Newcastle United owners timeline doesn’t look too bad to me | OneFootball

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The Mag

·7 December 2021

Newcastle United owners timeline doesn’t look too bad to me

Article image:Newcastle United owners timeline doesn’t look too bad to me

The new Newcastle United owners have now been in charge for a couple of months.

Fair to say that an awful lot has been said about them since the takeover.


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Not much of it positive, at least when we are talking about the media.

Obviously we knew pretty much what to expect when it came to coverage of the human rights angle due to the 80% ownership by the Saudi Arabia PIF. After all, we had already experienced it for almost two years, since the first reports of this potential Newcastle United takeover, early in 2020.

Much of that coverage is fair enough, though a lot of it isn’t.

However, when it comes to the actual running of Newcastle United, I find the vast majority of what the media say, absolutely laughable.

The criticism of the new Newcastle United owners is often taken to ridiculous (nonsensical) lengths.

Day One (7 October 2021) – Mike Ashley leaves and hands keys to St James Park to the consortium.

Day Fourteen (20 October 2021) – Steve Bruce sacked.

Day Thirty Three (8 November 2021) – Eddie Howe appointed as new NUFC Head Coach.

Day Forty One (15 November 2021) – Bruce’s coaching team Steve Agnew and Stephen Clemence are sacked.

Day Forty Two (16 November 2021) – Club confirm Eddie Howe’s coaching team.

Day Forty Four (19 November 2021) – Lee Charnley sacked.

Day Sixty One (6 December 2021) – Sports Direct signs start to come down at St James Park.

We are now at only day sixty two that the new Newcastle United owners have been in charge and yet outsiders continue to try and ridicule the supposed lack of action in these 60 or so days.

On top of that, trying to undermine the new Newcastle United owners with such over the top criticism of what they have actually done in these past two months.

In so many situations, these new NUFC owners would have been criticised whatever they had done.

Newcastle fans were gutted that Steve Bruce wasn’t kicked out immediately but the new owners faced this absolutely ludicrous media campaign that was whipped up by Bruce’s pundit / journalist mates. How supposedly it would be shameful if Bruce was denied a ‘sentimental’ 1,000th game in management.

Steve Bruce repaid that generosity with an embarrassing pre-Tottenham press conference that shamed the club, saying he hoped that certain journalists would be ‘getting a slap’ from their bosses. We then had to sit through his latest and thankfully final clueless team selection set up and tactics as Spurs could and should have won by four or five, yet by sheer luck Bruce escaped with a 3-2 defeat in his final match despite the Newcastle players only having one effort on target between them in the entire match.

Then so much made of the supposed humiliation of Unai Emery (Villarreal now 13th in La Liga) turning Newcastle United down.

These things happen.

Frank Lampard decided late on not to take the Norwich job and yet that is never mentioned.

When Rafa Benitez left at the end of his contract, refusing to put up with the NUFC owner any longer, Mike Ashley was reported to have been turned down by as many as ten candidates who were approached and offered the job, not willing to work for Ashley and be a patsy / stooge, unlike Steve Bruce. Yet where was the ridicule from the media for Mike Ashley? Sam Allardyce revealed on the radio how even he had turned down Ashley after being offered the job.

Then what about back in the 2014/15 season, Alan Pardew forcing a move mid-season to Crystal Palace(!) rather then stay at Newcastle, due to Ashley’s ownership and zero ambition. No offence but Palace!

Instead of appointing a replacement, Lee Charnley on Mike Ashley’s behalf said that John Carver would be in charge whilst Newcastle United scoured the World looking for the very best new manager. Carver almost relegated Newcastle from what had seemed an impossible position, losing 13 of the 20 games he was in charge and only winning three of them. Jonas Gutierrez inspiring NUFC to eventual guaranteed safety in the very final game of the season.

Carver sacked and who was this best possible new manager after scouring the entire World?

Steve McClaren. They found him 30 miles down the road, out of work after being sacked by Championship Derby County. Yet another typical patsy employed by Mike Ashley after failing in the second tier (or lower). Does it sound familiar?

Yet where was the ridicule from the media? Searching the entire World for six months and Steve McClaren is the best you can find??? On the same level of embarrassment as giving Steve Bruce the job in 2019, Bruce last handed a job by a Premier League club in 2009 when joining the Mackems.

Any other Premier League giving Eddie Howe the job, would have been given overwhelmingly positive coverage. Homegrown manager who had taken little Bournemouth, saving them from the drop into non-league, then promoted all through the leagues. Then establishing them in the Premier League with a highest placing of ninth (something Bruce has never managed in his entire managerial career).

Instead, so many pundits and journalists wanted to only concentrate on the relegation in his last season at Bournemouth. Of course this is a negative BUT when you are at such a small club, pretty much every season you are at risk of relegation. then when it did happen it was on the very final day of the season and by one point, with a large helping of bad luck.

You then have the fact no Director of Football has been appointed yet.

The new Newcastle United owners making clear via trusted media that they are trying to make sure they get the right person and aren’t going to rush it. We then though see an ‘exclusive’ at the weekend from The Telegraph, stating that Michael Emenalo had been offered the job but had turned it down. The report claiming he’d turned it down because the Newcastle United owners refused to match his ambitions. The journalist further shaming himself by personally attacking Amanda Staveley, claiming she was a big problem because she was too interested in being in the media spotlight.

Hilariously, after the Newcastle United owners called The Telegraph journalist out on his story and said categorically that Emenalo had not been offered the job of Director of Football, the journalist in question had to embarrassingly backtrack and admit that it was NOT true. Michael Emenalo had indeed NOT been offered the Director of Football job by NUFC.

Just think back to when Mike Ashley appointed a Director of Football…

All the ridicule was reserved for Joe Kinnear, not Mike Ashley, which was always the deal.

Joe Kinnear constantly ridiculed for the fact that in a year, over two full transfer windows, not a single first team player was bought by Newcastle United. That was the whole point…Mike Ashley having no intention of allowing any players to be bought in those windows, employing Joe Kinnear to take all the blame and ridicule, whilst the media far too lazy to call out what was really the case. Or even worse, simply choosing not to report the truth of it…

Even the delay in getting the Sports Direct signs that have blighted St James Park for over 14 years, has been down to Mike Ashley. The new Newcastle United owners admitting via trusted media, not long after taking over, that they would have loved to take them down immediately, but that ‘contractual’ reasons were preventing them for the time being, but they were working on it behind the scenes.

Thankfully, yesterday saw the work start on ripping down the Sports Direct signage, the club confirming this was happening after an image circulated on social media that appeared to show this was the case.

The information above is what we do know, that timeline of what the new Newcastle United owners have achieved in just over sixty days.

Who knows how much progress is happening behind the scenes regarding the incredibly long list of problems / issues, due to over 14 years of Mike Ashley neglect?

All of this above is not to say these new Newcastle United owners have got everything right, or will do so in the future.

I am sure that they will make plenty more mistakes and at times do things that a lot of fans might not agree with.

However, when it comes to where we were on the morning of 7 October 2021 and where we are now on 7 December 2021…

It really is like night and day.

At the start of October, if you had told me that in the next eight weeks or so we would see Ashley, Bruce and Charnley and those repulsive SD signs all leaving St James Park…well, it would have came across as the cruellest of tales.

Simply giving false hope that we might be free of this absolute nothingness and ambition-free status that we had all been repeatedly lectured on by our enemies, as to all that we are supposedly worth.

That to think of Newcastle United as something that could potentially be so much better, was simply delusion.

Well, we even won a football match at the weekend, so who knows what might happen next?!!

What we do know though as Newcastle United fans, is that we have got our football club back and we have hope of better times ahead once again.

None of us knows what lies ahead, no guarantee of winning trophies or indeed of relative success, or indeed of even staying in the Premier League!

However, all that matters is that four letter word. Hope.

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