Tom Lappin: Honeymoon with the Toon Army is over as Ashley gets his tactics wrong

Published on Saturday 6 September 2008 00:01

IF A WEEK is a long time in politics, it must be a whole geological era in the English Premier League. If this were a television drama, jaded critics would be queuing up to point out that the latest preposterous plot twists were a clear case of jumping the shark.

Instead, we have a week where Manchester City being taken over by a real sheikh (rather than one of Sven-Gran Eriksson's fakes) and bidding for every superstar on the planet has been demoted to third item on the news agenda.

The latest farewell of Kevin Keegan understandably hogged the attention. Tears, messiahs, Geordie peasant mobs marching to the castle demanding blood, tubby magnates knocking back lager, the beady eyes of Dennis Wise: these were three days of delicious melodrama.

The key ingredient was the ideological gulf between Mike Ashley and Keegan, the ghosts of football future and past, if you will. In a previous era when disgruntled Newcastle fans thronged at St James' Park to voice their discontent, Keegan famously met them on the steps and told them that the sale of Andy Cole would turn out to be justified in the end. That took courage and a heartfelt commitment to the club and the fans. On Thursday night, Ashley's pot belly was conspicuous by its absence. If he fancies taking a seat in the stands with the Newcastle support at any game in the foreseeable future, he will have to buy several neighbouring rows of seats for his security goons.

Like much of Ashley's conduct during his ownership of the club, this week's events reveal his ignorance about the way football (and its eccentric variant, Newcastle football) works. Before buying the club, Ashley failed to conduct sufficient research into Newcastle's finances to appreciate the scale of their debts, and was dismayed when they became apparent. One of his errors apparently was a failure to understand that transfer fees are paid in instalments, and that Newcastle were still paying Real Madrid for Michael Owen.

Ashley's dealings with Newcastle suggest that he attempted to conduct football affairs with the same tactics as he brought (with enormous initial success) to his sports retail empire. That emphasised the importance of branding, acquiring such reassuring names as Slazenger, Donnay, Kangol and Lonsdale. It is hardly surprising if that encouraged contempt for the label-conscious consumer.

His mistake may have been to regard Newcastle United as just another brand, offering up Keegan as an acceptable frontman, and presenting an image of himself as just another beer-swilling lad in an XXL Toon shirt (previously Ashley's business profile made Howard Hughes seem like a raging self-publicist by comparison).

Offered the stark choice between maintaining the front by keeping Keegan involved, or sticking to his preferred way of doing business, Ashley has ditched the PR spin and opted for the financial bottom-line. The honeymoon has ended in an almighty punch-up.

Such tearful traumas were hardly going to attend Alan Curbishley's resignation at Upton Park. Although plenty of West Ham supporters were sympathetic to Curbishley, there was never sufficient affection to mobilise any form of protest.

Curbishley has been a victim of nothing more sinister than the credit crunch. Owner Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, whose empire includes the Icelandic bank Landsbanski, has had to retrench due to the new financial climate. This was always going to be a season of austerity. It would have been a more decent policy to tell Curbishley as much from the outset, and allow the manager to trim his squad in his own way, rather than sell assets behind his back. Curbishley after all, has plenty experience of working within a tight budget.

Instead, West Ham go in search of a new manager whom they can offer little in the way of significant investment. Yesterday, the club reportedly had half-a-dozen names on their short-list, and were beginning interviews over the weekend. The appointment may hinge on Wednesday night's match in Zagreb. In the highly unlikely event that Fabio Capello's unformed England team win against Croatia, Slaven Bilic's meagre salary and job prospects will look a little less attractive than the goodwill and seven figures on offer at West Ham.

It is far more likely that Bilic's love affair with his homeland will continue to the 2010 World Cup, in which event West Ham will need to find a successor to Curbishley elsewhere.

If a charismatic leader is required as a quick contrast to Curbishley's dullness, there is a tantalising option. I have suggested it facetiously in the past, but offer it as a semi-serious option: Kevin Keegan might be the kind of manager the West Ham fans could appreciate as, in a sense, West Ham fans are the Geordies of London, fantasists cursed with romantic idealism.

West Ham play Newcastle on 20 September. It would surely be worth getting in Keegan if only for that one match.