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Finally, there is a game of football. It has been easy to lose sight of what lies at the heart of Newcastle United these past 10 days. In fact, make that 10 years and more of back-page headlines – rarely, if ever, for footballing merit.
If the club’s Saudi-led takeover is to become the trophy-laden investment the new owners envisage, that has to change.
On the early evidence, however, the removal of Mike Ashley is not about to make way for a new era of serenity. If anything, the mercury is rising.
Newcastle United fans have partied in the streets since their Saudi takeover was confirmed
Amanda Staveley, who has led the Saudi takeover, will be glad to finally see some football
Tyneside has felt like the centre of the sporting universe – just without the sport – since confirmation a week last Thursday of the takeover that provides the club with the world’s richest custodians, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund being valued at £700billion.
It has been noisy, chaotic and not without conflict. It was ever thus at St James’ Park. It may take a fair few Saudi riyals and a fair few years for the club to reacquaint itself with the stranger that is normality.
Take Friday’s press conference involving the soon-to-be-sacked Steve Bruce. The owners – led on the ground by Amanda Staveley and her Iranian husband Mehrdad Ghodoussi – realised within hours of their arrival in the North-East that Bruce’s presence threatened to pollute the atmosphere of their opening match.
He would, we were told, be gone by Friday. They could not have him as the footballing face of the new regime, it was said.
Yet there he was, in typically clumsy and contradictory fashion, talking about maintaining his ‘dignity’ before getting into a row with journalists and wishing we had been ‘slapped’ by our bosses for reporting he was to lose his job last week. Bruce prickled as he said it was ‘what you [the media] all wanted’.
Steve Bruce is under scrutiny and was expected to have…
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Source : dailymail
