This is in reply to
a post in the matchday thread
To be honest, I am enjoying what is happening, at the same time I think we're all in a state of disbelief at what is happening. Our rise in 18 months has been off the scale and my only hope is that we can keep on going, nothing suggests that it will not even if the Newcastle supporter in me expects that everything will turn to shit.
At the minute, it seems like everything the club does just seems to work. We’ve been taken over and have had to change virtually everything at the club. Our first transfer window was so important and that was the foundation for where we have go to so far. We had no Director of Football at that time so it was up to a small team of people tagging the transfer window on to their normal duties which will have been stretched anyway because of the state that the club was in at that time. Amanda Staveley, Jamie Ruben, Mehrdad Ghodoussi, Steve Nixon and Eddie Howe were virtually working 24 hour days to get the right players in at a time when very few premiership clubs wanted to do business with us. Those 5 people worked a virtual miracle and I think that period of time was crucial to where we are now if I had to point to one period in time that had the biggest impact on the club other than the takeover itself.
Ashley had run the club on bare bones and we had new owners who had never run a football club but they put everything into the job, worked seriously long hours and they’ve reaped the benefits. The first thing they did was simple, they cleaned the windows inside the ground and removed dead pigeons which had been trapped in nets for years. They also replaced all of the broken TV’s around the ground as the broken ones were either left in place or had been removed and the only sign of them was the wall brackets and empty space.
The grounds been cleaned, it’s been painted and the club have spent £millions bringing the training ground up to a decent standard and we’re looking to build a new purpose built training ground to house all sexes and age groups. Add to that, we’re also looking at what we can do to increase the capacity in the ground. We’ve actually got architects working on it now so we should hear something in the next few months.
Basically we’ve gone form the dark ages and become a modern and professional outfit within 18 months and that doesn’t happen too often although you’ve been through it yourselves.
We’ve not got a Chief Executive, a Director of Football, a Commercial Director and a full team working for him, fitness coaches, analysts etc. We’ve rarely had any of that and even when we did we had fucking Joe Kinnear as our Director of Football. On our last trip to Saudi we took the players and senior staff plus 100 members of the Commercial team to get out there and create business partnerships.
Addie Howe has been much better than I expected. I was happy when we appointed him because he had the balls to take the job on knowing that we were in deep shit and also knowing that he might be brought in to steady the ship and then be moved on. I think our owners have huge respect for Howe and I think he’s got one of the safest jobs in football as long as we keep making progress.
We’ll not make any future progress at such a rate going forward as we have so far. The easy things to do have all been done.
You can replace a shite player relatively easy who will give you 6 out of 10 with a good player who will give you 8 out of 10. The problem will be going from players who give 8 out of 10 to players capable of giving 9 or 10 out of 10 as those players are few and far between. Upgrading Shelvey with Bruno is easy as Shelvey had so many weaknesses, upgrading Bruno who has few, if any weaknesses is going to be a nightmare. Hopefully we can keep players like Bruno happy and they themselves become the 9 or 10 out of 10 players because we’re mainly buying players who have their best years ahead of them.
We have a great spine now as I’ve said before. Pope, Botman, Bruno, Joelinton and Isak and that’s nearly half of our starting 11. We need two fullbacks, one because of age and one because we need to upgrade. We might be fine in midfield as we also have Willock who is doing well and will likely keep on improving. I’m not too sure about our wingers yet because Saint-Maximin is injured far too often and Gordon needs a full pre-season with Howe but he’s promising and mainly showing a maturity that I didn’t think he had without really getting a chance to have a run of games to show us what he can do.
Our next transfer window needs to be a one where once again we bring in quality over quantity, even if the squad isn’t big enough at this time. We probably need another 3 windows to really be able to compete at a consistent and high level.
We should have Champions League football next season and the extra income that we’ll see coming into the club because of that. Our income should not really be restricted any more with interested parties as 4th place in the league should mean we can bring in as much as most clubs in the league because of the increased exposure that league position brings.
My only hope is that we prioritise the league again next season and give us a second season in the Champions League because not getting in would definitely hold us back. There’s no point in doing it once because any benefits will soon disappear, and I trust the club to get it right. At some point we’re going to need a squad which has 20 players in it who can perform at a high level if we want to compete, we’ll virtually need a weekend and mid-week team or we’ll suffer burnout and injuries.
These are good times for us and for once we have a bright future, possibly the brightest future that we’ve ever had as a club.
