Ashley’s words too late to appease fans (From The Northern Echo)

Ashley’s words too late to appease fans

8:39am Tuesday 16th September 2008 in Sport By Scott Wilson

HAVING digested Mike Ashley’s emotive Sunday night statement, the over-riding opinion of most Newcastle supporters appears to be: “Too little, too late”.

Why has it taken the biggest set of supporter demonstrations for more than three decades to force the Magpies owner to end his selfimposed media blackout and attempt to outline his vision for taking the club forward?

And why, in more than 1,600 carefully-constructed words, has he still failed to address the one burning issue that continues to make his position untenable in the eyes of the Geordie masses?

Why has he backed former Swindon manager Dennis Wise ahead of two-time European Footballer of the Year Kevin Keegan, and why does he feel his London-based cabal of friends are the best people to run Newcastle?

Unless he addresses those two issues, his attempts to portray himself as the saviour of a club that might otherwise have gone to the wall will count for nothing.

Even as they stuff their “Cockney Mafia” T-shirts into the bottom of their clothes drawer, most fans would be willing to concede that Ashley has done some good in his 16 months at the helm.

He has addressed a debt that was rapidly getting out of hand, signed two or three young players who appear to have potential and, lest we forget, generated immense goodwill with his appointment of Kevin Keegan in January.

But in the space of eight months, he has lost that goodwill forever. He has lost it because he has displayed a blind faith in a group of associates who are simply not qualified to carry out the job they are being asked to perform.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a scouting and recruitment system that divides labour between a series of highly-trained specialists, although for the process to have worked, Keegan needed to be aware of it from the moment he was appointed.

But there is something wrong when that system stands or falls on the judgement of Wise, someone whose previous scouting experience stretched to the recruitment of a couple of League One midfielders for Leeds United, and Jimenez, a former Chelsea doorman whose only business experience appears to lie in the field of property development.

While other Premier League clubs were staking their futures on the expertise of specialists, Newcastle were displaying blind faith in a group of Ashley’s friends.

When those friends alienated Keegan, the one figure Magpies supporters trusted implicitly, the ensuing fall-out was always going to make it all but impossible for the current regime to remain.

Ashley had to choose which way he was going to jump and, as Friday night’s failed negotiations proved, he chose Wise and Jimenez over Keegan.

The club’s supporters, as they were always bound to, chose differently.

And for all the club’s attempts to portray Keegan as a misguided romanticist who hadn’t watched a game of football in three years, and the at least partially valid argument that Newcastle’s fans have displayed unjustified loyalty to a serial quitter, there are rational reasons to suggest they were right to side with their idol.

For all his faults, Keegan was not naïve enough to assume that Newcastle would be in the market for a Thierry Henry or a Ronaldinho.

And while Ashley might have claimed in his statement that the fans wanted “huge amounts spent in the transfer market so they can compete at the top table of European football now”, those words merely perpetuate a well-worn myth that supporters at St James’ Park are completely detached from reality.

Keegan didn’t want Henry or Ronaldinho, he wanted Carlos Cuellar, Stephen Warnock and Sami Hyypia.

The club’s supporters didn’t demand miracles, they merely expected that their manager’s demands would be met to the best degree possible.

Instead, Wise and Jimenez ploughed their own furrow and signed a striker and an attacking midfielder on transfer deadline day, ignoring the obvious gaps at centre-half and full-back that will now plague Newcastle for the whole of the first half of the season.

Crucially, they also displayed a staggering indifference to the supporters’ sensibilities by failing to explain their decisions.

Ashley and his cohorts have erected a wall of silence that has placed an implacable barrier between themselves and the fans.

That bred suspicion then contempt, as supporters bridled against a regime based more than 300 miles away that appeared utterly indifferent to their fears and concerns.

When those fears began to be realised, further silence meant supporters lost any semblance of faith in the people running their club.

In the business world, Ashley’s shunning of publicity has been interpreted as a sign of strength. But in the mediafuelled world of football, it has undoubtedly created a position of weakness.

His relationship with Newcastle supporters has already passed the point of no return.