St James’ Park in an organised boycott.
The landscape has changed now. The mutiny has been called off – or postponed, provisionally, until Huddersfield’s visit in February – and Ashley has been spared the embarrassment of a highly visible protest, involving vast expanses of empty seats, at a match that is being beamed around the world. Many fans still intend to stay away, such is their antipathy towards his regime. More, however, have decided the timing is no longer right. “Although we continue to have deep reservations about Mike Ashley’s resolve to sell … we understand that any protest activity which could have a negative implication on Sunday’s result could jeopardise the potential sale of the club,” read a statement from the Magpie Group, the coalition that organised the protest.
The correct decision? A personal view is that the people eyeing up Newcastle are unlikely to be deterred by protests against the current owner or that, in the event of a bad result, it does not feel entirely realistic to believe the proposed takeover would be put at risk. Equally, I am also conscious that is very easy for me to say, from the outside looking in, whereas the supporters who have had to endure Ashley’s ownership of the club are perfectly entitled to hold off if they think there is even a tiny risk. And, besides, it is only a temporary ceasefire during what promises to be a crucial few weeks in the club’s modern history.
Ashley has already been the subject of protests. He cannot keep backing himself into a corner this way and, if nothing materialises, it won’t be pretty judging by one comment piece in the Newcastle Chronicle, warning him (more in desperation than anything sinister) that “this is your chance to walk away before it gets really, really ugly”.
Newcastle’s supporters can hardly be blamed, after all, for wanting a bit of genuine hope and ambition rather than what they have now: a club that is hard-faced, that is happy to do everything on the cheap, with a demoralised fanbase and unmistakable sense of drift. Is it really so unreasonable, coming up to the 50-year mark since the club last won a trophy, to imagine what Rafael Benítez, armed with a long-term contract and a new set of ambitions, could achieve with some financial backing? Or transfer windows where the net spend for Newcastle would not be less than that of many Championship clubs?
Can anybody really say they are wrong, 11 years into Ashley’s corrosive tenure, for believing the club have been misused for too long? Or for clinging to the hope that when the Sports Direct signs do finally come down the people who take his place, whenever or whoever this is, will restore some human qualities to the stadium Sir Bobby Robson once described as a cathedral, made for Saturday worship?
You can always judge a club, for example, on how they treat their former players, so what does it say for the modern-day Newcastle that Alan Shearer is now so marginalised, as a critic of the Ashley years, that the statue commemorating Tyneside’s record scorer was funded by the city council, erected on public land down the road from St James’ (rather than alongside those of Robson and Jackie Milburn directly in front of the stadium) and not one senior person from the club attended the unveiling? Or that Kevin Keegan, whose tribunal against the club exposed the deceit of the Ashley operation, has been excommunicated to the point that he is, in effect, persona non grata for as long as that magnificent stadium is a concrete advertisement for the boss’s sportswear empire.
One day, maybe all this could be put right and, if so, Newcastle will immediately be a better place. Equally, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves when, first things first, the more pressing matter is whether a deal can be made, providing the relevant people have the finance and expertise. That, more than anything, is key: it has to be the right deal, not just any deal.
The alternative is that it is remembered as just another false dawn, to go with all the other occasions when Newcastle were allegedly close to being sold. And then what? Benítez is in the last few months of his contract and, as unpalatable as it might seem for the 52,000 people who routinely fill St James’ Park, there are not many Champions League-winning managers who would be willing to commit to a club that falls so far short of his own ambitions.
Cityitis is hard to forget but best to bury some details
It is some time ago now, going back to the days when Manchester United and Manchester City were separated by two divisions, but I can remember writing one article for these pages in which I noted that the only thing the two clubs still had in common was the first letter of their postcode.
That looks badly out of date now the pendulum has swung the other way and the shift in power can feel even more staggering if you consider that when Pep Guardiola’s team lost at Chelsea on Saturday it was exactly 20 years to the day since City were huffing and puffing their way through a game that could be described as the nadir of their entire history.
The first round of the Auto Windscreens Shield (northern section) at home to Mansfield Town, to be precise, with only one stand of Maine Road being opened and a 2-1 defeat that finished with Joe Royle, the manager who coined the phrase “Cityitis”, walking into the pressroom, can of cider in his hand, to describe his players as “worse than poor”.
The attendance was 3,007, the lowest in the club’s history, and the embarrassment felt by City, then a third-tier club, was exacerbated by the fact it coincided with United playing a Champions League tie the following day against Bayern Munich. Hence a back-page splash in the Daily Mirror showing a near‑empty ground with the headline: “Manchester United will play in front of 55,000 screaming fans at Old Trafford tonight. Meanwhile, at Maine Road …”
All of which didn’t go down well, it is fair to say, among the supporters situated close to the press box at City’s next home match. Indeed, it needed a police barricade to stop the pressroom being stormed at half-time and an unassuming chap by the name of Lindsay Sutton, a freelance stringer who was covering the match for the Mirror but had nothing to do with the offending story, needed an escort to get him safely out of the stadium. Four supporters were ejected.
Twenty years on, the journalist who did write the story has politely asked me to keep his identity a secret (Twitter does not tend to take these things well) and it is strange to think that a new generation of City supporters will never properly understand the days when their team lost against Lincoln, Wycombe and York in the same season that “football, bloody hell”, in a Glaswegian accent, became a thing.
Three days before that Mansfield tie, George Melly was a guest on Have I Got News For You and the subject turned to Chris Ofili winning the Turner Prize with art created from elephant dung. “There isn’t much elephant shit to be found in Manchester,” Melly noted. At which point Paul Merton butted in: “Haven’t you seen Man City lately?” Different days, indeed.
Sturridge’s fall-guy history suggests he will not mind digs
Perhaps Jürgen Klopp and Sean Dyche, the managers of Liverpool and Burnley respectively, could bring in an independent witness in their spat about whether Daniel Sturridge’s alleged diving amounted to a form of “cheating”.
Luis Suárez, who knows a thing or two about these matters, would be ideal bearing in mind his recollection of the three penalties Liverpool won in one match against Manchester United a few years ago. “I certainly didn’t think we would get the one given to Daniel Sturridge,” Suárez writes of that 3-0 victory in his autobiography. “He threw himself down. But it was such a good dive that even I thought it was a penalty. I saw it and thought: ‘Penalty.’ But then I also saw how annoyed Nemanja Vidic was, which made me think that perhaps it wasn’t a foul. When I saw the replay, I realised that Daniel was about a metre away from Vidic.”
Sturridge was roughly the same distance from Phil Bardsley when he was suddenly elevated into the air during Liverpool’s midweek visit to Turf Moor. Though Suárez’s account of the Old Trafford incident does not leave the impression that his old teammate will be too upset about Dyche’s criticisms. “I said to Daniel later: ‘Can you imagine what would have happened if that had been me?’” Suárez writes. “He said: ‘I felt him touch me,’ and started laughing.”
