da dobrowin：
da wazamba： With the Newcastle hot-seat still warm following Chris Hughton’s shock departure, Mike Ashley has moved quickly to find a permanent replacement. With Alan Shearer ruling himself out of the running and saying that; “I won’t be the next Newcastle manager, I can guarantee you that”, and Martin Jol reportedly turning the job down on the grounds of limited transfer funds and contract details, it is Alan Pardew who has emerged as the man most likely to take the job.
There is no question that Pardew is not the big name that Toon fans were after, but is he the right man for Newcastle?
Arguably, his biggest and most difficult job will be to win over the famously passionate Newcastle fans who are still recovering from Hughton’s sacking. A quick look at an online Newcastle message board where Pardew’s potential appointment has been described as a ‘joke’, an ‘insult’ and as ‘one of the strangest decisions in football’ tells you what you need to know about popular opinion.
It seems to defy logic that Mike Ashley is set to replace Chris Hughton, a manager who came from nowhere to bring relative success and stability to a team on the rocks, with a man whose last job was at Southampton in League 1. The only thing that seems to be in Pardew’s favour is his limited Premier League experience, but his seasons in the top flight with West Ham and Charlton can hardly be classed as successful. He took West Ham to 9th in 05/06 but was sacked in December 2006 after a poor start to their second season in the Premiership. He then took over at Charlton Athletic for the second half of the 06/07 season but was unable to steer them away from trouble. What does Ashley believe Pardew can do for Newcastle that Hughton couldn’t?
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The only reason that I can see for appointing Pardew is that no compensation will need to be paid and he available to take over immediately. Obviously I can understand that Ashley would want to get in a replacement quickly in order to restore some normality and order to his club, but if he doesn’t want to disrupt Newcastle then why sack Hughton in the first place?
I think that Mike Ashley would have rebuilt some of the bridges that he’d burnt if he had persuaded Martin Jol to take over. Earlier in the week when Jol resigned from Ajax on the same day that Houghton was sacked it seemed as though he was destined to take over, but alas it wasn’t to be.
If, as expected, Alan Pardew takes over in the next few days I wonder how fans will react during Saturday’s home game against Liverpool, will Pardew get their backing or their wrath? This is another twist in the Newcastle history books just when things were starting to settle down and I find myself feeling a little sorry for Pardew who is inevitably going to become the new face of Newcastle fans’ angst. I get the feeling that over the next few weeks fans and the media alike will realise just how important Chris Hughton was to the Newcastle renaissance.
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