One leaves, one stays...choose

I voted for Pardew. The ultimate goal has to be owner(s) with ambition for footballing success and i think thats more likely to happen if we stay up. We are building up some serious downward momentum which needs to be changed quickly.

 

Who sacked Hughton and appointed Pardew? Who continues to employ Pardew despite an utterly atrocious record stretching several months while just about everyone else on the planet would have pulled the trigger? Who leaves our squad short of players season after season? As Keegan said, Mike Ashley knows nothing about football. He is the problem.

 

I voted Ashley but will also be happy when Pardew goes.

 

I voted Pardew, but if we're assuming we would get a brilliant replacement for either one, it's got to be Ashley as Pardew would be out the door anyway once our amazing new owner watched one corners training session.

 

I voted for Ashley, I think that he is a great businessman but a terrible club owner, when you have so much money the only reason for being here is to chuck the Profit and Loss sheets out the window and go on the journey that Abramavich and Mansour have done, as long as Ashley sticks to his policies of operation it doesn't matter who the manager is. The very simple fact that we will not pay the transfer fees to bring in 4/5 quality players and then pay salaries of £80k to £100k per week will leave us down in the bottom half of the PL and fighting to stay in there, Arsenal will spend about £180 million on wages this season, we will probably spend £63 million, Abramavich has put in over £900 million into Chelsea with some £700 million written off and nearly £200 million converted to equity, yep it's a lot of money but look at what they have won and where they are.

I have been a big one for the wait and have patience to see if there will be any change but I can't see it, the fact that Ashley has let it be known that he will look to sell the club in about 2 years indicates that there will be no change in his policies, the difficulty comes then when you consider who is out there that will buy a PL club and will they as others have said be another disaster, the reality is that to do anything other than survive you need a rich owner who is prepared to spend. Ashley should stop looking at Newcastle as a business and more like a night out at the casino, chuck a couple of hundred million on Black and White and give it a spin, you never know he might actually have some fun.

 

I don't think either of them is what we want for the club. I do think we needed Ashley's business model to fix the way fat freddy brought the club to the edge of bankruptcy, but we should have kicked on after finishing 5th. Ashley isn't re-investing enough to even keep us standing still, never mind moving forward.

We need a better owner and a better manager but there is no guarantee we'd get either with a replacement, and the odds are that we will end up with worse on both scores. Having a worse owner would be far more devastating than a worse manager so gone for Pardew out of fear of ending up with another Vincent Tan or Peter Ridsdale. At least we have a club to moan about.

I'm not sure Pardew's replacement will be better. He will probably be worse cos he'll have the same players and recruitment policy, but at least the atmosphere will improve - for a few games at least.