Ashley has left Newcastle Stagnant and Stained

[chilledbear 16]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/newcastle-united/11317458/Mike-Ashley-has-left-Newcastle-stagnant-and-stained-with-his-greedy-ownership-who-would-want-the-job-now.html

 

 

Mike Ashley has left Newcastle stagnant and stained with his greedy ownership - who would want the job now?

St James' Park now resembles a branch of Sports Direct - piled high with nonsense, with Ashley treating his critics as pygmies with pea-shooters, writes Paul Hayward

 

 

Standing up to a ruthless owner who is worth £3.75 billion might sound like the definition of futility, but it happens to be the only option for the next man in at Newcastle United, where the nonsense is piled as high as the gear in Mike Ashley’s retail empire.

Ashley is one of those moguls who has come to feel he has the globe on a string. Zero-hours contracts at Sports Direct? Get stuffed, liberals. Wonga shirt sponsorship? What has it got to do with you? Ashley’s business ethic is to treat his critics as pygmies with pea-shooters. He bestrides the swamp of unregulated free-market enterprise. Wealth is the only show in town.

Observe the big man’s skill. Instead of having to go through the tedious business of sacking Alan Pardew, Ashley simply waited for Crystal Palace to come along and offer him £2.5 million in compensation to take ‘Pards’ away. What a deal. Not since he made £926 million in a single day floating his sportswear firm has such a cherry dropped off Ashley’s tree. No wonder his facial expression suggests omnipotence.

Newcastle’s fans are understandably conflicted about Palace’s raid on St James’ Park. Those who held up a bedsheet declaring “Pardew is a muppet” will be glad to see him go. But they must know too that Ashley will want a continuation of the owner-manager relationship established during Pardew’s four years in charge. It would be a major turn-up if the proprietor ditched the current model of managerial subservience in favour of, say, Tony Pulis.

Don Hutchison, the former Liverpool and Sunderland midfielder, writes in his Newcastle Chronicle column: “I’m not sure he [Ashley] actually wants the hassle of a manager who would demand money to sign players who can take Newcastle to the next level.

 

“And I’m really not sure that he wants a manager who is going to sit there and say ‘I want this striker and he’ll cost £15million.’ I don’t think a manager like that would last five minutes at Newcastle at the moment.”

Pardew, we know, endured his own powerlessness with a peculiarly strained expression, unless he was verbally abusing Manuel Pellegrini or putting the nut on Hull’s David Meyler. His disinclination to take on Ashley publicly on all the important points – Joe Kinnear, for example – took me back to the day Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano signed for West Ham, and Pardew, the manager at the time, called it “intriguing.” He clearly had no say in the club’s decision to park them at Upton Park.

Multiply that many times and you find Pardew answering to Kinnear (briefly), spectating as Andy Carroll moved to Liverpool and having little say in Newcastle’s overall transfer dealings. It was during Pardew’s reign that Ashley decided he wanted 100% control over where his money went. Newcastle, who have a wage to income ratio of 64% (the Premier League average is 70%) have become a stepping-stone club for expertly-scouted players: an exercise in mid-table stagnation.

 

Pardew never had the powerbase to resist this drift. The fans regarded him as Ashley’s puppet: another mouth from the south. Rather than fight the owner, he found a way to leave, returning to his roots at Palace. A more self-aware owner than Ashley might reflect that his manager is taking a demotion (to Palace) to escape the shadow he casts. The thought would not trouble him for long.

Newcastle have previous here. Long before Ashley stepped into the Premier League casino Sir Bobby Robson and others struggled with Freddy Shepherd, a local heavyweight who also liked to do the deals. Under Robson’s tenure the late Gary Speed was sold to Bolton Wanderers without the manager’s prior approval and Patrick Kluivert’s arrival on Tyneside was conceived at boardroom level.

Robson tolerated these interventions because he loved the job too much to give it up, and backed himself to produce a winning team from whatever resources were available to him. After he left, in 2004, and the job passed to eight managers inside a decade, there was one quick way to annoy Sir Bobby. All you had to do was ask him: “Who on earth would take the Newcastle job?”

“It’s a wonderful job,” he would say. “Any ambitious manager would want that job. They’ll be inundated by applications.”

He saw 52,000 fans, a deep love of the game on Tyneside, a strong local tradition and culture, even if they lacked the trophies to go with it.

But to be Newcastle manager, now, without power, or even influence, is no siren call. Pardew’s successor will either have to lay out his terms at the first negotiation stage or step into Ashley’s empire as a departmental head, while the real business goes on elsewhere. Pardew stopped being a yes-man in the end. He accepted defeat, and fled.

Edited December 30, 2014 by chilledbear

[Rangersitis 0]

Hayward doesn't miss in that, not that Ashley will be mending his ways because of it.

[Hildy 0]

Newcastle: an exercise in mid-table stagnation. That just about sums it up.