Pardew accused of presiding over Tenerife “drinking binge” before Toon cup crash
Posted on January 30th, 2012 | 89 Comments |
It contains a bawdy tale of late night binge drinking and €20 lap dancers as Pardew and the players celebrated Steven Taylor’s 26th birthday party at “Lineker’s Bar” on the island.
Before embarking on the trip, Pardew told the media:
“If I am honest it is not a work situation and a case of making the players work hard and run. It’s a breather. We will have a rest and a chat and socialise a little bit.
“We will obviously do some training and hopefully be refreshed for Brighton. Don’t get me wrong, we won’t be drinking but it is a kind of ‘let’s see where we are’ and analyse everything. We will enjoy each other’s company and hopefully stay tight until the end.”
If the People story is to be believed, what Pardew meant by “tight” could possibly be open to interpretation. However it must be said though that the only really “incriminating” pictures in the story (which I have posted here) are of birthday boy Steven Taylor, who of course is out for the season with his Achilles tendon. I do suspect that if any of the players currently playing in the squad were caught “il flagrante delicto” (“while the crime is blazing”) that they would have undoubtedly be published by a muckraking rag such the People, which leads me to doubt some parts of the story’s integrity, but lets get to the story itself.
After a few paragraphs of the usual self righteous tabloid fury, the reporter fumed on:
“Fellow revellers told how the stars got over Newcastle’s last league game – a humiliating 5-2 defeat by strugglers Fulham – by drinking Lineker’s Bar DRY and paying for lapdancers. Fans will question whether the bender in the early hours of Wednesday was the ideal warm-up for the FA Cup tie in which defender Mike Williamson scored a second-half own goal.”
It then goes on to quote “Bar manager Jason Templeman, a 35-year-old Brit ex-pat” who allegedly told the rag:
“The guys had a lot to drink. I honestly couldn’t tell you how much but it was a lot. Pardew was steaming.”
After listing what the players allegedly had to drink during the alleged “binge” (twelve bottles of Laurent Perrier Rose champagne, five bottles of Jagermeister spirit, the entire stock of Corona lager at the bar and also “around half a dozen bottles of Belvedere vodka, plus wine and shots for girl revellers”.allegedly), the bylined reporter, Nick Dorman, also alleged that they were “singing raucously” and that two unnamed players sneaked off to a lap dancing bar saying:
“And despite the attentions of wannabe WAGs on the dancefloor, two players sneaked away to a nearby bar where strippers offering lap dances for just £17 each.”
Dorman then went on to quote unnamed “revellers” at the bash, who according to the him said such things as:
“Taylor was really going for it. He couldn’t get enough champagne and then he ended up pulling the best looking girl in the club. They were getting pretty close.” and:
“Pardew arrived first at about midnight and within half an hour a group of the first-teamers were here as well.
“They were really going for it. They drank at least a dozen bottles of champagne, five bottles of Jagermeister which had been ordered in specially and hundreds of Corona lagers. In fact they drank the bar’s entire stock of them.”
And also how the above mentioned Jason Templeman showed his exemplary professional discretion by immediately tweeting on the alleged debauchery to Leicester City player David Nugent (see photo above):
“nuge On it with NUFC Linekers Tenerife, they’re up for smashing the Linekers Banus jager train, fancy their chances?Lol”.
“Banus jager train” obviously being some kind of drinking challenge involving the German digestif spirit and cough remedy, “Jagermeister.”
Finally, after claiming that a local lap-dancer called “Konnie” told them that she gave two of the players dances at 20 euros a time, they quoted a holiday rep called “Dean” as saying:
“I thought we all drank a lot but those guys were wild.”
Hmmm, unlike the Mike Ashley “full monty” story and the Llambiasgate tapes, I do suspect that several aspects of this story have been somewhat exaggerated at least. Whilst Pardew has a reputation for encouraging a laddish drinking culture at previous clubs, which was undoubtedly the way things were during his days as a player in the ‘eighties, as I suggested above (and as you can see for yourself in the published photos), not one active Newcastle United player is photographed with a drink in his hand. However since the publication of the story, the Silver Supremo himself has come out and said on that trip, and the story of the alleged “binge”:
“I don’t think there is any correlation with that at all, to be honest.”
Hmmm once again. That’s hardly a firm rebuttal, a denial that any of the players apart from Steven Taylor were drinking excessively, though of course, that doesn’t means that they were. For the club’s sake, I do hope that they weren’t.
The rest of the photos
NUFCBlog Author: workyticket
workyticket has written 1091 articles on this blog.
Who’s that bloke with Rambo? He looks like Dean ‘Over-the-top’ Winstanley. Cripes.