Joke in’ere*

*Thanks to NUFC.com

When one gets out of the habit of blogging, it sometimes gets a little hard to restart the thread.  The world goes on as normal and it becomes a touch hard to see the point of regular updates.  As a way of letting off steam without sheets of A4 paper cluttering up the house.  I had a few reviews of the football season scribbled down but all those have been superseded by the clown that is Joe Kinnear being appointed director of football of Newcastle United.  You might just as well have appointed the Chuckle Brothers as directors of football.

Mike Ashley has been itching to re-install the role since Dennis Wise (another ludicrous appointment) was ejected from the role as the price of securing Alan Shearer’s services.  Shearer’s coaching record was poor but eternal thanks should be his for getting Wise out of Barrack Road.  There was talk of bringing back the job last season but Alan Pardew’s stewardship of the club to fifth place (narrowly missing out on Champions League qualification on the last day) made rocking the boat unlikely.  Yet Pardew’s credit is exhausted after barely escaping relegation last season and he was in no position to push back against it, other than walking out (and with seven years left on his contract, he would be forsaking a lot of money by doing so).

Right, bring in a director of football so your friends at Spurs won’t look down on you as some sort of footballing bumpkin.  Who do Spurs bring in to fill their role?  Franco Baldini, respected around Europe.  Given that Ashley has confessed to knowing nothing about football, who does he get for his club?  A man who has spent much of the last decade out of football, bar an ill-starred few months managing at Newcastle.  Sorry Mike, but your buddies at White Hart Lane are still going to look down their noses at you.  Hear that laughter?  That’s them behind your back.

It is almost churlish to say why have a director of football when you appoint a Kinnear in the first place.  Did David Moyes help Everton punch above their weight with someone looking over his shoulder?  Does he need someone to keep things ticking over at Manchester United.    It’s interesting to note that the two people Kinnear cites as being on the phone with, week-in, week-out, Sir Alex Ferguson has retired, Arsène Wenger has consistently kept Arsenal in the top four on a shoestring and both did not feel the need for a director of football.  By contrast, such a set-up at Manchester City and Chelsea have undermined their Premier League campaigns with rampant backroom instability.

Ultimately, a director of football is supposed to guarantee the direction of travel for a club no matter who is in charge of the team, for head coaches come and go.  But while Pardew is part-way through an eight-year contract, Kinnear was given only three years perversely, if one follows the logic of the role.  Graham Carr, sharing an eight-year contract with Pardew, was so influential as to be de facto director of football and that position could easily have been made official for Carr.  Now he might even leave the club.

Already Kinnear’s malign influence has been brought to bear, vetoing a free transfer for the defender Douglas because he – incredibly – has never heard of him, a player who has graced the Champions League and who Carr would have had an extensive dossier to hand, after cultivating him for a year.  Douglas is allegedly heart-broken; I’m pretty shook up as well, by losing a potentially excellent player (had Kinnear been around in 2010, he probably knot of heard of Cheick Tiote, also hailing from FC Twente).  In light of this, it’s just as well that Moussa Sissoko was snapped up in January.  In one stroke, Derek Llambias’s summer work of trying to recruit Douglas on a free transfer had gone up in smoke; having erroneously said by Kinnear to have resigned as director of football (as well as having his name mispronounced as Lambezi, as if some he were some African river), this was his cue to resign for real as managing director.  Nice work, Ashley – chickens already coming home to roost.

As for Kinnear saying that he was under more threat than Pardew, that doesn’t follow as Kinnear alone has the ear of Ashley and is he going to fall on his sword when he push Pardew onto it?  Do me a favour.  It all smacks of trying to build a case against constructive dismissal before Pardew is even out of the door.

I’m glad Pardew is staying (for now), as any continuity is essential.  However, where I was thinking of a comfortable mid-table finish for next season, bare survival is the fact of the matter with the chaos that Kinnear has wrought and will wreak.  I’d take 17^th place now.  Let’s see Kinnear say he’s responsible for that, when sanctioning only players that (with Tony Pulis’ departure) not even Stoke want anymore.  The heart aches.

There’s also the small matter of the Premier League, whose promise to the Football Association to allow a breakaway was it would improve the national team, proving once again that only mammon is in the hearts of their executives.  Richard Scudamore would sell his own mother if he thought he would gain extra broadcasting rights.  Not content with making the League a place where less than one third of the players in it qualify for the national side and persistently blocking a winter break because it makes a killing when other leagues have theirs, it has scheduled high-profile matches before crucial England qualifiers.  Ukraine may have done England a favour thrashing Montenegro at the home of the Balkan country but that only counts if England win their remaining games and there is a very real chance that England might not even make the play-offs.  Unwilling to offend their paymasters at BT and Sky, the League flat out refused to cooperate, as if the Joseph Bonaparte of the FA asked for some more power in governing Spain and his brother Napoleon  of the Premier League snubbing him.  Rolling over in the face of such selfishness has been as successful as Tony Blair’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the American neo-cons to win some influence for Britain (“here you go, get killed in Basra.  Act on Israel-Palestine?  You must be joking”).  Hopefully Greg Dyke will stick it to them where they don’t like it once he has properly got his feet under the table.