My Relationship With Mike Ashley Is Perfect – I Never Speak To Him

Posted by: Clarky · May 6, 2008

Well, now we know the answer. Despite giving Chelsea a helluva battle with a highly creditable 1st half performance, we were steam-rollered in the 2nd half and ultimately couldn’t live with a team in the Champions League Final and within a breath of stealing the Premier League from ManU.

It’s difficult to know what happened during the half time break to so utterly change the course of the game. Certainly without Viduka we seemed to lose all shape and organisation, and never really got back into the game from the restart.

We had worked extremely hard during the first 45 minutes, and seemed unable to continue making the telling runs, retain good possession, or provide support to the man in possession thereafter. John Terry revealed that Avram Grant had given his team a real rollicking at half time, so perhaps it was simply down to Chelsea moving up a gear or two.

Whatever the reason, the 2nd half was a real disappointment after such a thrilling opening 45mins. To be fair to Chelsea, they were excellent during the opening 30 minutes of that 2nd half, during which we were totally overrun in midfield.

I thought Taylor, Butt and Owen were our best performers on the day, although Martins caused Chelsea problems in the 1st half. Taylor handled Drogba terrifically well, and perhaps deserved his official MOTM award.

Butt had an excellent 1st half, being involved in almost everything for us, but like most of the others rather faded in the 2nd half. Owen worked his socks off all over the pitch. He missed a couple of difficult half-chances, but had a goal-bound shot cleared off the line by Terry.

I thought we ultimately lost it in midfield, where Barton in particular was poor, barely making a telling contribution in the entire 90mins. Smith ended up in midfield – I think. He was truly dreadful. We seemed to start the 2nd half in 4-4-2 with Martins and Smith playing up front.

With Chelsea running all over us, Smith dropped back into midfield leaving Martins on his own up front. This left us with no ‘out’ ball, and effectively conceding possession to Chelsea time and time again.

Tbph, I’m not sure what else we could have done in the circumstances, but I felt we’d have been better off telling Smith to stay forward, occupy Terry and Carvalho, and hopefully hold up the ball to allow others to get forward when we had possession.

As always, Smith was utterly useless in midfield, and we couldn’t possibly have been any worse off had he stayed up front with Martins foraging. There again…

Regarding Kevin Keegan, I didn’t see his post-match interview, but almost everything he is saying publicly right now concern me. I really don’t think he is happy with the management support behind the scenes at St. James’s Park, and I’m becoming increasingly concerned that, having kept the club in the Premier League, he may throw in the towel unless he starts getting the support he feels he needs.

One of his his most recent quotes is something like – “my relationship with Mike Ashley is perfect – I never speak to him”. Read into that what you will.

This was a game that provided us with a reality check, if one was needed, and confirmed just how far behind the Top 3 we really are. At our very best we can give them a game: drop below our very best by even a couple of percents and we are snookered.

For me, the game confirmed what I already knew – we have improved immeasurably under King Kev, but our midfield, in particular, is nowhere near good enough to take us back into the Top 6.

PS: nice to see Frank Lampard getting a little round of applause, after a few loons starting booing his introduction. Also nice to see him reciprocating on the final whistle. He seems a decent blerk to me, and has had a tough time personally recently.

Tags: Avram Grant, chelsea, Kevin Keegan, Newcastle United

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 10:12 am and is filed under Kevin Keegan, Toon Army Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or trackback from your own site.