To be fair mate, Rafa has said enough in his interviews since his contract ran down for anyone with an ounce of common sense to give us a wide berth. You really would need to be fooking mental to want to work for Ashley regardless of how much of an attractive proposition we are.
See you next season in the Championship lads !!
But that’s just it mate, the way you lads see Ashley and the way many managers will is totally opposite.
It’s a Premier League club, with loyal, if half witted supporters.
It’s in a magnificent city of music, food, culture, listed buildings, the polar opposite to how the fans have it perceived on Sky, in my opinion, and I’ll take the flack from fellow Mackems, the finest city in England to live in.
With FFP some may argue it’s a club being ran ahead of the game, debt free, making money, completely against the grain.
Top, top managers will say ‘**** that’ as they want to feel they can fight for trophies, but top, top managers got to top, top clubs.
Big support no longer makes you a big club. It makes you a known one, a famous one.
That’s what Sunderland and Newcastle are now, famous, historic clubs of note.
Now, living in Newcastle I see the passion for the club every day, every bit as blind as us Mackems about ours but heavily unbalanced. There’s about 10-15 gaffers in the world who wouldn’t want that job simply because of the Lions on the sleeves.
There are managers on the game that could get that club somewhere working bang under Ashley’s conditions, there are clubs doing well with far less outlay, there are clubs that have followed the Ashley route and are now self financing signings, my belief is that this is Ashley’s aim, a self financing club.
There’s an argument that it’s admirable, there’s a clear vision that he’s almost achieved it, and there’s a school of thought that he’d be there already had you lot gone with him a few years back instead of deriding and calling him a fat ****, and idiot, a moron.
A lot of Newcastle fans have their heads rooted in the Keegan and John Hall years, forgetting that the club racked up massive debts and with FFP would have been in major, major trouble.
Does he understand the club, not one bit. Does he care about the fans? Not massively.
Is he a horrific harm to the club? Is he someone that a neutral couldn’t work for? Is it him that’s killing the spirit around the place, or the group of fans driving embarrassing protests and initiatives that are a flop and a failure?
Take the passion for your club aside and you’ve a club, 2 years in the Premier league, who spent £20 million plus on a player last window and have just lost a manager who’d achieved nothing in the game for 7 years, who lead you along a path having agreed to go to the hotbed of China 2 months earlier.
You’re not in that bad a place. The phrase ‘reality check’ could have been coined specifically for you lads.
It’s pure emotion. Emotion doesn’t run business, doesn’t run football clubs. Emotion makes bad decisons, it makes you blind. This is that on a grand scale.
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