There are plenty of reasons to have it in for Mike Ashley and friends over the
way they have handled matters at Newcastle United: coming from The Smoke is
not among them.
COCKNEY MAFIA OUT, read one banner displayed during Saturday’s game against
Hull City. YIZ DIVINNT KNAA NOWT ABOUT GEORDIES, ITS WOR CLUB, LERRIT GAN,
NIVVA RETORN. GORRIT, another said, which I think translates as: “You know
nothing of Novocastrians, the club belongs to us, please desist from your
meddling and do not darken our doors again. Now have I made myself perfectly
clear?”
So now we know the problem.
Ashley and his colleagues, Dennis Wise and Tony Jimenez, are Londoners. Not
that the club have been run poorly since Ashley took control, and before.
Not that a chain of command has been put in place that would alienate any
manager, that transfer policy has been muddled, that there has been no
communication, a weak squad, ordinary football, a raft of false expectations
and patronising man-of-the-people PR stunts, where a coherent business plan
should have been. No, it is all about postcodes and birth certificates and
dropping your aitches and whether St James’ Park is a bus ride or an Inter
City commute, because unless you come from the Toon, you could not
understand.
What has been forgotten is that Kevin Keegan did not understand, either. On
Day One, having acknowledged that the fortunes accrued from the Champions
League by the elite clubs was as good as an annual dividend to keep the
others out, Keegan then refused to believe his own wisdom and went on to
talk about breaking into the top four, all the while perpetrating the lie
that Newcastle are a special club, as if sheer will could achieve what has
been beyond their capability in the five years since football underwent its
equivalent of the big bang with the arrival of Roman Abramovich.
And that is a factor, too. Yes, Ashley and his colleagues have handled this
situation badly; as badly as is possible without turning up in the
Gallowgate End in a Sunderland shirt, or replacing Blaydon Races
with Chas & Dave’s greatest hits in the prematch entertainment. Yet the
moment Keegan walked in, it was possible to foresee the bitter end to the
fairy story because this was a man who was out of touch with the modern
game, yet pledged to rekindle some mythical golden age on limited resources
at a time when having lots of money has never been so vital. Keegan worked
the room beautifully that afternoon, so that those asking perfectly
legitimate questions about funding, or raising doubts over whether a
professional who, by his admission, had taken at most a passing interest in
the game in the previous three years, could hit the ground running in a
league that seemed to evolve and mutate by the week, were dismissed as sad
saps lacking in the necessary positivism or soft southern theatre-lovers who
could never appreciate the desires and potential of the Geordie people, when
awakened.
It was bull then and it is bull now. If anything, the present crisis has
unfolded because Ashley, in his desperation, bought into this ideal of one
nation, apart and unique. He thought that he could try on Tyneside folklore
like a newly acquired replica shirt, playing along with its fantasies, while
stepping unscathed from the wreckage of the botched approach to Harry
Redknapp, by giving the fans what they wanted: the return of a local hero.
No matter that this hero was notoriously volatile and could not coexist for
long with Ashley’s secondary plan for how the club should be run; no matter
that in securing this man, Ashley made Newcastle appear ever more parochial
and inward-looking.
The arrival of Wise as executive director (football) and Jimenez as
vice-president in charge of player recruitment put Keegan on collision
course with the board and precipitated this fiasco because the manager has
to control buying and selling at his club and the factions seemed to be at
loggerheads from the start. Ashley’s flaw, however, is not that he is a
Cockney but that he is a Cockney who tried to assume the disguise and the
thought processes of someone playing to the gallery and to populism when he
should have made a hardheaded business decision. The Glazer family have
never tried thinking like the man in the Stretford End and, in doing so,
have given him what he wanted: the best manager, financially supported.
Ashley’s problem was that he did not want to do the work.
Running a football club properly is tough. It consumes time, it consumes
money. It needs a leader on the pitch, in the dugout and in the boardroom.
Instead, Ashley delegated to old friends and pandered to the public by
inviting Keegan to be part of an incompatible management structure. It was
always going to end in calamity. but not because Ashley is from London.
There are plenty of smart people in the South who could have run Newcastle
and made the fans happy. Del Boy could have done a better job than Ashley;
so could Trigger. Ashley’s flaw is not that he is a Cockney, it is that he
has been a plonker.
And another thing...
Terry suffers injustice
Respect being a two-way street, it is to be hoped that Mark Halsey, the
referee, sees sense about the red card shown to John Terry, the Chelsea
captain, in the match against Manchester City on Saturday and downgrades it
to a booking. Terry had two players covering him when he brought down Jô
roughly 50 yards from goal. If it had been serious foul play – a dangerous
tackle rather than a clumsy rugby grapple – there could be justification. As
it was, Terry did not prevent a scoring opportunity or endanger an opponent.
He had been skinned and behaved cynically. Not nice to see and, perhaps, in
the future, worthy of a red card, but as the rules and directives stand, it
was harsh. Terry has also been criticised for making a gesture to the City
fans as he left the field, showing three fingers with one hand and one with
the other, which was Chelsea’s lead at the time.
This seems a pretty mild response compared with the level of abuse he was
getting; perhaps we should just be grateful the score was not 2-2.
Against football religion
Speculation that Tal Ben-Haim, the Israel defender, may have no future at
Manchester City under the new owners from the United Arab Emirates seems
wide of the mark. Although the UAE does not recognise Israel, the group that
is buying City is under the control of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan
and wishes to obtain favourable publicity and promotion for the state of Abu
Dhabi.
This would hardly be helped by a decision that would have them branded as Arab
extremists and antiSemites. Even those noted fit-and-proper-person testers
at the Premier League may take a dim view of that.
The perfect world outside
And now we return to an occasional series entitled “It’s only football that’s
bent”.
Last week the Association of Tennis Professionals cleared Nikolay Davydenko
after a 12-month investigation into suspicious betting patterns surrounding
his match against Martin Vassallo Arguello at a tournament in Sopot, Poland,
on August 2, 2007. Arguello was also cleared, as were all other individuals
connected to the event. “The ATP has exhausted the avenues of inquiry open
to it and the investigation is now concluded,” a statement read.
Davydenko was rated No 5 in the world at the time, Arguello was No 87. In
football terms, going on yesterday’s league tables, that makes Manchester
City the equivalent of Davydenko and Lincoln City the equal of Arguello. Say
that match was taking place and Betfair received ten times the usual amount
of activity on its exchange, some £3.4 million with, inexplicably, most of
the money going on Lincoln. And imagine if Manchester City took the lead, as
Davydenko did by winning the first set, yet still the punters were piling on
the team lying sixth from bottom in what used to be the fourth division, as
happened when Davydenko played Arguello. Imagine then that Lincoln not only
equalised (Arguello won the second set), but City walked off the pitch, as
Davydenko did in the third set, citing injury.
Do you think we would accept at face value the explanation that a few
spectators may have overheard Mark Hughes, the City manager, talking about
fitness problems before the game, as Davydenko suggests occurred when
supporters listened in on a conversation he had with his wife in the stands
in Sopot? No, me neither.
That is why we should be grateful for our knowledge that only football wallows
in the murky depths of corruption; for, if we did not know this, we could
jump to all sorts of hasty conclusions about the noble, decent and
resolutely upstanding sport of tennis.
Caribbean power trip
Jack Warner, the delightful vice-president of Fifa and special adviser to the
football federation of Trinidad & Tobago, claims that Roy Keane, the
manager of Sunderland, has a callous disregard for small countries because
he would not release Dwight Yorke for a match against the United States in
Chicago. He is wrong.
Trinidad & Tobago is not a small country, or even two. It is Warner’s
personal fiefdom, with an incongruously overblown significance in world
football, caused by Warner’s political power within the governing body. That
is why the FA was creeping around out there in June, in the hope of winning
Warner’s support for the 2018 World Cup bid. Yorke was present, too. He
could often be seen around Port of Spain’s flashest hotel, in clothes that
suggested he would soon be working up quite a sweat, although not the type
of which any manager would have approved so near to match day.
Despite this, Yorke played 14 minutes against England. “I remind you that a
player’s greatest honour is to represent his country,” Warner sniped. How
can Fifa have any credibility when a man as ludicrous as this is allowed
power? Keane knows all about representing a small country. Tinpot
dictatorships, however, are something else.
Conflicting emotions
The most amusing juxtaposition of the week? All the sages braying about how
England’s national team have ceased to matter then squealing in childish
fury because they could not get highlights of the win over Croatia on cheapo
terrestrial TV. Make your minds up, chaps.
Getting partial to the area
Sergei Rebrov, the former Ukraine player, has warned Roman Pavlyuchenko,
Tottenham Hotspur’s new arrival, of the pitfalls of life in North London. “A
lot of dark-skinned people live there, so naturally the crime rate is
higher,” he said. “It is not nice to be a robbery victim, so I suggest Roman
does not walk around that area.” There is a grain of truth in this because
when Rebrov played for Tottenham somebody got mugged, but it certainly
wasn’t him.
