Toon target top six!
Posted on July 24th, 2010 | 127 Comments |
Come to think about it, the only real bone of contention this summer is over how much money we will, or won’t, be spending on new players.
New players, we have two of them. One of them, James Perch, would have probably come here anyway, regardless of whether or not we had been promoted, but he other one, Dan Gosling, wouldn’t have, no way. So why did he choose Newcastle then? Especially when you consider there was more than just us interested in the player. We don’t have a Kevin Keegan anymore, someone who can sell the club, the area, to a player and get them to buy into it, or do we?
It would appear that we do, only this time in the shape of Chris Hughton, well according to Dan Gosling anyway. He has revealed that Hughton has plans for Newcastle, and whilst they may be modest at the moment, they are by no-means trivial in the long-term.
“The manager has a vision of where he wants this club to go. I came up with my agent and my family, met him and Colin Calderwood, and we sat down and talked about how we’d like the next few years to go. He told us where he wants us to be, and I want to be a part of that,” Gosling told The Journal.
“I think the long-term aim is to establish ourselves as a top-six Premier League team in the next four or five years and I think it’s a realistic aim, and hopefully we can do it a bit sooner than that. It’s certainly a massive club with a massive fan base and I think the people around here deserve that.”
A top six team then eh? It would be nice and I will believe if it happens as I just can’t see it myself, but that is my personal view and I have been wrong before, only once or twice though. It’s an ambitious target to say the least, especially when you consider that we haven’t even survived one season in the Premier League yet, but it’s a target that aims to put this club back to where it belongs.
Fair play to Chris Hughton for selling that ideal to the player. At the end of the day, Gosling has said himself that he had the pick of a few clubs, and from the outside it looked like he was whoring out his services to the highest bidder in fairness.
West Ham, Sunderland and Bolton were all reported to be interested, and can you really imaging Ashley sanctioning wages that would be higher that what those three clubs would pay? I can’t. Gosling has said he moved here for footballing reasons, and the fact that Gosling wants to be part of where Hughton wants this club to be can only be a good thing.
Hughton is either a good liar and managed to convince Gosling that we could be in the top six in five years time whilst striving to ‘break-even’ without laughing, or he genuinely believes we can do it.
And why not I say?
If you ask the majority of the premier league teams then they will say they are aiming for top 6/7 in the long-term.
But its difficult with Man City spending widely and Spurs on the up. I can see being around Villa and Everton as long-term targets as they seem to have reached their peak in my opinion.