What’s the deal Mike?
Posted on February 26th, 2011 | 60 Comments |
I’m confused. Which is to say that I’m more confused than normal. For starters I’m confused as to how an email address that has never been used by me anywhere and was only set up last week has ended up on some spam lists. It’s already getting about 10 emails a day offering to increase the size of certain parts of my body, reduce the size of others or somehow make me rich from under my duvet.
But that’s an aside. What I’m confused about for the purposes of this article is Newcastle United.
We have at the helm of our club a certain Mike Ashley and I confess to not having a clue where he’s coming from and, more to the point, where he’s planning on going.
Ashley has threatened to sell the club more than once and the last I heard was that it was still his intent to sell it, but that he needed to secure Premier League safety in order to get his asking price. Has that changed?
I ask because a man whose sole purpose is to create something to sell is going to approach things with a different intent than a man whose purpose is to build something for the long-term. I think this is important and I haven’t got a clue which category Ashley now falls into.
What I’d like to see is an announcement from Mike Ashley explaining his intentions, but then again I’d like a Maserati GranTurismo MC Stradale, an island in the South Pacific and regular bedroom visits from the Minogue sisters, but those things aren’t likely to happen either.
I’m not what you’d call a rampant Ashely basher but neither do I want to have the man’s babies. He’s made plenty mistakes but he’s also had some good ideas and I try to mix cynicism about him with the positives in roughly equal measure. In the recent poll on this site I placed myself in the ‘maybe – I’ll wait and see’ category when it came to wondering if Ashley is good for this club.
Let’s take, for example, the recent extended contract of Cheick Tiote. The optimist will see that as a good thing because we’re tying in a highly-rated player until 2017. The pessimist, though, will just point to the fact that Andy Carroll had signed a long contract and it made absolutely no difference when Liverpool came calling with £35m in used notes.
For me – a self-confessed fence-sitter – something like the Tiote contract is a quandary. The delight at securing the services of the player is tempered by the fact that a contract obviously makes no difference if another club comes calling with the appropriate lolly. And I can’t put it into the context of the owner’s intentions because I don’t know what they are.
For reasons which further demonstrate my confusion (and unerring ability to find tangents) it puts me in mind of the ‘only one owner from new’ tag that’s applied to used car sales as some sort of positive selling point. Why is that a good thing? Surely it depends upon whether that one owner was a retired cleric who only used the car to drive little old ladies to church on a Sunday, or whether that one owner was a suicidal maniac who moonlighted as a getaway driver. Context – that’s what I’m getting at.
We are told that Ashley wants to build a sort of new Arsenal, which (if done properly) is a fine idea. But it’s difficult to get enthusiastic about that when the last thing we heard from the man who wants to build this new Arsenal is that he wants to sell the club.
There still seems to be a marked division in opinions about Ashley. If this site’s poll is anything to go by then only 12% of fans think he’s doing a good job, whilst 35% of fans think he stinks. Most fans are – like me – waiting to see what happens: 48% of them in fact, so I’m pleased I’m not the only fence-sitter around.
I’m just raising a lot of guff really. I could try to sound all arty and call it ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, but we really know that it’s just my usual random, disorganised rambling!
Anyway, I’ll clear off and go and be confused about something else now, possibly breakfast. Hmm, one egg or two with my scrapple and jellied cow’s foot? Tough decision for a fence-sitter like me.
I’ll leave you with a request: if anyone knows what Mike Ashley is really up to, please let me know.
PS. Entries for this week’s Prediction Competition will be locked at midday today, so if you want to enter please do so before then.
NUFCBlog Author: Hugh de Payen
I'm a baby-boomer of the punk rock persuasion, currently exiled in Somerset for crimes committed in a previous life where locals keep trying to poison me with something called 'scrumpy'. Hates sprouts, coat-hangers, Cilla Black, ornaments, Steven Seagull movies and 50 Cent (he's not worth 10).
Hugh de Payen has written 634 articles on this blog.
hmm me thinks he is plotting to get more bums on seats with his lady friend as our new mascot!