How Ashley's men let him down

Sep 15 2008 by Luke Edwards, The Journal

MIKE Ashley appears to have admitted defeat at Newcastle United but chief sports writer Luke Edwards argues the club’s owner might not be going anywhere quickly.

EVEN now, as he begrudgingly bows to unrelenting public pressure and puts Newcastle United up for sale, Mike Ashley has failed to grasp the real reason for his fall from grace at St James’s Park.

Even now, as he prepares to suffer the first humiliation of his business career and the club teeters on the brink of a disaster which could take a generation to recover from, Ashley cannot see why things have gone so wrong, so quickly.

Ashley cannot be blamed for wanting to buy a football club so that he can enjoy it. He cannot be blamed for wanting to implement a long-term plan based on gradual and sustainable growth and he cannot be blamed for not wanting to bring himself to the brink of bankruptcy in a vain effort to buy instant success and gratification.

But what Ashley can be blamed for, and what he must realise if he is to salvage something from the car crash that Newcastle United has become, is that his single, biggest and ultimately fatal mistake was in who he appointed to run the club for him.

Loyalty can be blinding and Ashley has been blind to the mistakes made by his friends. By sticking by them following manager Kevin Keegan’s row with managing director Derek Llambias and executive director (football) Dennis Wise over their interference in transfer policy, he has ostracised the one appointment he has made since he became Newcastle’s owner which gave his regime real credence and widespread support – Keegan. He has not seen that Llambias has been a disastrous replacement for former chairman Chris Mort because of his refusal to open any lines of communication.

He did not realise that Llambias’ aggressive approach to dealing with the day-to-day running of the club has upset and angered many of his employees, not least Keegan, whose decision to quit owed more to the arrogance and bullish behaviour of the former casino manager than any other individual.

He has not seen that Tony Jimenez’s persistent leaks to a London-based media has undermined his regime by emphasising the fact the club was being run from 300 miles away.

And he did not see that the presence of Wise as what has become an omnipotent director of football would not only incense those supporters who loved to hate him when he was a player, it would lead to the complete dissatisfaction and eventual departure of the football manager who united the club with its followers in an unbreakable bond.

For an astute and ambitious businessman, Ashley has been remarkably naive in how he has run the club. He has tried to operate a football club like one of his sport shops and has failed miserably.

Football is big business, but it is still not like any other big business. It is part of the entertainment industry and those at the top cannot simply stay quiet and hope the problems go away. The wall of silence the board erected after Mort’s departure in June allowed the divide to grow between club and supporters and suspicions to ferment even before the Keegan debacle.

In his for-sale statement yesterday, Ashley gave his most revealing insight into how he wants to run the club, but why wait until he has been backed into a corner because of the actions of his board? What would the atmosphere have been like on Tyneside if Ashley had made such a clear mission statement at the start, rather than the end?

When Mort had been in charge of the day-to-day running of things in his absence, the vast majority of fans had bought into his vision of the future.

Newcastle United fans did not necessarily want superstar signings and big-name players. They knew that was no longer viable and they believed Mort’s exposé of the club’s finances and the blunders of the previous regime which had left the club facing economic meltdown. Ashley underlined those facts again last night, but in that respect he was already preaching to the converted.

Nobody believed Newcastle would be able to sign Thierry Henry or Frank Lampard this summer, nobody thought it was realistic for the Magpies to enter the race for Dimitar Berbatov, but it was realistic to expect the management structure he still stubbornly defends to get the players the manager asked for and needed.

Newcastle could have done with another creative midfielder and a centre-back this summer, but just a new left-back before the transfer window shut would have been enough to keep Keegan satisfied in the short term.

There will be a certain amount of sympathy for Ashley following his emotional comments. It is sad that someone who wanted to enjoy watching football matches with his family on the terraces can no longer do that because of the strength of feeling against him and it is sad that someone who appears to have wanted to improve the football club has failed to do so because of the mistakes of those around him, but Ashley may still have the time to put things right.

He has warned that there will be no quick sale and it is far from certain that the buyer he is looking for is willing to pay the price he is looking for.

Indeed, at the same time as putting the club up for sale, Ashley has effectively tried to dissuade anyone from buying it by highlighting the size of the debt and the money needed to put things right in the short term.

As things stand this morning, as the unpopular Newcastle board look for Keegan’s replacement and the team tries to pick itself up after a home defeat to relegation favourites Hull City, it is difficult to tell whether this is the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end.