My anger at league for letting it happen

It has been dismal, but he doesn’t chop up his critics ALEX THOMSON ON THE MIKE ASHLEY YEARS

Igrew up just outside Newcastle... in Basingstoke, Hants. But Geordie family heritage drew me to the Toon. I was eight when they last won a major trophy. I am 60 now. But with the Toon you stick by the lads through thin and thinner.

I could take the lack of success. I could even stomach turning a sport into a business.

But not this. I am a journalist. Am I supposed to shrug when a country takes over my club soon after it has seized, murdered and dismembered a fellow journalist?

Do I just dream of being where Man City (owned by a slightly less notorious outfit) are, when my club is owned by a government which routinely beheads people in public? Which treats women as third-class citizens on an industrial scale?

MORALS

My anger – there is no other description but white hot anger – isn’t really directed at the Saudis. They are obviously keen to sports-wash their global image by waking up English football’s ultimate sleeping giant.

No, my anger is directed at the Premier League bosses. As the great poet, seer and philosopher (and footballer) Gordon Strachan memorably observed: “There are no morals in football.”

The Saudi takeover at Newcastle United underlines that sentiment.

The Premier League could have shone. Instead they shirked. They appear to have shrugged. Nothing irregular here.

But for many it is just another footstep down a road well travelled, where so many values appear lost because of money.

The Premier League has performed a miracle, managed the unmanageable. It has succeeded in making Mike Ashley look desirable.

His apparent devotion to achieving 16th place in the Premier League has been a grinding, dismal, low-level depression for all of us long starved of success. But he doesn’t chop up people who dare to criticise him.

Has it really come to this? First Chelski, then Man City... the ever slippery slope into a place where there seems to be no fit and proper test for owning a club, beyond money. That and not actually being a convicted criminal.

Some fans say UK plc trades billions in arms to Saudi Arabia. They say – rightly – we are not the first club to be owned by foreign despots with dubious reputations for upholding freedoms we hold dear.

All of that is true. And there are those who say politics has no place in football. They miss the fact politics is football as politics is business and football has become business.

I feel enormously for the fans who have filled St James’ Park every home game for seven billion years. They deserve better.