Good grief. I said the last few weeks incidents that have the Internet nuts getting worked up are actually not totally Ashleys fault. The clubs stance on Barton is the correct one, you're average football fan wouldn't expect not to get a heavy reprimand for behaving in the way Barton has. Nolan wanted a ridiculous amount of money over a period of time that would almost have certainly seen him become a hindrance to the club - I'd say he was a hindrance on the pitch for the latter part of last season, and I went to every game.
My point is that we are stuck with our owners, and yes they have made monumental errors but not everything that goes wrong is their fault and people need to address this or we will continue to appear to be reactionary, sheet waving Neanderthals on SSN. I also think they are quite spiteful, or at least like to prove a point and I think the feeling of contempt is mutual now.
I can't see Ashley leaving, it's as simple as that, mainly because he's not making any money out of NUFC, rather he's lost a lot due to his own errors when he bought the club. And this seems to be the story of the Ashley regime, make mistakes and be too stubborn to go back, hence compounding them. The mistake with Keegan was hiring him in the first place, a misguided ploy to win the fans around, he would never be the sort of manager they needed but they continued anyway. The mistake with Hughton was the way he was dismissed, and the fact Pardew was the 'experienced manager' that replaced him, Hughton may have been a lovely guy, but he was a very, very limited manager who had no control over the strong characters in the dressing room - we had 4 players suspended for disciplinary reasons at the same time, something that no good manager would stand for! They could have handled the situation much better but it was a public mess that the board made worse with their handling of it.
Believe it or not, I'm not an Ashley fan, but I'm a realist, he's not leaving and he's not as bad as people would like to believe. We genuinely could have worse in many ways, in the sense that I don't think he'll ever let us go down again, and we have signed some pretty good players so far in the window. As I've said, if we don't buy a striker I will be furious, until then, this particular chapter - eg the transfer window a - has not been the disaster people would have us believe. But this is NUFC under Ashley.