So, the big news today is that Kevin Keegan has resigned as manager of Newcastle United, which probably means that owner Mike Ashley is likely getting his Mercedes overturned by an angry Geordie toddler as we speak, and that's only if he hasn't already been lynched by the local arm of the militant WRVS. Actually, the big news for me today is I've got a new coat and couldn't genuinely give two poos about Kevin Keegan's plight, but I expect it's a much bigger story to most of you than my choice of evening wear.
To be honest, it was always an inevitability that King Kev would eventually leave. He's notorious for throwing his toys out of the pram the minute things start going against him, and things were always going to be against him from the very off back in the north east. See, the problem with being hailed as a messiah by so many people is that it's incredibly hard to live up to those expectations, and even though the fans were still massively behind him and expecting him to win back to back Champions Leagues while walking unaided across the Tyne, he was never, ever Ashley's man and, let's face it, completely failed to live up to the hype with which he was reinstated.
We were told when 'King Kev' returned that, armed with Ashley's millions, Newcastle would crack the Premiership's, nay Europe's, 'entrenched big clubs'. He would bring trophies, medals and, most importantly, flair-filled, exciting football to St. James's. Shame, then, that all he really brought was some shitkickers and Claudio Cacapa. Oh, and the return of Joey Barton, who's return against Arsenal culminated in him getting his ankles kicked from under him by a tiny slip of a Frenchman who showed him up for the spiteful little bully he is. His 15-game ban cannot come soon enough.
What ultimately drove Keegan out, however, was his refusal to work alongside Dennis Wise. as Director of Football and general transfer meddler. Now, I'm fairly sure you could write what Dennis Wise knows about tactics and transfers in microdot on the top left corner of a very small postage stamp, so I can fully see why Keegan refused to work with the atrocious little oik, but that's the way football is going these days - Wise is Ashley's man and Keegan would always have to work under him or incur the wrath of the Chairman, and when he handed in his alleged him-or-me ultimatum to the board, he obviously overestimated the influence his popularity with the fans would have - Ashley quite clearly sided with Wise, and so Keegan is gone.
So where now for Newcastle United? Where now for Mike Ashley? He surely could never sit amongst the fans in the way that so endeared him to some of the Geordie faithful - they'd have him crucified upside-down on broken bits of folding seat by half time - and no replacement he could bring in from the board room could possibly placate the fans short of luring Jose Mourinho away from Inter Milan with promises of all the fish pie he can eat. If he does what many are already suspecting he will and appoints Dennis Wise, the fans will raize the place to the ground, such would be the hatred and feelings of betrayal around Newcastle. Keegan might not have been doing particularly well and the rest of football might have laughed at the Geordies for their almost religion-like reverence of a man with a bubble perm who has built a career on building teams that flatter to deceive, but he wasn't doing badly enough for the fans to understand why Ashley was meddling. By interfering in transfer policy so badly, he has made his own position almost completely untenable and I doubt he will last a year, taking a massive loss and going from a nobody to one of the most hated people in football in just over a year.
How the Newcastle fans must be yearning for the stable if insignificant Freddy Shepherd years.
While all this was going on, however, an almost identical situation was playing out a few hundred miles south, as Alan Curbishley was forced out of West Ham in almost identical circumstances. The chairman, eager to cut back on expenses, was displeased with Curbishley's spending in the transfer market and had begun to sell players from under his nose - George McCartney and Anton Ferdinand in the last week of the transfer window, just late enough for Curbishley to be unable to replace half of his defence, being the final straw.
I'm not sure if the 'Director of Football' at West Ham is as intolerable an oik as Dennis Wise, but he'll invariably be some sort of shit, and when I read this morning that the board were being advised to sack Curbishley by that runt Kia Joorbachian, orchestrator of the Carlos Tevez debacle, I knew that the former Charlton man had done the right thing in quitting - what is a 'Director of Football' anyway? A few years ago that would have been a mockingly Americanised description of a manager used to poke fun at our American cousins - now they have David Beckham and we have an utter bloody shambles.
Goodnight.
To be honest, it was always an inevitability that King Kev would eventually leave. He's notorious for throwing his toys out of the pram the minute things start going against him, and things were always going to be against him from the very off back in the north east. See, the problem with being hailed as a messiah by so many people is that it's incredibly hard to live up to those expectations, and even though the fans were still massively behind him and expecting him to win back to back Champions Leagues while walking unaided across the Tyne, he was never, ever Ashley's man and, let's face it, completely failed to live up to the hype with which he was reinstated.
We were told when 'King Kev' returned that, armed with Ashley's millions, Newcastle would crack the Premiership's, nay Europe's, 'entrenched big clubs'. He would bring trophies, medals and, most importantly, flair-filled, exciting football to St. James's. Shame, then, that all he really brought was some shitkickers and Claudio Cacapa. Oh, and the return of Joey Barton, who's return against Arsenal culminated in him getting his ankles kicked from under him by a tiny slip of a Frenchman who showed him up for the spiteful little bully he is. His 15-game ban cannot come soon enough.
What ultimately drove Keegan out, however, was his refusal to work alongside Dennis Wise. as Director of Football and general transfer meddler. Now, I'm fairly sure you could write what Dennis Wise knows about tactics and transfers in microdot on the top left corner of a very small postage stamp, so I can fully see why Keegan refused to work with the atrocious little oik, but that's the way football is going these days - Wise is Ashley's man and Keegan would always have to work under him or incur the wrath of the Chairman, and when he handed in his alleged him-or-me ultimatum to the board, he obviously overestimated the influence his popularity with the fans would have - Ashley quite clearly sided with Wise, and so Keegan is gone.
So where now for Newcastle United? Where now for Mike Ashley? He surely could never sit amongst the fans in the way that so endeared him to some of the Geordie faithful - they'd have him crucified upside-down on broken bits of folding seat by half time - and no replacement he could bring in from the board room could possibly placate the fans short of luring Jose Mourinho away from Inter Milan with promises of all the fish pie he can eat. If he does what many are already suspecting he will and appoints Dennis Wise, the fans will raize the place to the ground, such would be the hatred and feelings of betrayal around Newcastle. Keegan might not have been doing particularly well and the rest of football might have laughed at the Geordies for their almost religion-like reverence of a man with a bubble perm who has built a career on building teams that flatter to deceive, but he wasn't doing badly enough for the fans to understand why Ashley was meddling. By interfering in transfer policy so badly, he has made his own position almost completely untenable and I doubt he will last a year, taking a massive loss and going from a nobody to one of the most hated people in football in just over a year.
How the Newcastle fans must be yearning for the stable if insignificant Freddy Shepherd years.
While all this was going on, however, an almost identical situation was playing out a few hundred miles south, as Alan Curbishley was forced out of West Ham in almost identical circumstances. The chairman, eager to cut back on expenses, was displeased with Curbishley's spending in the transfer market and had begun to sell players from under his nose - George McCartney and Anton Ferdinand in the last week of the transfer window, just late enough for Curbishley to be unable to replace half of his defence, being the final straw.
I'm not sure if the 'Director of Football' at West Ham is as intolerable an oik as Dennis Wise, but he'll invariably be some sort of shit, and when I read this morning that the board were being advised to sack Curbishley by that runt Kia Joorbachian, orchestrator of the Carlos Tevez debacle, I knew that the former Charlton man had done the right thing in quitting - what is a 'Director of Football' anyway? A few years ago that would have been a mockingly Americanised description of a manager used to poke fun at our American cousins - now they have David Beckham and we have an utter bloody shambles.
Goodnight.
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