This is a post taken from another NUFC forum. It's not mine but I have to say it is a very balanced assessment of the situation...
As the dust settles....
What has this week been all about? These are my reflections [naturally, you are not expected to agree with them].
I believe Mike Ashley is a dreadful owner of NUFC, and have frequently said so, often to recriminations. However, I can't, and won't, accept that his agenda is to "screw", or destroy, Newcastle United. For a self-made multi-millionaire who has spent something like £3-400m to date on the club, that is utterly illogical. Yes, the fans upset him post-KK and he tried to dump the business - but only at the right price.
He has become successful building and running a retail business with a very specific modus operandi. This is what he knows, this is what made him successful. Unfortunately, but predictably, he has sought to apply the same principals to running a football club. Some of these concepts, while not the norm within the football world, will be successful, but some don't effectively translate into this new world for him. Nevertheless, that is his comfort zone, and will inevitably guide his every action.
What has been missing in his new business empire imho is experienced council on football matters. He is undoubtedly acquainted with football insiders, and will seek their advice and opinion. However, imo he has badly needed someone on the inside, someone who he implicitly trusts, someone in who he can confide on specific football issues. Today he will believe he finally has that experienced football confidante within the club with the appointment of Alan Pardew.
Part of Ashley's naivety regarding football, and perhaps his achilles heel in this business, is that he does not appear to recognise the importance of keeping the club's supporters 'onside'. He regards them much as he would the customers of his retail business, wherein he would never contemplate communicating to them what he was proposing to do strategically, much less seek their concurrence. This is a major weakness, and one that Pardew will perhaps eventually exert some influence on.
Ashley quite clearly did not believe Chris Hughton had the complete skill set to satisfactorily guide his expensively-acquired asset through the choppy waters of the PL. He came to believe Chris was an excellent coach, rather than an excellent team manager. Ashley probably believes his success in The Championship was largely down to the quality of the high-earning playing sqaud, allied to Hughton's undoubted coaching skills. A good part of Hughton's success was the closeness of the playing sqaud and the small management team, and his direct involvement of a cadre of senior players in some of the decision-making. I suspect Ashley came to believe that this apparent strength could well become a weakness over the long haul - if for no other reason than it is entirely alien to his own method of managing.
It has been suggested this week that Ashley did not believe Hughton was a safe pair of hands in the area of player acquisition, and believed he was not well enough known or respected internationally to attract the kind of young developing talent that Ashley wishes to build the future of the club upon. It is suggested that the two high profile signings in the summer of 2010 - Chiek Tiote and Hatem Ben Arfa - were entirely down to Chief Scout, Graham Kerr, with little or no input by Hughton. This may or may not be post-event spin. Conversely, Ashley is reportedly very unhappy at Hughton's signing of Leon Best and James Perch, perhaps unsurprisingly.
If you wrap all of this together it is not too hard to gain an insight into Ashley's thinking with regard to Hughton, however risky and however unsympathetic and hard-nosed the ultimate decision may have seemed. It has also been suggested that Ashley's actions have apparently been influenced by the failure to appoint Alan Shearer as Caretaker Manager during 2008/9 until it was effectively too late to keep the club in the PL, and was not prepared to take that same risk again.
While I disagree with his selection of Alan Pardew to replace Hughton, he fits what I assume to be Ashley's specification almost perfectly. Following on from Allardyce and Keegan, I don't believe there was ever a chance of him hiring another high profile, high cost, and high maintenance manager like Martin O'Neil and the ilk who would demand essentially a free hand to run the football side of the business. Despite the accusations of remoteness, I believe Ashley is actually a hands on manager who wants to be at the epicentre of all major decision-making. For the first time in his troubled period of ownership, Ashley finally has his own man, his first choice, in the dug-out.
Sacking Hughton seems to most people a massive gamble. Ashley has almost certainly weighed the risks in his mind, and concluded that the risks of not acting decisively where likely to be even greater. Only time will tell whether he was right or not.
Taken from this forum.. http://www.notbbc.co.uk/forums/f=unufc
