George Caulkin's new piece

[ewerk 31195]

 

 

The only thing we expect, no matter the allegiance, is f***-up. F***-up after f***-up. A compendium of f***-up, f***-up squared or cubed. An infinity of f***-uppery and then, just when you think you cannot stand any more f***-up, one more f***-up just to f*** you off.

 

Very well put.

[The Fish 10963]

 

Very well f***ing put.

 

[Rayvin 5295]

That is a superb piece. I wish he wasn't behind a paywall...

[Sonatine 11542]

Crisis a weary friend of the Mike Ashley era at Newcastle United

George CaulkinApril 11 2014 11:04AM

Quiz question: what do Newcastle United (ever-perplexing football club), Pat Sharp (DJ, recently seen in I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!), Flavia Cacace (a regular on Strictly Come Dancing), Alicia Douvall (50 Greatest Plastic Surgery Shockers), Nancy Dell’Olio (former girlfriend of Sven-Goran Eriksson) and Fue Hair Clinics (branches in Harley Street and the Midlands) have in common?

 

The answer is a who, not a what, and he was pictured sitting alongside Mike Ashley at St James’ Park the other week. He might be an unfamiliar figure amongst supporters, so much so that some wondered whether he might be an investor seeking to take control of Newcastle, but this is a man with a deep and close association to the club and its leading protagonists. Meet Keith Bishop who, in his own words, is a “PR and crisis management specialist & celebrity agent.”

 

The crisis management bit is (sadly) self-explanatory. From the hiring of Dennis Wise, the departure of Kevin Keegan and Alan Shearer, the baffling presence of Joe Kinnear (twice), a bitter relegation, the renaming of Newcastle’s home, Chris Hughton’s sacking, two failed attempts to sell the club, the arrival of a controversial payday lender as chief sponsor and much else besides, crisis has been a weary friend of the Ashley era, even if most of it has been self-inflicted.

 

At Ashley’s Newcastle, a juggernaut delivering crisis has always been hurtling around a blind corner. It is a combination of the retail billionaire’s methods of doing business (just because something is done a certain way is not reason enough for him to do it), and decisions which have either been dreadful, crass or caused pain but, whatever the reason, you can understand why a “PR and crisis management specialist” might be useful. Not to mention busy.

 

Newcastle have their own PR and media team. Good and decent people they are, too (I have to write that or I’ll get banned, obviously), even if circumstances sometimes present them with a brick wall/forehead kind of challenge. There have been victories for communication – fan forums, a Twitter feed which was one of the worst (let’s all buy a Newcastle gnome!) but is now witty and engaged – but they tend to get lost in a fog of negativity, journalist bans and other stuff beyond their control.

 

Why an outside agency is either required or desirable is not something I can answer – aside from the sheer quantity of work – although, whether at Sports Direct or in football, Ashley has tended to surround himself with people he knows and can trust. Newcastle are not the only sporting institution on Bishop’s books; he has worked with Leeds United and Rangers, in which Ashley also owns a seven per cent stake.

 

In a subtle way, Bishop has become part of the furniture at Newcastle and yet few fans would be aware of his involvement, let alone the extent of it. He has attended the odd Alan Pardew press conference, was in the London hotel room when Derek Llambias, the former managing director, embraced glasnost and detailed the club’s push for “stability” a couple of years ago and was recently Ashley’s match-day companion. He is not hiding.

 

On the website for Keith Bishop Associates, he is described as “one of the best-known names in the PR business. Keith, or The Bishop, is a familiar face around Soho, the pulsing heart of the entertainment and PR industry, while he’s equally well-known in boardrooms and executive offices not just in London, but the length and breadth of Britain.”

It continues. “Aside from his stunning range of skills, Keith possesses something that no amount of money can buy and no amount of wishful thinking can acquire – experience, but he also has the acumen and insight to put all this to the best possible use for his clients.

 

“His address book has been compared with a particularly hefty volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica and it’s the envy of most others in the profession. He counts as his friends and clients everyone from archaeologists to zoologists with just about every possible profession in between, while he inspires a fierce loyalty, admiration and affection, even in such a cut-throat and instantly changeable industry as ours.”

 

There are several points of interest here. Bishop could stroll down Grey Street and not be recognised and yet he clearly enjoys a profound influence on Ashley and others. Second, there can only be fascination at the unusual link between Newcastle, the club of Milburn, Keegan, Robson and Shearer, and the self-styled Bishop of Soho, whose varied professional clients include Aldo Zilli, the chef, Les McKeown, the lead singer of the Bay City Rollers, and the bloke who was, until recently, the face of Sky Sports News in the North East.

 

At face value, the common ground does not appear obvious and yet the qualities which Bishop lists as his great strength, aside from the crisis part – “a deeply personal approach that gets results,” – is also fundamental to Ashley’s modus operandi. It always has been. One of Llambias’s sons was involved in designing the website in question and on his own Twitter feed (@BishopofSoho), there is a photograph of Bishop with “the fab Mrs Pards.”

 

At a club which has occasionally veered towards the dysfunctional, where relationships can be strained and painful and where public words have been pored over and picked apart, it is easy to see how a “deeply personal approach” would be important; a whisper in the ear, encouragement, smoothing egos, networking between disparate opinions, finding common ground, drawing together. Perhaps “The Bishop” is the glue holding Newcastle together.

 

On a related front, who knows how involved Bishop was with the 1400-word statement which accompanied Lee Charnley’s promotion as Newcastle’s managing director this week but the phrase “deeply personnel” did not apply. It read like a document that had been passed from desk to desk, office to office, caught like a piece of glass in the tide, robbing of it of edge and definition to the point of translucence. By the end, it was scarcely there at all.

 

In normal circumstances, you would implore clubs to communicate more openly with their public, but when Newcastle do it they speak to customers, not fans. This, too, is at Ashley’s insistence, and the effect is utterly disheartening. Where was the love, the passion, the empathy, the sense of history or belonging or possibility? While there was “delight” at Wonga and praise for “dedicated, hardworking and loyal employees”, where was the thanks?

 

Where was the thanks for that average attendance of more than 50,000 which Charnley acknowledged makes Newcastle “the third-best supported club in England”? Ticket prices may be (relatively) reasonable, but investment such as that at a time of recession is worthy of recognition beyond corporate blandishments. Where was the gratitude for steadfast backing during a season where the league position has become a mirage?

 

Newcastle may, in Charnley’s words, have “never been in such a stable and healthy financial position,” but they have scarcely felt so empty. As Michael Martin, the editor of True Faith, put it in a brilliant, withering editorial this week, Newcastle have become a club that “exists to exist,” that does not view knockout competitions as a priority, that has lost three consecutive matches to Sunderland, that can employ Kinnear, that sold Yohan Cabaye, their best player, without finding a replacement, that has failed to make a permanent signing for two transfer windows.

 

As Martin wrote: “This season is far from the worst I’ve seen by a long chalk. I’ve been angry, frustrated before but I’ve never felt this level of disillusion, disconnection or depression at what is going on at the sorry excuse for a football club I have the grave misfortune to have an affinity to. Whether it’s my age or the collective disappointments the club has provided down the years catching up with me, I don’t know, but I look upon almost everything associated with our club and I don’t see anything at all I actually like any longer. I am completely alienated from it.”

 

Martin’s opinion is far from a lonely one. It is not a scientific sample, but plenty of people I know – friends, family, the Twittersphere – are questioning their ties to a club which can feel more like the footballing wing of Sports Direct than a grand old institution straining for glory. Charnley concluded his statement with a desire to “make Newcastle United the best it can be.” The addition of the phrase “pound for pound” was as depressing as it was inevitable.

 

Within the building, his elevation has been received with relief and fragile optimism. With Kinnear no longer around, there is hope that Charnley, Pardew and Graham Carr will form a tight-knit group that can marry the wishes of the manager to the strengths of the chief scout and Ashley’s insistence that acquisitions are predominantly young and of good value, which has not always worked. Steve Harper describes Charnley as a good man and his opinion is one I trust.

 

The statement referred to signing “one or two players per year to strengthen the squad,” but this is an aspiration rather than a reflection of what will happen this summer. After recent events – Pardew putting numbers on possible transfers followed by an agonising, slow-motion failure to get any “over the line,” – fans will take more convincing, but, someone authoritative I’ve spoken to insists that Newcastle will be more active than any club outside of the elite. We shall see soon enough.

 

Something has to give. Newcastle may well be a “well-run club,” with players on course to meet the “incentive scheme,” which will kick in if a place in the top ten is secured (they are presently bossing the race for ninth), but they are also in a difficult and dangerous place. Sunderland have plundered more league goals at St James’ than they have in 2014 and aside from their most recent sequence (three defeats, 11 goals conceded, none scored), results have been erratic.

 

When they lose games, Newcastle have a habit of losing badly (in ten of their defeats, they have shipped three goals or more) and coupled with a lengthy list of connected disappointments, some historical, some not, the feeling endures that the club is once again tip-toeing towards a precipice. Pardew, for one, understands that his authority has been dented, particularly in the wake of that nonsense at Hull City, and is in dire need of a positive result. And more than that.

 

Newcastle are a contradiction, “well-run” and forever falling apart, always asking for judgement to be deferred. Whether they realise it or not – and you would hope that, in spite of this week’s life-sapping mission statement, some of them do – they are in the throes in crisis, one which is not immediately visible and one which, given their league position, might prompt confusion elsewhere. It is a crisis of meaning, of confidence, of purpose. It is a less tangible crisis than what The Bishop is used to, but recognising it and managing it is vital.

[Happy Face 29]

[David Kelly 1260]

Newcastle have become a club that “exists to exist,”

 

That is, depressingly, excactly how I see the club at the minute. A football club should be striving towards a goal and a club of our size should be striving to get as close to the top of the league as possible and aiming to win any cup competition we enter. But when the guy at the top isn't interested you get what you have now.

[Monkeys Fist 43063]

That's another excellent, if depressing, article from George.

[Anorthernsoul 1221]

That's another excellent, if depressing, article from George.

 

He's a top writer is George, always hits the nail on the head. As painful as that may be.

[Kitman 2207]

We're a zombie club, it's true. There's really no point to us other than making up the numbers in the PL.

[aimaad22 4222]

Utterly depressing but true.

[The Fish 10963]

 

There is no straining for glory at Newcastle

George CaulkinMay 15 2014 14:05PM

Listen closely on match day at St James’ Park and you can hear it. Beneath the clamour for Alan Pardew’s removal, the chanting against Mike Ashley’s tainted stewardship, you can hear it. Beneath the swells of noise which still pummel Newcastle United’s stadium, when you can close your eyes and conjure those warm, aching memories of Shearer and Sir Bobby, Keegan and beyond, you can hear it. Tick, tick, tick. The sound of a football club ticking over.

Look across the country and you will see teams in peril, indebted to the eyeballs, haemorrhaging money. You will find anguish and despair, the newly-relegated wrestling with reduced status and job-losses. Throughout the divisions, you will stumble upon fractured dreams and sharp disappointment, concerns that careerist managers or stellar players will move on. But you will not see anywhere less life-affirming than Newcastle.

Read through the minutes of the club’s latest Fans Forum and experience a moment of cold, grey clarity; Ashley and Lee Charnley, his managing director, are not custodians of a proud sporting institution, they are caretakers. There is no straining for glory, pushing for excellence, or speculating to accumulate, they are keeping the place tidy and double-checking that the lights still work. Tick, tick, ticking over.

There was no fresh discovery – the heavily-trailed confirmation that Pardew “will remain the club’s manager,” barely counts – and yet with each repetition of these bland and misery words, bereft of any feeling or colour, we understand more about Newcastle’s standing. My favourite sentence was probably the “commitment to an open and consistent communications process.” Co-writer: David Brent.

The humourless, corporate language is not a coincidence; it has been one of the few consistencies of the Ashley era, where programme notes, statements and press releases are passed from desk to desk and stripped of love, until they read like the most turgid of annual reports. Don’t let them Geordies get too keen, whatever you do. Don’t get their hopes up. Play down, minimise, obfuscate, offend.

In the case of cup competitions, their attitude is now entrenched. “The board reiterated that the Premier League will remain the club’s priority,” they said and, in itself, there is nothing unremarkable here. Whoever you are, the league is always the priority, the bread and butter, the paying of bills, the bedrock of any season and more so, perhaps, when the consequences of relegation can be counted in the tens of millions.

It is impossible to actively prioritise a tournament which, by its very nature, is unpredictable; all it takes is one blast from the referee’s whistle, an own-goal, a bad decision, a wondrous intervention from an opponent to make planning worthless. By the same token, you can be set up to have a go, you can pick your best team, motivate your players, instil in the club the desire and ambition to win something, the emotional importance of ending that journey.

Yohan Cabaye (“injured” although fit enough to play the matches immediately before and afterwards) and Loic Remy did not start against Cardiff City in the FA Cup third round on January 4 and Newcastle duly lost. Those who say the XI picked by Pardew was strong enough have a point, but the atmosphere was flat and beaten from the beginning and did not waver. They have not progressed beyond the fourth round of either domestic cup under Ashley.

The Fans Forum again. “The board outlined research into Premier League clubs in relation to domestic cup competitions in the last five years, with Swansea City the only club outside the traditional top six to win a domestic cup and not be relegated in the same season (Birmingham and Wigan Athletic were both relegated).” Research over the last five years is a contradiction in terms. It is a five-minute click-fest on Wikipedia.

How about this season, when Sunderland’s fortunes were resuscitated and then inspired by their run in the Capital One Cup? How about Hull City, who have definitely not been relegated and are in Saturday’s FA Cup final? What about Portsmouth (not, admittedly, the best model of financial probity), who won it six years ago and finished eighth? Since 2000, Leicester City, Blackburn Rovers and Middlesbrough have all lifted a trophy and stayed up, outside the top-six.

This is not prioritising, this is close to saying that cups are unwelcome (which, in retrospect, is pretty much how Newcastle’s season in the Europa League has been portrayed). Here is the next passage: “Independent research into the cost of relegation over the past ten years showed there is a 50 per cent chance of not gaining promotion back to the top flight and a 30 per cent chance of being relegated to League One or further. In addition, if clubs do return to the Premier League, it takes four years on average.”

What if Newcastle could finish higher in the table than their most recent 10th? “At this moment in time, the club’s priority is the Premier League.” The choice being offered is stark: stay in the Premier League or go for a cup and be relegated. It is also patronising nonsense.

Newcastle are averse to opportunity. When they finished fifth in 2012 and had momentum behind them, their only senior signing was Vurnon Anita, whose midfield position was not a priority. By the time January came along and a small squad was stretched and struggling, they were obliged to splurge. Then came Joe Kinnear and a wasteland spell of Director of Football, which brought two transfer windows without a permanent addition.

They were sixth on Boxing Day, with a chance to kick on. Instead, Cabaye was sold – for less than Ashley wanted – and promise dissipated into dreadful form and growing animosity. Contrary to the statement which accompanied Charnley’s recent promotion, when he said Newcastle’s intention is to sign “one or two players per year to strengthen the squad,” they will be far more active this summer, but this is less a demonstration of ambition as simple necessity.

Without Cabaye, Newcastle are barren creatively, particularly with Pardew unwilling to accommodate Hatem Ben Arfa. Without Loic Remy, whose loan from Queens Park Rangers is now complete, they have no regular source of goals, and without Shola Ameobi and Luuk de Jong they have no back-up, no matter how pale. Replacing them will be costly, although with the money they have saved and the riches banked from television revenue, they can afford it.

Newcastle have become self-sufficient, but no boundaries are being pushed. At the Fans Forum, it was said that “the owner is not actively trying to sell the football club,” and while this is true – no bank or broker has been engaged – there is a sensation of limbo, stability as an end in itself rather than a side-effect of sound and structured leadership, tick, tick, ticking over, waiting for the right offer, loveless and lacking soul. They are a football club where football is no longer a “priority”.

[David Kelly 1260]

The last line sums it up perfectly. We really might as just change the name to Newcastle United limited because we really aren't a football club any more. Mind you, we're not united either!

[Graing 15]

Utterly depressing read there.

[Monkeys Fist 43063]

As ever, a great piece from George, but it is so depressing , especially the last line.

[ClubSpinDoctor 0]

SEB

[Park Life 71]

Brilliant as usual from Caulkin. Tip my hat to you Sir!

[Kevin Carr's Gloves 3963]

SEB

Only ever seen SEB as a reply on RTG.

[The Fish 10963]

Only ever seen SEB as a reply on RTG.

What's it mean?

[ClubSpinDoctor 0]

You go on RTG? It got disabled access?

[Gemmill 46022]

Lads, lads, lads.

[Kevin Carr's Gloves 3963]

You go on RTG? It got disabled access?

Are you trying to look pathetic or does it juat come naturally?

[Tooj 17]

https://www.theblizzard.co.uk/articles/the-great-betrayal/

 

 

Along Stowell Street and up to Gallowgate, hemmed in by the illicit, everything mam would scold you for; men weaving through traffic, a chuffing of tabs, the fucketty-twat, rat-a-tat swearing, pie-flecked gobs crooning mayhem. A half of orange squash at fart height outside the Strawberry and it is ten to three and tears are prickling and panic clenches and you cannot swallow but the rush is on and you bolt it.

Moved and buffeted, onto tiptoes, Dead Sea swimming, but a sea alive, afroth with yanking current, past the walls to the turnstiles though pockets of meat smells, piss and ale. Step-dad on one side and a neighbour on the other – his tickets, his offer, an eight year old’s queasy nod – but nobody had told you it would be this affront to childhood, to responsible parenting. This obscenity, this stench, this first time, this only time, this cesspool.

A struggle up some steps and then a struggle to comprehend, a long field of emerald bordered by grey, fringed with concrete, by black and white. Glorious green in a monochrome landscape, vivid and out of context, too vivid to wrest your eyes from. It is what you remembered stuffed between the adults, packed so tightly that you rose when they did, arse-down when they sat. The rest of your view: the back of someone’s parka.

No teams, no scorers, no specific date, just a pressing of eyes and that flash of green. Nothing else brought you back, nothing else made sense, certainly not the invisible, middle-distance game you did not witness. Nor the shouting or the scuffle for the bogs at half-time, the leaving five minutes early and the dull, distant cloud-burst of two late goals (you would never do that again). Just that big grey city green.

That was how it began and that is how it remains; arrive at a stadium and search out the grass, man-made but natural, defying the stanchions crowding in on it. There would be human heroes – Keegan as a player, Beardsley and Gascoigne, with his chip-fat shine and bagatelle feet – but the tingle of that feeling, eyes wide at the incongruity of an urban savannah, the darkness of encroaching terraces, is what burrowed inside.

It is what Newcastle United meant. That oasis inside St James’ Park. In a city as foreign as Marrakech, manic and polluted, nothing like home, like Durham, with its university skin and pit-village veins, but the green and the football and Keegan’s return and then the promise of energy pulled me to it after college. 22 years later – 35 since the first time – it keeps me there, bound to it by work, relationships, a shadow of love.

The job makes it different. You get closer to the club, but the boundaries extend to Sunderland, Middlesbrough and elsewhere and there is a professional reserve which prevents your embrace. There was no reserve with Keegan, that defiance of a bedraggled history, that have-a-go fluidity, and love is expressed in different ways; players became friends. Slaughtered at Gretna Green (another green), with one of them your best man, you say a woozy yes.

Now (never more so) there is a yearning to give assent again, to renew vows with a place that has both grown and retreated, but this is a team which does not win – although that, in itself, is not so unfamiliar – a dry, joyless club which operates like the footballing wing of a retail empire. A club where cups are everything, the essence, the futile goal, those decades of waiting, but where cups are now nothing, no longer a “priority”. It’s business, just business.

No coal, no ships, no steel, but a legacy of hapless football, of pygmies with reins around mammoths, urging them towards irrelevance. From ambition burnt out by vanity and pawning the future, to silence from the boardroom, relegation, Joe Kinnear, the Sports Direct Arena, press bans, Wonga, the sieving of emotion, the Premier League tribunal which described Newcastle’s evidence as “profoundly unsatisfactory”. Profoundly unsatisfactory: make that the club motto.

Crap football is one thing. Mediocrity was once a mantra, the selling of players a recurring habit, until Keegan arrived, fumigated the first-team dressing room and lit a spark beneath a city. There had always been fury and frustration and stumbling backwards to a precipice, but there was always hope, too, no matter how skinny or misplaced. A chance. Newcastle is now a monument to the death of hope, a club which exists with the sole aim of existence.

Stop the clock, turn back and ask, “What was it again? What brought me here? Why?”

Michael Martin, fan, editor of true faith, the fanzine, representative of the Newcastle United Supporters Trust: “It’s a local thing. It’s a community thing. It’s a way of looking at the world from a north-east angle, from a corner of a country often forgotten, it’s the cap badge of our Geordie identity. It’s family, friends, the street, the estate, the village you were brought up in. The club should stand side-by-side with the aspirations we have for the north-east, wanting to be better, to give us pride and recognition.

“The 1974 FA Cup run is the first thing I remember really well, the Leazes End at the end of the Forest quarter-final, Supermac, Jimmy Smith, Moncur. My old man having a bit crack with Jackie Milburn on Grainger Street and Milburn calling my old man ‘son' and asking me if I played and then walking off into the crowd and no-one taking much notice.

“And it’s Keegan, so much is Keegan, believing and making us believe we can do better and must do better. Massive shows of support all over the country – the San Siro with 12,000 Mags pinching ourselves we were really there. Sir Bobby, with so much of the Milburn way himself but more cunning, unaffected, comfortable in his own skin and tough but not hard (there’s a big difference). It’s the away end at Roker Park during the miners’ strike applauding the NUM lads with the banner from East Durham. It’s us alone, Geordie and fuck the rest of you.”

Chi Onwurah, fan, MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central: “I’ve been an MP for four years now and have met many important and even very important people, but it was only recently when I met Malcolm Macdonald that I had cause to imagine my nine-year-old self arriving at Hillsview Primary School playground and saying that I would one day be arm-in-arm with Supermac and then looking at the faces around me. It would not be jealousy there or even disbelief but absolute awe that I should raise my sights so very high.

“That’s what Newcastle meant to me as a child and although since then I spent many years living away from Newcastle and watched the team play mainly in London grounds I still stand in awe of them, for all I hate the Wonga name emblazoned across their shirts.

“For me, the arrival of Ruud Gullit as manager was very important. He didn’t bring the club much success, but as a child I would avoid Gallowgate and the ground because of the National Front presence, so to see fans honouring him with dreadlock wigs made me realise how much had really changed (thanks in part to the work of Show Racism the Red Card and other groups).

“Then there were FA Cup finals, Sir Bobby, Kevin Keegan managing us up from the bottom of the second division, being in the Premiership race, Shearer scoring … I can’t really talk about silverware but I’m looking forward to that changing.”

Max Roberts, fan, Artistic Director of Live Theatre, Newcastle: “At the age of 18, when I moved to Newcastle to become a student, I was a stranger in a strange place and a long way from home but I liked the band Lindisfarne, the McEwan’s Best Scotch was cheap and thanks to my lecturers and a couple of inspiring mentors (writers CP Taylor, Tom Hadaway) I quickly grew to love the north-east and its rich social history and radical traditions.

“Unbeknown to me it was a great place to begin shaping a sensibility that would inform my work as a theatre practitioner. The north-east’s identity and culture were distinctive and vibrant. Newcastle United seemed to be etched into the heart of that culture and so it wasn’t long before I became a regular on the Leazes End. They got to the Cup final the year I arrived and whilst the league form was erratic, I loved the maverick personalities and talents.

“Little did I know that such fluctuating fortunes were to become the norm, but I still enjoyed the bus journey into town, the walk up the hill and a good luck pint in The Trent House. I always travelled in hope rather than expectancy in common with the vast majority of true football supporters.”

Roberts talked of Jimmy Smith, Terry McDermott, John Tudor, Pat Howard, Terry Hibbitt, Tommy Cassidy, Alan Kennedy. Of Supermac, Keegan, Chris Waddle, Beardsley and Peter Haddock (“an average footballer, but I loved the name.”) Of Mark McGhee and Micky Quinn who, “like many players from working-class backgrounds simply ‘got’ Newcastle and entered into the spirit of the region’s identity and culture.”

Keegan as manager, then later Bobby “brought some of the best games it was possible to witness,” and the players – local or otherwise – “seemed to genuinely connect to the club, the city and its supporters … You genuinely believed they wanted to play for the club and shared their managers’ passion. They seemed to recognise the club’s significance to the city, the north east as a whole and, most importantly, the lives of its supporters. They also won more times than they lost.”

The hearing of it helps, the hearing of it hurts and not simply because the winning has stopped (the winning barely started). It cannot just be generational, cynicism corroded further by time, because although things have been more perilous than this, it has never felt so empty. The Newcastle United of autumn 2014 is no longer leaking money and it is in the Premier League (just about), but bonds have strained and snapped. A club should attract and nurture bind; this one is cold.

Michael Martin: “There isn't anything I like about it at all. The strip is shit, a great modern stadium is defaced with appalling advertising, the manager is a puppet, shouldn't be there and the players are all making a move to get somewhere else, somewhere better. Mike Ashley just wants Newcastle to advertise his horrible cheap shops and to keep the TV money rolling in.

“It’s dead-eyed, zombie football, meaningless, the antithesis of what sport should be about – getting better, striving, dreaming, stretching – it’s none of those things. The fans who remain like me are powerless, defeated, apathetic, fucked over, empty.”

Chi Onwurah: “As an MP, I don’t regard myself as a proper fan anymore. I don’t get to go to, or even watch, every home match never mind the away matches and I can’t name every attendance and every squad member, but I am still a supporter and I still stand in awe of the team and United, match days, St James’ Park, the black and white, the sense of unity, that in this city, unlike Liverpool or Manchester or Glasgow or Birmingham, if you are into football then Newcastle is your team. They all mean as much to me as before.

“But I also feel saddened and shamed by the link with Wonga, another sign of the ownership’s total lack of respect for the fans and for the city. I’m often out knocking on doors around Newcastle at the weekend and the sight of five-year-olds playing in the street with Wonga shirts, innocent placards for 5000 per cent interest rates, breaks my heart.

“Almost equally bad is the sight of some of the richest young men in Newcastle telling some of the poorest that they should go to Wonga. I’ve said I won’t go to St James’ Park for matches while the team is sponsored by a legal loan shark. Some of the club’s actions like renaming St James’ Park and bringing back Joe Kinnear seem explicitly designed to play with the fans’ emotions. I have no idea what the club’s ambition is, but it is certainly not to be at the heart of the city. Sometimes it doesn’t even seem to include footballing success.”

Max Roberts: “For the most part, the club has been owned by idiots; greedy bastards who lacked the wit, wisdom and most tragically of all, the final ambition, to achieve greatness. They were all blinded by avarice and the possibility they could make millions in their fortuitous roles as temporary custodians of the club as the game’s finances rocketed out of control.

“And as for the present ownership? In 2008 and 2009, Live Theatre created a play about the plight of the club and its new ownership. Ashley’s tenure was the biggest story in town and it seemed like a tale that had to be told. The first production was called You Couldn’t Make It Up. It was so successful we had to bring it back in an updated version as the club’s fortunes plunged further downward and we were relegated on that sad afternoon at Villa Park. We called the sequel You Really Couldn’t Make it Up.

“It’s difficult to rationalise or justify why I remain a supporter and season ticket holder – the club I support has been transformed ‘into a glorified advertising hoarding’, as someone wrote, ‘a works team largely bereft of joy’ – but as I’m the same fella who watched Chester FC through thin and thinner and have avidly followed my eldest son’s experiences through grass-roots football, I obviously require my live match fix. Like many people I find such simple pleasures a brilliant antidote to my professional occupation.

“I live and work in a great city, in a region of sublime natural beauty with some of the finest landscapes in Europe. It has great universities, restaurants, museums, cinemas, art galleries and theatres. You can see world-class art, some of it created here, with a universality and quality that touches hearts and minds, nationally and internationally.

“So surely it’s not much to ask for a half-decent, attractive-to-watch football team that recruits world-class players and augments them with locally-nurtured talent? Surely we can aspire to follow that team in Europe or to the final of a cup competition? And surely that team should connect directly to its community and its supporters? I don’t think that’s asking too much of a club that's the third-best supported team in the country.

“The current transfer strategy and youth development programme at Newcastle can never produce the loyalty, commitment and connection to the place where they perform and the fans that come to see them. The club is now completely enveloped by the owner’s indifference and ruthless economic strategy. It's faceless. I’ll try to be more succinct – it sucks. Am I concerned? Yes, passionately and angrily.”

It is not just to supporters and the media that the club are closed to (for more than a year, three local newspapers, who should be family, have been prevented from attending press conferences and sitting in the press-box); they have locked and barred their doors to other institutions, to politicians. The club’s Foundation is a worthy body, but the dots are not joined and stories are untold, in a place where there is a desperation for pride.

Michael Martin: “The Supporters Trust is banned from a pointless ‘fans forum’ which, on reflection, inflates the profile of the Trust because they fear it and are aware it has the wherewithal to expose the crass manner in which they run the club. As for true faith, I’ve no interest in having any kind of relationship with any of the current mob in the current situation. I have no respect for them, no regard, no faith, no belief, no trust in anyone who works for Ashley. I've no interest in being lied to, patronised or misled by Ashley's saps.”

Chi Onwurah: “I have had no engagement with the club – the club, that is, not the Newcastle United Foundation – beyond a joint appearance at one Wonga event. I wrote to Ashley to invite him for tea in Westminster. It was a very nice letter and I took a long time over it but the only response was a note from Lee Charnley (the managing director) not to bother Ashley again.

“They do not encourage dialogue and instead I have engaged with NUST and with the Sports Minister, the Shadow Sports Minister, the Labour policy team and other MPs – such as Alison McGovern – who are concerned about the state of football today more generally. Labour’s policy on fan engagement is one of the fruits of that engagement. It is said countries get the politicians they deserve, but no-one would argue United fans have the ownership they deserve.”

Max Roberts: “It would be great to think that the club actually cared about where it resided and who came to watch it – but under Ashley it simply does not. It would be fantastic to think that an institution like Newcastle United in the heart of the city might be keen to promote understanding and awareness of issues that, as an arts organisation, we feel we have a responsibility to explore with young people.

“It seems the club is simply not interested. Even if we felt it worth having a crack, I’d be at loss as how to establish a partnership that might develop such projects. Our first port of call might be via the local media, who we enjoy a strong and important relationship with, but as the club has severed its dealings with the local press that would be a non-starter. It feels clear that the club has no desire whatsoever to engage.”

On a recent Saturday, that journey again, shorter now, bereft of uncertainty, each step well-trodden by repetition. Along Stowell Street, inhaling rendered duck fat and soy, a hopscotch exhaling around last night’s kebab puke, spray-painted near the casino. Slower for the hill, through Gallowgate car park to the side of the Strawberry, turn left and skirt the club shop. Too early for seething waves of people, never too late for discounts, reductions, roll up and pay up.

Fingertips on the bottom of Sir Bobby’s statue, staring south to Durham and then parallel to Barrack Road, beneath the Milburn Stand, a sharp right and inside. Kick-off is delayed because a new jumbo screen is untethered in the wind and the ground is empty and the breeze gusts through it and you march towards steps, that sensation of knowing unknowing, like those anticipatory seconds in the car before the sea fills the horizon and the sea will be there, but you haven’t seen it yet and so you cannot quite be sure.

You climb slowly towards the sky, the stands darkening the view, each stride bringing light to the black, not feeling panic, no coughed back tears, but waiting to remember, waiting to feel anything but dread, anything but this stomach-fist of sadness. And then it opens and is there, that same long field of emerald, but the eyes flicker to it and away, tempted by rivals, beckoned by blue and red, by the words and the logo scrawled on a noble space, by the sirens of nylon and acrylic. The moment dissolves. There is a sale on at Sports Direct.

 

[PaddockLad 17643]

[Happy Face 29]

 

Tweeted it out and it's hitting a nerve with Rangers fans too.

[trophyshy 7084]

Shared this a gooner who said the other day he likes Mike Ashley.

 

His response was "do you really think you would be miles better with different owner/manager.. maybe 5th or 6th like in the Robson days?... but Pardew got a 5th place.."

 

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!