Odličan tekst sa true-faith-a:
HAPPY NEW YEAR tf
Past, Present, Future!This time of the year is always one for reflection and making grand plans for the next twelve months so we are in no mood to buck the trend.
At New Year, we are on 30pts and sit well in the PL and if the season ended now, we’d all be happy. But it doesn’t end now and there are huge challenges ahead for us to make a success out of the season. Success is meeting Mike Ashley’s target for the season, which is a top ten finish. If we hit that target, we’ll have had a very good season and we’ll mark this one down as another step on the club’s recovery from the Shepherd-Hall years and the disaster of relegation in 2009.
Of course, stages in the club’s history don’t fall into nice bite size chunks of twelve month periods. For what it’s worth, my view is there isn’t one big thing that will lead a club to success or failure. It is a succession of decisions which will deliver triumph or disaster. They need not all be made by the same person and some times you can’t see whether they are good or bad immediately they are made.
For what its worth, I believe United has made some correct calls in the last eighteen months but its made some blunders too and left us speculating on the grand plan for Newcastle United.
Wizened, older readers of true faith will know we were of the view the running of Newcastle United under the axis of Hall-Shepherd was a car crash particularly in its latter years but the seeds of that failure perhaps go back to 1994.
When Ashley bought United in 2007, he inherited a mess on just about every front. The club’s finances were in an appalling state. We were carrying an unsustainable amount of debt, running at a loss and the club’s infrastructure was virtually non-existent. Shepherd’s final act as Buffoon No.1 on Barrack Road was to appoint Sam Allardyce, the equivalent of putting rotten fish under the floorboards of the house you’ve just sold.
Under Hall-Shepherd we were unquestionably all fur coat and no knickers. And the fur coat was on tick. As Keegan had led us to the PL and we thrilled the country with fantastic football and money poured through St James’ Park, Sir John’s eyes rolled and he embarked upon nonsense schemes for a Sporting Club Newcastle, a grand delusion which would uproot Durham Wasps from their traditional home and plant them into a grotesque franchise at the Arena and pour money into mad cap ideas for Rugby, Basketball and anything else he thought SKY might buy the TV rights to. There was even a United car at Le Mans for God‘s sake. The publicity hungry Chairman may have spoken about a team of eleven Geordies but it was all talk. Land was bought for a youth academy and training facility but the years rolled by and nothing happened. It carried the whiff of property speculation in my opinion. Whilst Man Utd, Liverpool and Arsenal poured money into infrastructure we scrapped our reserve team. The true faith solicitors are probably relieved we’ve left United’s relations with agents under Hall-Shepherd well alone here. It was utter folly. A Wallsend lad by the name of Michael Carrick, advised by his family there was no route to first team football at his home town team, joined West Ham. Throughout this era, the salaries and dividends paid to Hall-Shepherd were massive. PLC AGMs were regularly held in London at times that made it extremely difficult for NE-based supporter-shareholders to attend. Ask yourself, why?
God knows what scouting arrangements the club had in place but manager after manager brought in an endless stream of duds that dragged the club into the mire. Llambias has stated that when he took up position, United were still paying the transfer fees of players who had left the club years earlier. By 2007, the debt was becoming unsustainable and the club running at a loss. Shepherd’s chairmanship was a car crash. The bad planning, the head-spinningly bad decisions had caught up with Hall-Shepherd. Sir John Hall knew this and wanted out. We were linked to sales to cold blooded investment agents like Belgravia and Polygon, both of whom appeared to take a look at the books and think better of it. Into this Mike Ashley, came sleep-walking. Why a businessman as savvy and successful as he, chose not to do due diligence continues to baffle. The reasons why he bought the club will probably be never known but he has acted in haste and repented at leisure for a large chunk of the near five years he has been the main man on Barrack Road. He bought the club with no apparent idea what to do with it, took advice from the wrong men and on 24/May/09 at Villa Park, amidst the abuse and cat-calls of the home fans that those of us there, will never ever forget, we were relegated.
Summer 2009 was probably the worst time in living memory to be a Newcastle United supporter. I recall a pre-season game at Darlington talking to lifelong Mags who looked ill at what we feared was about to befall our club. That mood was not helped by a hiding at Orient which has now taken on an almost mythical (probably overblown) significance in the club’s fight back from the abyss. We all wanted the club to be sold that summer but no-one would touch it with a bargepole, well apart from a local dreamer with no money. The clamour was for Alan Shearer to be appointed but that didn’t happen. Our former No.9’s arse hasn’t moved far from a BBC couch in the near three years since the last time he sent out a football team under his direction. Chris Hughton started that season amidst daily updates about people buying United, new managers coming, rumours of Ashley putting the club into administration, KK’s case at an FA tribunal exposing the men running United as liars but we stayed on course. Players baled out but a core of decent lads, coached by a good man remained and funded by Ashley who picked up the players tab we marched back to the PL full of expectation and a new mood of unity which lasted a fortnight as Llambias made some comment about “no capital outlay” which we took to mean very little for new players. And still we couldn’t be blown off course, the players ramping up some brilliant results against those who had celebrated our demise most loudest - Vile, murdered 6-0 in the sun at SJP and the Mackems humiliated on Halloween as the new piss take “Sunderland Til Half Time” sang to the echo as their fans poured out of the Leazes End exits after the first half hour and their team 3-0 down.
Then Hughton was gone … the rumours proven right and in walked Alan Pardew, impressing no-one and coming with a set of wild and wholly unsubstantiated rumours that only good results have shaken off. It has been a spectacularly good decision. Twelve months on , Pardew has proven himself as good a manager as we have had since Sir Bobby Robson (though that is probably damning with feint praise). Whoever made that call, made the right one. Tactically astute, modern, articulate, intelligent and with an attention to detail that should shame some of his predecessors. He has benefited from a renewed sense of purpose in the club’s infrastructure. He has good people around him in Carver, Carr, Beardsley and Stone. There has been ongoing investment at the training ground and we now have a superb facility. We now have an extensive knowledge of talent in France when under Hall-Shepherd we didn’t have an extensive knowledge of talent in Fawdon.
Ashley has set an achievable target of finishing in the top ten this season. It’s a good, sensible target for a club still in recovery. I would suspect that is Pardew’s target to deliver and Llambias has another about the balance sheet. I would guess it is to “return” Newcastle United to profit by the next time the accounts are published. I’d guess both men are on bonus plans to achieve their targets. it’s the Ashley way.
If both targets are achieved, Mike Ashley will be entitled to turn and face his detractors with a satisfied grin on his face. The crowds are back up beyond 50K+ - attendances achieved in two successive games for hardly glamorous opposition in Swansea and West Brom. And achieved in the teeth of a recession with a series of inventive deals which have pulled fans back to St James’ Park. Niall Quinn must grind his teeth at the turn-outs at SJP under an unpopular owner and have something of a quandary that whilst those who do turn up at the SoS raise banners adorning his mush there are those who stay in the house or the pub or wherever.
The vitriol which once flowed in Ashley’s direction has now all but stopped. There are those, who though will never be described as his admirers, cannot ignore what he has done at the club. We are a better, more stable and balanced club in January 2012 than we were in January 2007, five months before he took over the club.
The money stuff will never get Geordie juices rolling but think of Leeds, Portsmouth, the fate about to befall Bolton (£110m in debt) with relegation in the post, a Venkys run Blackburn Rovers, Sheff Wed, Boro, Forest, Sheff United, Southampton et al and put our position into some perspective. That is where we imagined we were going in the summer of 2009 and with bloody good cause. That we aren’t traipsing through that nether-world of abuse and humiliation is a massive consolation.
And yet. There is something cold-blooded and clinical about Ashley’s running of United. Everything is for sale including heritage and hopes for the future. The sale of Carroll is one which broke our hearts but which could have been salved by reinvestment in the squad. That didn’t really happen, though we are a better squad for the wheeling and dealing that took place in the summer. Nolan, Barton, Enrique joined Gateshead’s finest on St James’ Boulevard, heading south. We now fear the same with Tiote, Collocini, Cabaye and Krul. We suspect the whole purpose for United is to be a stepping stone to better things for our club whilst Ashley takes advantage of the global popularity of PL football to advertise Sports Direct to potential new markets. We despair at St. James’ Park’s attempted renaming and speculate the sponsor’s name on United’s shirt next season will be Sport Direct. Expect sales to plummet both through NUFC shops and the Sports Direct shops that undercut them were that to happen.
Where is it going? Where does it end? Is Ashley clawing his money back from player sales, minimum investment but staying in the PL ahead of selling the club? But with the world economy in such a dire state, who has the money to take us on and challenge an elite in the PL bloated by a Russian oligarch, a sovereign oil state and others cushioned by near 20 years involvement in the Champions League? Is the plan to get us back into a healthy state before tilting for the top again? Or is the plan for a repetition of where we are now forever and ever and ever and the club a giant advertising hoarding for Sports Direct? Newcastle United constantly cast as a spare parts bin for clubs further up the food chain and 50K souls fretting at SJP every match-day? Who knows? Mike Ashley might. And he’s not really saying is he?
But we are in the here and now of a transfer window just opened with a squad which is woefully thin and a about to get thinner with players leaving for the African Cup of Nations. I have hope for the emerging talents of Shane Ferguson, Haris Vuckic and Sammy Ameobi. But they desperately need match practice and I’d suggest a season in the WTCTSDTD would be ideal. We saw what that did for Carroll but also Collocini and Enrique. But we can’t let that happen because the squad is far too thin. A central defender and centre-forward should have been recruited in the summer. It looks unlikely they will be in January. If we do shell out decent money for a centre-half, I’d guess that might mean Colo is on his way.
Mike Ashley is a gambler. Pardew talks about getting him revved up, firing his enthusiasm. Its weird relationship for us to have with an owner who seems to have lukewarm enthusiasm for the hugely important football club he owns but one we continue to support in massive numbers. Numbers that would grow with the hint of success. Newcastle United has never reached its full potential. But what is the gamble? Is it Ashley achieving maximum returns for minimum outlay. That, after all, is the basis of a gamble. We’ll have a better idea by the end of January and I expect Mike Ashley to be in credit again on the player trading that happens in these windows.
All the best,
Everyone at true faith.
http://www.true-faith.co.uk/tf/features.nsf/0/50DBE2290DABCA088025796F002CDDF8?OpenDocument
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