George Caulkin

[jimmymag]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/sport/newcastle-are-again-on-the-precipice-mike-ashley-knows-rafa-benitez-is-vital-now-he-must-show-it-8jdql6vpq

 

Supporters want Benítez to stay, the club want Benítez to stay and Benítez wants Benítez to stay

 

Loved that line

Preferred the final sentence.

 

A disgrace that Rafa's not already signed up, but not surprising.

[LoveItIfWeBeatU]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/revealed-secrets-of-newcastles-physio-friend-and-agony-aunt-derek-wright-6xgpzwj3s?shareToken=76d4a680c2f8a204fb49ee6ee229f833

 

DEREK WRIGHT INTERVIEW

Revealed: secrets of Newcastle’s physio, friend and ‘agony aunt’ Derek Wright

 

George Caulkin, Northern Sports Correspondent

September 3 2018, 12:01am,

The Times

 

Derek Wright is standing in Newcastle United’s confessional. The club’s treatment room is a converted squash court, a sparse, clean space — cream paint, three sinks, a clock, six massage tables, trolleys stacked with strapping and acupuncture needles — but for the past 34 years, it has also been a house of secrets, a place of laughter, agony and pink tutus. A sanctuary.

 

Wright joined Newcastle in October 1984, a qualified physiotherapist just as the era of bucket and magic sponge was ending, but it was still just him, Jack Charlton and his assistant, divvying up jobs. The room he inherited was “dirty”, the only rehab equipment an “old, rusty multi-gym”, and now there is an ensemble of doctors, sports scientists, soft-tissue specialists and performance coaches.

 

Yet amid all this progress, old truths linger. Wright glances down. “It’s the hands,” he says. “They’re the most important tool.” He is 60 this year and for more than half of his life he has manipulated limbs, rebuilding footballers when they are broken, in their lowest moments, full of fear. “I’ve seen and heard some unbelievable things,” he says. “Most of it I’ll take to the grave.”

 

Others are willing to talk about Wright. “A brilliant man,” Alan Shearer, Newcastle’s record goalscorer, says. “A man you can trust. Brilliant at his job and the most down-to-earth guy you’ll ever meet. He helped me enormously with my injuries. A rock.”

 

“He was a big help when I was in a bad place in 2005,” Steve Harper, the longest-serving player in the club’s history, says. Out of the team, Harper wrestled with depression. “Del Boy”, as he calls him, was there. “He’s a proper unsung hero,” Harper says. “I love the bloke.”

 

Steve Howey played for England, a cultured centre half with a fickle body. “Derek always went above and beyond,” he says. There was a trip to the Lake District once, when they climbed fells and talked, lancing poison. “He was the best physio I ever worked with,” Howey says. “He was also a great friend.”

 

“Derek became my agony aunt as well as my physio,” Paul Ferris, a gifted but frail footballer, who later worked alongside Wright, writes in The Boy on the Shed, his beautiful book. “He was a gentle and caring man.” Under Kevin Keegan, the treatment room was “the heartbeat of the training ground”, Ferris says, somewhere players felt “free”.

 

Wright wears all this lightly. In some ways, he has been Newcastle’s priest, although the description makes him laugh. “I’ve never thought of it like that,” he says, “but it’s important you don’t just treat the injury. With Harps, I knew there was something wrong, so you cut it back to the bare bones and just talk.”

 

If this implies sombreness, Howey and Harper correct the impression; ask him about the tutu, they say. Wright squirms. “It was the players’ Christmas party — fancy dress — and they’d invited some of the staff,” he says. “This was in Kevin’s first spell as manager and that same day he’d said something to me about not getting too close to the players, not being the butt of their jokes.

 

“ ‘Bloody hell’, I thought, ‘I’m about to walk out of the training ground in a Marie Antoinette wig, a pink fairy costume and Dr Martens’. I put my outfit on and walked out. Apparently Kevin was standing at his window, shaking his head . . . Have you ever tried waving a taxi down with a magic wand?”

 

Wright is not small and, over the years, there have been bets with players about diets. Shearer’s retirement fund was a beneficiary. “There was one last season,” Wright says. “If I didn’t get down to a certain weight, I had to get a tattoo of Matt Ritchie. As the season went on I was thinking, ‘Christ, I’m going to lose’. I managed to get there just before the last game, but nearly killed myself in the process.”

 

Like Tony Toward, the team administrator, and Ray Thompson, the kitman, Wright is part of Newcastle’s fabric, binding a restless club together. “I worked out recently that I’ve had 28 managers, including interims and caretakers,” he says. “They’ve all been different. Those first five years under Kevin were amazing. We were winning every game. It almost felt easy. He was such a good man-manager.

 

“Under Kevin, Sir Bobby [Robson], Rafa [benítez] now, when the fans have that connection, it feels so powerful. Everyone is swept along. I remember standing at Durham station with Bobby and a train flew through, bending around the corner. He’d say ‘Derek, how does that train stay on the track?’ He wasn’t taking the mickey. He had that inquisitive nature. Football-wise, he was a genius.

 

“We have a manager now whose eye for detail is incredible. The injury record since he’s been here has been phenomenal and that’s down to his meticulous planning, when to use or rest players. At the same time, he has a depth of feeling. It means a lot. Some people have worked here who wouldn’t have a clue about tradition, about Geordie people.”

 

Newcastle is Wright’s club. A Co Durham lad, he signed for Arsenal as an apprentice, a “tackling full back, no finesse”, as he puts it. “I played about 40 or 50 games for the reserves, but didn’t make the grade. It was upsetting, but my parents were very good at guiding me and I didn’t just want to wallow in self-pity.”

 

Wright trained in remedial gymnastics, working with soldiers returning from conflict, then as a physio. He worked for the NHS in a miners’ rehab centre before being enticed to Fulham by Malcolm Macdonald, who he had known at Highbury.

 

“I was physio for the whole club but I was only 23 and still had a thought of ‘Can I make it’, so Fulham registered me as a player,” Wright says. “It was strange. I was playing reserve games and, if someone got injured, I’d run off the pitch, get my bag and run back on to treat them. You could see players looking at each other going, ‘What the hell’s happening here?’ ”

 

When Newcastle approached him, the “pull of home” was strong, he says. “I was physio for the first team, reserves and youth team and on top of that did the organisation for away trips. I’d sort the rooms, the meals, fax the hotel.

 

“I’d be in charge of the float, the money we’d take away with us for incidentals, fish and chips for the players on the way home. I’d get the float off Tony. When Jim Smith was manager, he used to like his red wine and I’d come back to Tony with no receipts and little things written on scraps of paper and he’d go mad. ‘I know, Tony, but Jim is spending £300 on red wine. What am I supposed to do?’

 

“When we were playing in London, I’d give two players a fiver between them to get a Burger King at Kings Cross. That was their post-match meal . . . Even in those days the players were on decent money and I remember one coming to me the week after a trip and saying, ‘Derek, you owe me £2.50 for the Burger King’. I’d forgotten to give it to him. I’d better not say who that was.”

 

As you would expect at Newcastle, there have been some baffling episodes. The treatment room became an epicentre of Shearer’s rift with Ruud Gullit, when the striker felt that he was being pushed out of the club. Ferris, who was particularly close to Shearer, “was sure the room was bugged”, Wright says. “So we had a look. We took the false tiles off the ceiling and I was up in the roof.

 

“Even in that moment, Paul took the chair away — he couldn’t resist — so I was stuck up there with my legs dangling down. We didn’t find anything, but it wasn’t a nice period. I told Paul at one point, ‘They’re gunning for you here’. They were trying to push us apart, but I couldn’t let my friend down.”

 

And then there was the time that Cheick Tioté had to renew his British visa and Wright found himself minding Newcastle’s late midfield player in Ghana, the nearest issuing office to Ivory Coast, without any luggage, beset by delays, suffering from chronic food poisoning, setting up impromptu training sessions.

 

“George, our taxi driver, found us a bone-hard pitch at a military stadium,” Wright says. “Cheick needed to do shooting practice, so I asked George to go in goal. He was in a suit, shirt and tie, but he agreed. He was unbelievable, saving everything, diving in his suit in 40C heat, no nets. My bag still hadn’t arrived, so I was wearing all this multicoloured gear Cheick had bought me.

 

“I’d been spewing everywhere, couldn’t see straight and could barely stand up. I thought I had malaria. I just stopped for a moment and thought: ‘This is absolutely surreal.’ The whole thing went on for about 12 days and it gets to a point where you think the club have forgotten about you. When we came back, Cheick would look at me occasionally in the treatment room and burst into laughter.”

 

Wright is no longer the young man who would rush onto the pitch, full of adrenaline, taking the cheers of the crowd. “It was childish, but I used to hate getting beaten by the other physio,” he says. “I was always thinking, ‘Don’t race him’ if we had to come on together, but, if he tore off, that would be it, I was after him.”

 

Within the club and by those who have passed through it, Wright is perceived differently; steadfast, loyal, discreet. It says everything about his character that a day or two later he texts to reiterate the impact others have made on his life; Pat and Derek, the mam and dad who “always supported me”, John, his brother, Helen, his wife, “always there for me”, his three boys, Jonathan, Benjamin and James.

 

The telephone bleeps again. “I’ve read back through my message and it reads like my own obituary,” Wright says, but Newcastle’s confessor deserves this moment of reflection.

 

“The club celebrated its 125th-year anniversary recently and I’ve been here for more than a quarter of that,” he says. “You can’t just look back. You have to drive on, but it gets under your skin this place, into your blood. It’s always the thought of what it might be.”

[Paully]

Cracking read that!

[Minhosa]

The Tiote story is brilliant!

[Conjo]

Been too long since I've seen a proper physio race from Wright.

[samptime29]

The Tiote story is brilliant!

 

Class 

[Jimburst]

That's a really nice piece, that.

[ToonArmy1892]

Been too long since I've seen a proper physio race from Wright.

 

Those were the days, clash of heads or something and both teams physio's come rushing on, crowd going "GOOO ONNNNN" to Derek, and he always got there last.

[Guest firetotheworks]

When we came back, Cheick would look at me occasionally in the treatment room and burst into laughter.”

 

:lol:

 

Ah man, that's class but it's made me feel sad.

[wormy]

The Tiote story is brilliant!

 

Class 

 

The thought of Wright in clothes Cheick bought him.

 

Love reads like that. Even more so for Wright, who's gotten a bit of a 'Dr Death' label at times with our terrible past injury record. But it says it all that every manager has kept him on, including Kev, Sir Bobby and Rafa.

[geordiedean]

Whats the odds on it being Mickey Quinn who he owed 2.50 for the burger king

[Conjo]

Been too long since I've seen a proper physio race from Wright.

 

Those were the days, clash of heads or something and both teams physio's come rushing on, crowd going "GOOO ONNNNN" to Derek, and he always got there last.

 

He maybe lost, but he had an intensity in his strive that none of his opponents could match. Loved seeing him run

[xLiaaamx]

Laughed loads at that Cheick story, then I realised I'd forgotten he's gone and got upset by it all over again.

[Papavasiliou]

The Tiote story is brilliant!

 

Class 

 

The thought of Wright in clothes Cheick bought him.

 

Love reads like that. Even more so for Wright, who's gotten a bit of a 'Dr Death' label at times with our terrible past injury record. But it says it all that every manager has kept him on, including Kev, Sir Bobby and Rafa.

 

Wright sweating buckets, chipping ball after ball for Tiote to volley over the bar from 40yards out at a taxi driver.

 

Still sounds like a better setup than Longbenton.

[loki679]

Whats the odds on it being Mickey Quinn who he owed 2.50 for the burger king

 

£2.50 wouldn't even pay for Quinny's starter at Burger King.

[geordiedean]

Whats the odds on it being Mickey Quinn who he owed 2.50 for the burger king

 

£2.50 wouldn't even pay for Quinny's starter at Burger King.

 

In 1990 it would have got you about 3 whoppers

 

[loki679]

Whats the odds on it being Mickey Quinn who he owed 2.50 for the burger king

 

£2.50 wouldn't even pay for Quinny's starter at Burger King.

 

In 1990 it would have got you about 3 whoppers

 

 

That's what I said.

[Guest Howaythetoon]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/revealed-secrets-of-newcastles-physio-friend-and-agony-aunt-derek-wright-6xgpzwj3s?shareToken=76d4a680c2f8a204fb49ee6ee229f833

 

DEREK WRIGHT INTERVIEW

Revealed: secrets of Newcastle’s physio, friend and ‘agony aunt’ Derek Wright

 

George Caulkin, Northern Sports Correspondent

September 3 2018, 12:01am,

The Times

 

Derek Wright is standing in Newcastle United’s confessional. The club’s treatment room is a converted squash court, a sparse, clean space — cream paint, three sinks, a clock, six massage tables, trolleys stacked with strapping and acupuncture needles — but for the past 34 years, it has also been a house of secrets, a place of laughter, agony and pink tutus. A sanctuary.

 

Wright joined Newcastle in October 1984, a qualified physiotherapist just as the era of bucket and magic sponge was ending, but it was still just him, Jack Charlton and his assistant, divvying up jobs. The room he inherited was “dirty”, the only rehab equipment an “old, rusty multi-gym”, and now there is an ensemble of doctors, sports scientists, soft-tissue specialists and performance coaches.

 

Yet amid all this progress, old truths linger. Wright glances down. “It’s the hands,” he says. “They’re the most important tool.” He is 60 this year and for more than half of his life he has manipulated limbs, rebuilding footballers when they are broken, in their lowest moments, full of fear. “I’ve seen and heard some unbelievable things,” he says. “Most of it I’ll take to the grave.”

 

Others are willing to talk about Wright. “A brilliant man,” Alan Shearer, Newcastle’s record goalscorer, says. “A man you can trust. Brilliant at his job and the most down-to-earth guy you’ll ever meet. He helped me enormously with my injuries. A rock.”

 

“He was a big help when I was in a bad place in 2005,” Steve Harper, the longest-serving player in the club’s history, says. Out of the team, Harper wrestled with depression. “Del Boy”, as he calls him, was there. “He’s a proper unsung hero,” Harper says. “I love the bloke.”

 

Steve Howey played for England, a cultured centre half with a fickle body. “Derek always went above and beyond,” he says. There was a trip to the Lake District once, when they climbed fells and talked, lancing poison. “He was the best physio I ever worked with,” Howey says. “He was also a great friend.”

 

“Derek became my agony aunt as well as my physio,” Paul Ferris, a gifted but frail footballer, who later worked alongside Wright, writes in The Boy on the Shed, his beautiful book. “He was a gentle and caring man.” Under Kevin Keegan, the treatment room was “the heartbeat of the training ground”, Ferris says, somewhere players felt “free”.

 

Wright wears all this lightly. In some ways, he has been Newcastle’s priest, although the description makes him laugh. “I’ve never thought of it like that,” he says, “but it’s important you don’t just treat the injury. With Harps, I knew there was something wrong, so you cut it back to the bare bones and just talk.”

 

If this implies sombreness, Howey and Harper correct the impression; ask him about the tutu, they say. Wright squirms. “It was the players’ Christmas party — fancy dress — and they’d invited some of the staff,” he says. “This was in Kevin’s first spell as manager and that same day he’d said something to me about not getting too close to the players, not being the butt of their jokes.

 

“ ‘Bloody hell’, I thought, ‘I’m about to walk out of the training ground in a Marie Antoinette wig, a pink fairy costume and Dr Martens’. I put my outfit on and walked out. Apparently Kevin was standing at his window, shaking his head . . . Have you ever tried waving a taxi down with a magic wand?”

 

Wright is not small and, over the years, there have been bets with players about diets. Shearer’s retirement fund was a beneficiary. “There was one last season,” Wright says. “If I didn’t get down to a certain weight, I had to get a tattoo of Matt Ritchie. As the season went on I was thinking, ‘Christ, I’m going to lose’. I managed to get there just before the last game, but nearly killed myself in the process.”

 

Like Tony Toward, the team administrator, and Ray Thompson, the kitman, Wright is part of Newcastle’s fabric, binding a restless club together. “I worked out recently that I’ve had 28 managers, including interims and caretakers,” he says. “They’ve all been different. Those first five years under Kevin were amazing. We were winning every game. It almost felt easy. He was such a good man-manager.

 

“Under Kevin, Sir Bobby [Robson], Rafa [benítez] now, when the fans have that connection, it feels so powerful. Everyone is swept along. I remember standing at Durham station with Bobby and a train flew through, bending around the corner. He’d say ‘Derek, how does that train stay on the track?’ He wasn’t taking the mickey. He had that inquisitive nature. Football-wise, he was a genius.

 

“We have a manager now whose eye for detail is incredible. The injury record since he’s been here has been phenomenal and that’s down to his meticulous planning, when to use or rest players. At the same time, he has a depth of feeling. It means a lot. Some people have worked here who wouldn’t have a clue about tradition, about Geordie people.”

 

Newcastle is Wright’s club. A Co Durham lad, he signed for Arsenal as an apprentice, a “tackling full back, no finesse”, as he puts it. “I played about 40 or 50 games for the reserves, but didn’t make the grade. It was upsetting, but my parents were very good at guiding me and I didn’t just want to wallow in self-pity.”

 

Wright trained in remedial gymnastics, working with soldiers returning from conflict, then as a physio. He worked for the NHS in a miners’ rehab centre before being enticed to Fulham by Malcolm Macdonald, who he had known at Highbury.

 

“I was physio for the whole club but I was only 23 and still had a thought of ‘Can I make it’, so Fulham registered me as a player,” Wright says. “It was strange. I was playing reserve games and, if someone got injured, I’d run off the pitch, get my bag and run back on to treat them. You could see players looking at each other going, ‘What the hell’s happening here?’ ”

 

When Newcastle approached him, the “pull of home” was strong, he says. “I was physio for the first team, reserves and youth team and on top of that did the organisation for away trips. I’d sort the rooms, the meals, fax the hotel.

 

“I’d be in charge of the float, the money we’d take away with us for incidentals, fish and chips for the players on the way home. I’d get the float off Tony. When Jim Smith was manager, he used to like his red wine and I’d come back to Tony with no receipts and little things written on scraps of paper and he’d go mad. ‘I know, Tony, but Jim is spending £300 on red wine. What am I supposed to do?’

 

“When we were playing in London, I’d give two players a fiver between them to get a Burger King at Kings Cross. That was their post-match meal . . . Even in those days the players were on decent money and I remember one coming to me the week after a trip and saying, ‘Derek, you owe me £2.50 for the Burger King’. I’d forgotten to give it to him. I’d better not say who that was.”

 

As you would expect at Newcastle, there have been some baffling episodes. The treatment room became an epicentre of Shearer’s rift with Ruud Gullit, when the striker felt that he was being pushed out of the club. Ferris, who was particularly close to Shearer, “was sure the room was bugged”, Wright says. “So we had a look. We took the false tiles off the ceiling and I was up in the roof.

 

“Even in that moment, Paul took the chair away — he couldn’t resist — so I was stuck up there with my legs dangling down. We didn’t find anything, but it wasn’t a nice period. I told Paul at one point, ‘They’re gunning for you here’. They were trying to push us apart, but I couldn’t let my friend down.”

 

And then there was the time that Cheick Tioté had to renew his British visa and Wright found himself minding Newcastle’s late midfield player in Ghana, the nearest issuing office to Ivory Coast, without any luggage, beset by delays, suffering from chronic food poisoning, setting up impromptu training sessions.

 

“George, our taxi driver, found us a bone-hard pitch at a military stadium,” Wright says. “Cheick needed to do shooting practice, so I asked George to go in goal. He was in a suit, shirt and tie, but he agreed. He was unbelievable, saving everything, diving in his suit in 40C heat, no nets. My bag still hadn’t arrived, so I was wearing all this multicoloured gear Cheick had bought me.

 

“I’d been spewing everywhere, couldn’t see straight and could barely stand up. I thought I had malaria. I just stopped for a moment and thought: ‘This is absolutely surreal.’ The whole thing went on for about 12 days and it gets to a point where you think the club have forgotten about you. When we came back, Cheick would look at me occasionally in the treatment room and burst into laughter.”

 

Wright is no longer the young man who would rush onto the pitch, full of adrenaline, taking the cheers of the crowd. “It was childish, but I used to hate getting beaten by the other physio,” he says. “I was always thinking, ‘Don’t race him’ if we had to come on together, but, if he tore off, that would be it, I was after him.”

 

Within the club and by those who have passed through it, Wright is perceived differently; steadfast, loyal, discreet. It says everything about his character that a day or two later he texts to reiterate the impact others have made on his life; Pat and Derek, the mam and dad who “always supported me”, John, his brother, Helen, his wife, “always there for me”, his three boys, Jonathan, Benjamin and James.

 

The telephone bleeps again. “I’ve read back through my message and it reads like my own obituary,” Wright says, but Newcastle’s confessor deserves this moment of reflection.

 

“The club celebrated its 125th-year anniversary recently and I’ve been here for more than a quarter of that,” he says. “You can’t just look back. You have to drive on, but it gets under your skin this place, into your blood. It’s always the thought of what it might be.”

 

Thought I was reading one of my own posts there for a moment...

 

Especially when I got to the end and tried to add more to it!

[NEEJ]

Shortest yet.

[Guest reefatoon]

You just had to go and quote it though HTT, so still a mahoosive scroll.

[Stottie]

The Tiote story is brilliant!

 

Class 

 

The thought of Wright in clothes Cheick bought him.

 

Love reads like that. Even more so for Wright, who's gotten a bit of a 'Dr Death' label at times with our terrible past injury record. But it says it all that every manager has kept him on, including Kev, Sir Bobby and Rafa.

 

Yeah, great read. I must admit I had Wright in the Terry Mac/Shola category of lingering mediocrity, but I am pleased to be proved wrong.

[Paully]

Brilliant as always;

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mike-ashley-tries-pasta-and-platitudes-to-lift-tensions-at-newcastle-united-8shlssrs8?shareToken=1c2817f07352abb28548685ef10ff792

[Heake]

Brilliant as always;

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mike-ashley-tries-pasta-and-platitudes-to-lift-tensions-at-newcastle-united-8shlssrs8?shareToken=1c2817f07352abb28548685ef10ff792

 

Nails it again

[LRD]

Brilliant as always;

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mike-ashley-tries-pasta-and-platitudes-to-lift-tensions-at-newcastle-united-8shlssrs8?shareToken=1c2817f07352abb28548685ef10ff792

 

Mike Ashley tries pasta and platitudes to lift tensions at Newcastle United

George Caulkin reflects on an extraordinary 24 hours of heroes and villains on Tyneside

 

George Caulkin, Northern Sports Correspondent

October 5 2018, 12:01am,

The Times

 

Security is tight as Ashley steps out of Rialto while suggestions that he made an obscene gesture, inset, to waiting fans were denied vehemently by the retailer’s spokesman

NORTH NEWS AND PICTURES

 

You have never known true love until you have seen Kevin Keegan take to a stage on Tyneside. It was a capacity attendance in the big hall of the Sage, Gateshead — a football crowd in a music venue — and it rose in unison when Newcastle United’s pied piper stepped from the wings to promote his autobiography. Cheers echoed, tears streamed and Keegan blew out his cheeks in wonder. It felt good to be home, he said.

 

For 90 minutes or so, the man who enraptured Newcastle by coming to play for them and then did it again from the dugout, lifting the club from the doldrums of the second tier to challenge at the top of the Premier League, trotted through his life. He fielded questions. His best game as manager? “Well, we had a few, didn’t we?” he said. Pause. “I quite liked beating Manchester United 5-0.” The ovation is still rippling down the river.

 

Over the course of this week, Newcastle’s past, present and future have coalesced in a jumble of adoration and anger. Tomorrow, the team travel to Old Trafford for a game defined by weary desperation: Newcastle have yet to win this season; their opponents are labouring under José Mourinho. Both United, both untied. The days of Keegan’s tussle with Sir Alex Ferguson, that glorious, furious football, are distant.

 

Twenty-four hours after Keegan’s revival meeting, a few hundred people were sitting in the Labour Club, in Gallowgate’s shadow, to discuss the notion of protest, to mull over the meaning of better. The Magpie Group is a coalition of fans, drawn together by frustration at Mike Ashley’s 11 corrosive years at Newcastle. They were addressed by two local MPs, Chi Onwurah and Ian Mearns, as well as Kevin Miles of the Football Supporters’ Federation.

 

At the same time, Ashley was eating spag bol and downing a couple of pints at the Rialto restaurant in Ponteland, breaking breadsticks with Rafa Benítez (risotto marinara) and Newcastle’s first-team squad. Tension bubbles around the club and the grand plan of Lee Charnley, the managing director (who paid the £2,500 bill), is to get Ashley more engaged, more involved, to build bridges with Benítez.

 

The context is convoluted. When Benítez, a Champions League winner, was appointed in 2016, he spoke of stature, history. Unlike Keegan, he is a manager of the head, not the heart, but both represent hope. He, too, took Newcastle up from the Sky Bet Championship and then led them to tenth last season, but he has felt undermined in successive transfer windows.

 

Fans arrived outside the restaurant as news of Ashley’s presence emerged

NORTH NEWS AND PICTURES

 

Keegan knows what it is like to work under Ashley, his second, brief spell as manager followed by an arbitration case in which Newcastle were condemned for “repeatedly and intentionally misleading the press, public and the fans”. The fear is that Benítez is in the throes of another sapping farewell. He is in the final year of his contract and has rebuffed offers of an extension. Fans still sing his name.

 

Ashley’s motivations have always been obtuse, but the suggestion that things might lurch towards sustainable improvement is more difficult to swallow than happy-hour pasta. After months of absenteeism, he has watched Newcastle’s past two matches (and is on the guest list for Old Trafford), but the retailer did not talk to Benítez after either of them; no hello nor hard luck. His behaviour is reliably unconventional.

 

At Rialto, he sat close to Benítez, but little of substance was discussed; vague talk about Newcastle’s academy, but nothing about transfers or contracts. Avoid relegation and he would take them all on holiday, he said, a dubious incentive for millionaires. And his claim that the club would not be sold this season? In the past six months, his allies have briefed that the price has gone up to £400 million and down to £300 million. “Is he really a true seller?” one would-be buyer asked.

 

Newcastle have been here before. Alan Pardew and Steve McClaren both thought the key to unlocking the club’s potential was to get Ashley interested, but he has always reverted to type. At the end of last season, he said that “every penny” generated by the club would be made available to Benítez, but the club made a substantial profit over the summer and now they are groping for goals and momentum.

 

Jonjo Shelvey, Freddie Woodman and Matt Ritchie arrive at Rialtos Italian restaurant

NORTH NEWS AND PICTURES

 

For some — for many — it is far too late; Ashley deserves no third or fourth chances. “It’s very clear that you want Mike Ashley out,” Keegan said at the Sage. “Your patience has been fantastic. He will go one day. He can’t last for ever.

 

“Just keep doing what you are doing, which is supporting your club. Because if that club goes down again because there is no support there, it could dive.”

 

At the Labour Club, Mearns described Newcastle as “unique” because where else would a 50,000 crowd still support a team without a domestic trophy since 1955? They are a big club, but could be “so much bigger”. And this is the point. They are in the Premier League but dead from the neck down, not striving for anything aside from existence. Benítez will not stay for that.

 

St James’ Park perches in Onwurah’s Newcastle Central constituency. Like Mearns, she is a fan but stopped going to games when the team were sponsored by a payday lender. She has invited Ashley for tea in the Commons, but was turned down by Charnley, who insisted that “all future correspondence be directed to me”. In July, she introduced a petition to parliament about Ashley’s lack of investment in “players, training facilities and community engagement”.

 

Football is important — to her, her constituents and the lifeblood of Newcastle. She will continue to scrutinise, she told the Magpie Group. “Ashley is a very stubborn man,” she said.

 

“Maybe this campaign will make him more entrenched and stubborn.” But the alternative is to do nothing. “I’ve spent the last five years not pissing him off and it’s got us nowhere,” she said. “I don’t see how pissing him off can be worse.”

 

Numbers have been growing at demonstrations and meetings, but everyone understands this is an attritional situation; Newcastle are struggling on the pitch and saviours are thin on the ground. Removing Ashley “won’t be an easy job”, Mearns said, although these people are dedicated, and when news broke that Ashley was in Ponteland, a few drove with their banners to the restaurant and waited outside.

 

At 10.20pm on Wednesday, with three police cars lurking, Ashley ducked into a people carrier, smiling at the discordant chanting of “Where’s the money gone?” and, as the vehicle moved away, he was caught on camera with two fingers raised and spread around his ear. It was not the V of a PR victory, although Ashley last night denied that the gesture was intentionally offensive. “To suggest otherwise is both inaccurate and irresponsible,” he added. The footage is available online.

 

If Keegan at the Sage had offered a bittersweet reminder about the club that Newcastle can be, here was the loveless truth about where they are. In 1996, as Ferguson’s team nipped at his heels, Keegan had said that finishing second would “mean nothing” but he was wrong. Second meant cherished memories, power, beauty, joy, anguish and everything in between. Everything compared with this.

[David Icke - Son of God]

Jonjo Shelvey, Freddie Woodman and Matt Ritchie arrive at Rialtos Italian restaurant

NORTH NEWS AND PICTURES

 

We take the piss for Ashley offering to take them on holiday, but it appears our players can't even afford to buy socks or pants that fit.