A couple of hours after finishing what was intended to be the first and final draft of this column, I was forced into a rewrite. An excoriating, potentially award-winning polemic that will now never see the light of day, the original version was mildly critical of the kind of football fans who relentlessly bore everyone to tears with grievances regarding their dissatisfaction with the owners of their football club, but are invariably too apathetic to do anything even remotely useful that might in some way lead to the departure of those custodians who are the source of so much disgruntlement.
Like those fabled match reports quickly deleted by panicking football writers when Manchester United staged a late smash-and-grab on Bayern Munich’s Champions League hopes two decades ago, the column I had written was largely accurate but ultimately rendered nonsensical by a late, unexpected intervention. As if sensing Newcastle fans were about to be singled out and publicly belittled for repeatedly complaining about Mike Ashley without ever doing anything that might reasonably be expected to help get rid of him, one website devoted to doing exactly that finally invoked the nuclear option and actually called upon fans to stop attending the team’s games.
Related: Sad departure of Rafa Benítez says everything about Newcastle’s woes | Harry Savill
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