Mike Ashley is the greatest thing that’s happened to you lot. He’s given you everything you asked and you’ve spat it back in his face
Dropped this into this Newcastle-dedicated thread so as not to keep derailing the Rafael one with NUFC-related guff!
I'm genuinely interested to know what you mean by this. It's inevitable that I won't agree cos I feel so strongly about Ashley, but genuinely curious about the outsider's perspective.
As a fan of Newcastle, my experience is that Ashley has used our club to progress his other interests at the expense of the progress of the club. Meanwhile he has isolated, ridiculed and shot down club legends (/individuals we're extremely fond of) like Keegan, Benitez, Gutierrez and Shearer; overseen two relegations; allowed deeply unpleasant and grateful chancers like Joe Kinnear, Alan Pardew, Derek Llambias and Steve Bruce to oversee club operations for years at a time; allowed the commercial arm of the club to completely stagnate; let the infrastructure crack and mould whilst dozens of other clubs have invested massively in their's; sold-off the club's land for quick bucks and thus preventing growth in those areas; plus, as I said in the other thread, he's essentially holding his own club to ransom with the debt situation. But above all, he's manifested a grim agenda that our club is a small one that cannot compete and shouldn't try to. If you, as rival fans, think NUFC is small - that's your opinion and I won't ridicule you for it. But for the owner of NUFC to set that tone is basically a sporting crime. It's competitive and has pretty far-reaching implications.
Mike Ashley has effectively left me without a club that I believe I can support, and that's why I detest him. That's why Bruce gets it too, because he's an enabler of this whole charade, just grateful that we airlifted him from the doldrums at the fat end of the Championship; all the while playing the Geordie card and sticking it to his predecessor at every opportunity. He a disingenuous arsehole happily gobbling up every plate of feces his master feeds him.
