After failing to attain the point they needed to ensure survival given Hull's home defeat to Manchester United, Newcastle United were relegated from the Premiership today. After 16 years of roller-coaster football, the club returns to the second flight of English football. And let's be honest, no one's that surprised. Everything that could have been done to damage the club over the last few years has been. Firstly, the previous Chairman slagged off the fans and arguably the club's greatest ever player in a covert interview with an undercover reporter. Then he sold the club to a man that thinks wearing the shirt, sitting with the fans and fast-draining a pint of lager is appropriate behaviour for a serious businessman. Then said Chairman got into a very public wrangle with the fans' greatest living hero, Kevin Keegan. As if he was ever going to come out of that one with any credibility! And finally, as the fans were turning on him, his mates and the club as a whole, he appointed a throw-back of a manager with acknowledged health problems to attempt to turn round a group of over-blown no-hopers that were more likely to respond to Roy Kinnear (RIP) than a manager most of them had never heard of. The word "inept" somehow feels inadequate.
But as the dust settles on the debacle, and the image of the one tormented Geordie in the Villa Park crowd that really was bubbling is repeated across every screen from Blaydon to Beijing, one difficult to digest fact really does need to be swallowed. For whilst the prostitutes that have donned black and white kit and paraded their ineptitude and personal weakness across the pitches of England's top tier for the last ten months deserve all of the brickbats that will be thrown at them...the fans are as much to blame for this as anyone.
The fans have asked for the impossible, then kicked up an ungovernable stink when what they asked for could not be delivered. They want an owner to buy the club and invest hundreds of millions in players. When challenged, they quote Sir John Hall's approach. Grow up! When Sir John took over, the club was blessed with an enormous amount of latent value. He exploited it, made a fortune (he's an entrepreneur you know) and gave us Ginola, Ferdinand, Asprilla, Albert and Shearer to keep us happy. Now the latent value has been dispersed. The money's gone. But are the fans accepting of the fact that big-time-charlie status is no longer possible on Tyneside without a sustainable business model? No! They don't want to hear that no one in his right mind would invest in that club at the moment, because they've seen what's happened to Fat Mike. Until the fans can grow up and realise that the only way the club can re-attain and then retain Premiership status is through a sustainable off-field business model, NUFC will sadly be condemned to further failure and humiliation.
No doubt there are thousands (or should that be "thoosands") of pissed-up Geordies sitting in bars across the world calling for the summary execution of Ashley and Co as we speak. But how many of them are thinking about their own role in the whole sham? How many of them are considering the fact that if they'd let Ashley apply his model for club sustainability, let Dennis Wise deliver in his role of bringing in new players (or be sacked if he failed) and let Sam Allardyce have a proper go at developing a strong team and squad, they probably wouldn't be drowning their relegation sorrows today? Newcastle fans are always talked about as "the best in football," "highly knowledgeable" and "willing to turn out to watch 11 monkeys if they were playing in black and white shirts." Well, despite the fact that they had the opportunity to do the latter earlier today, the other cliches simply aren't true. I know this because I've been following the team avidly for 35 years. Newcastle fans are largely boorish, lacking in humour (certainly compared to the 1980s, when terrace humour was fantastic at St James's), unrealistic, naive and too partial (try to get one of them to acknowledge the genius of Sir Alex Ferguson). Maybe a spell in the lower reaches will change this. If, at the same time, it rids the club of the fat mockney, then relegation may prove to be a blessing in disguise.
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