Only when a new owner buys out the hated Mike Ashley will the club’s fans appreciate the Saudi Arabia deal was not the one they needed to hitch themselves toPut the cans back in the fridge. Take down the Kylian Mbappé poster from your bedroom wall. Quietly delete the Saudi Arabia flag from your Twitter handle. Yes, the end is nigh for one of English football’s most unlikely summer romances. Boy meets sovereign wealth fund. Boy loses sovereign wealth fund over television piracy issues. Boy pockets £17m deposit. A tale as old as time itself.Of course, you don’t need to be a professional satirist to spot the heavy irony in Saudi Arabia’s bid for Newcastle United being thwarted by due...
Supporters’ group fighting Ashley is calling for a St James’ Park boycott – but would not be first to find apathy in their wayA 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...
The fact the protest scheduled for the Wolves game was postponed because it could ‘jeopardise the potential sale’ by Mike Ashley shows how much Newcastle supporters want changeApologies if this may sound terribly cynical, but when Mike Ashley announced that he was closing in on a deal to sell Newcastle United, possibly even severing his ties before the end of the month, it wasn’t easy knowing whether to take it at face value bearing in mind his track record for being – and I will couch this as politely as possible – slightly careless with the truth.Ashley does, after all, have previous when it comes to blurring the facts for his own means and, by his own admission, there have...
When will the generations of supporters too young to remember the thrill of a championship chase under Kevin Keegan see their club emerge from all the stagnation and drift?In happier times for Newcastle United, it probably summed up the club’s ambitions that a delegation from St James’ Park once travelled to Turin on the off-chance they might be able to persuade Juventus into selling Roberto Baggio on the spot.It’s a great story. They didn’t have an appointment. They didn’t have a contact at Juve and when the relevant directors invited Kevin Keegan, Newcastle’s manager at the time, he told them they must be round the twist to think one of the giants of European football would appreciate them turning up...
Chants aimed at Mike Ashley and swaths of empty seats at Stamford Bridge showed the depth of fans’ dissatisfactionIt was on 17 minutes that the Newcastle United supporters first made their feelings clear. “You fat cockney bastard, get out of our club,” came the chant from one corner of The Shed and it did not require Sherlock Holmes to figure out to whom their ire was directed. Mike Ashley was not in attendance but he has remained a notable figure in proceedings, on and off the pitch.First there was the chant, which could be heard again on three occasions during the second half, and then the makeup of those responsible for it. Newcastle fans regularly travel in good numbers but...