Newcastle owner Mike Ashley and manager Alan Pardew will now be in line for the blame for future failings after depature of Joe Kinnear.
Joe Kinnear announced his arrival at Newcastle with a blaze of boastful self-promotion and a promise of great times ahead.
The club revealed his departure seven months later in a 29-word email sent at 11.05 on Monday night.
Their announcement of a new pizza partner later in the week merited 261 words. The Kinnear email didn’t even contain the word thanks. Even Kevin Pietersen got that!
Kinnear had just become the first Director of Football in the history of the Premier League to go through two transfer windows without making a permanent signing.
A few days earlier, the Magpies had sold their outstanding player Yohan Cabaye or Kebab as Kinnear called him in that now infamous barrage of mispronunciation when he unveiled himself as Newcastle’s new powerbroker last June.
No-one had been bought to replace him, Sunderland had just won 3-0 at St James’ Park and the fans’ fury had been turned on Kinnear and owner Mike Ashley.
Kinnear resigned. It wasn’t even “mutual consent”. With no further communication from the club, it’s hard to argue. Of course, that hasn’t stopped some people trying.
They’ve pointed out that Ashley, a man with a reputation for getting value for his cash, might think that two loan signings is a pretty poor return for an alleged £60,000 a month salary.
Some have even suggested that he was disappointed with the fee of around £20m Kinnear extracted from PSG for Cabaye.
It may well have been that Kinnear could never have been a success, however good at the job he’d been, simply because he was given no funds to spend.
We’ll most likely never know why he went but his departure probably doesn’t help either Ashley or manager Alan Pardew.
As a target for the fans, Kinnear was an open goal. He was everyone’s scapegoat. He was Ashley’s human shield but he also deflected criticism away from Pardew.
Now, failure in the transfer market will be traced to either Ashley’s greed or his meanness, not to Kinnear’s incompetence.
Equally, if the team puts on a performance like it did against Sunderland, Pardew will carry the can. So maybe Joe did a useful job after all.
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