Andy Cole: Sold by Keegan two weeks after this tattoo was done!January. Possibly the most disappointing month of the year.
Christmas is over, you are back to work and still wondering what happened on New Years Eve and where you are going to find the money to pay for all the presents, booze and food you went through during the festive period.
January 2011 turned started out as usual, nothing much was happening, nothing much was going to happen. The media tried it’s best to drum up stories to make us watch their television channel or buy their papers, but it just wasn’t working; NUFC were having a very uneventful January. This was a cause of much frustration for some, as it was well believed at the time that we needed strengthening. So, in time honoured NUFC tradition we waited until the last minute until we did something that took everyone by surprise. Not just us NUFC fans, but the footballing world as we sold Andy Carroll to Liverpool. (more…)
As a prelude to the morra’s clash with Tottenham, here’s one of the highlights of the Keegan “Entertainers” era involving both teams.
This magificent drubbing actually came after something of a barren spell for Kevin Keegan’s squad, and also after the disappointment of “that” season when we almost cracked it, and Keegan cracked up under the pressure of Alex Ferguson’s psycho-war. (more…)
Mike Ashley - 3 years at the helm.Between the vast swathes of speculation in these last few weeks, I nearly managed to forget that a certain anniversary is about to be upon us.
That is an anniversary to mark Mike Ashley having owned Newcastle United for three years! Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun eh?
Technically, Ashley completed the sale three years ago this coming Sunday, but with me being faced with the very real possibilty of having a stinking hangover from Saturday night, and the fact the nearly all of us will be wrapped up in the World Cup by then, I thought it would be best to, errr, ‘celebrate’ this milestone prematurely and get it out of the way. To say Mike Ashley’s reign on Tyneside has been a turbulent one would be a wee bit of an understatement. His tenure includes having had five different managers in three years, two failed attempts at a sale, and one very big falling out with Kevin Keegan, and that is the one thing Ashley will probably find the hardest to come back from, plus countless others that I have probably either forgotten or haven’t got enough time to write about. (more…)
Kicking off the latest chapter in our one year retrospective of all things Newcastle United and NUFC Blog, we move on where we left off, with an Ashley rant from Hugh de Payen. This one is from November 4th of last year and is called “Random gripe about the random Toon“. The “random” in the second instance referring to Ashley’s seemingly random approach to planning and investment in building up the squad. It also contains a great line about Kevin Keegan (well I thought so anyway) “although it’s quite ironic that Keegan was constructively dismissed for not wanting to spend money on a player”.
Coming next, I am including a trio of stories about the NUST’s “Yes We Can” campaign for fans to buy the club from Mike Ashley, though in the end it a resoundingly a case of “No We Can’t”. The first story, written by Hugh de Payen once again and called “Are you the next Mike Ashley?“, covers the launch of the ill fated campaign and was published on November 11th. It also includes a paragraph I particularly liked about ‘fan owned’ Barcelona’s outgoing President, Joan Laporta: (more…)
Before I begin with the second instalment of our little retrospective, I would like to thank all those who left such wonderful comments about the blog in the first instalment yesterday, and indeed, everyone who has stuck by the blog in general.
I left the first part of this retrospective with one of our stories (by Geordie Deb) written in the aftermath of the sad death of Sir Bobby Robson, as it seemed an appropriate point to finish on. It is now time to move on, mostly through speculative tosh and non stories regarding Ashley’s second attempt to sell the club, as the publicity hounds seeked to captilise once again on one of Newcastle United’s sorrier periods. Of course, there was also the great exodus of supposedly top players at the club which relegation and lesser income streams brought. We saw the departure of Duff, Beye, Bassong, and of course, Michael Owen.
As I hinted at in the previous chapter, this period also saw the emergence of Chris Hughton as a leader under the most testing of conditions as Newcastle got their season in the Championship underway. Both of these facets were kind of hinted at in the first story I have included by someone who was undoubtedly one of our best writers, but who is sadly no longer with us, Hugh de Payen. His small news article on the 29th August last year, “Fire sale over, says Hughton“, seems to hint, albeit faintly, at some kind of ‘turning of the corner’ for the club, with Hughton succesfully calling for an end to the fire sale, and though much depleted in terms of ‘big names’ a greater collective spirit seemed to be emerging, a spirit which barely existed in the previous season of emnity and flux. (more…)
