Uncertain times indeed for North East football
THESE modern days football is in the iron grip of club owners who by their wealth and ambition, or lack of it, dictate what fans are to be served.
Here twixt Tyne and Wear – the hotbed of football as it was once so succinctly named – we are currently living slap bang amid the turmoil of change.
Newcastle fans are demanding Mike Ashley sells up and departs, Sunderland are praying Stewart Donald is their saviour after Ellis came up Short and Gateshead twitch nervously following a sad end to the season topped off by news owners Richard and Julie Bennett have put the club up for sale.
The Heed have always been my second love after the Mags and so it is with apprehensiont I await the outcome of their fate.
Everything is on a knife edge with manager Steve Watson, his coaching staff,and all the players out of contract wondering where their next employment is going to come from.
These are tricky weeks because while the summer produces breathing space it is sometimes a false assumption time is on your side when it is ebbing away and building bricks are still not in place.
Richard Bennett appears extremely positive all will be worked out within the time frame available and we have to hope he is right because Gateshead cannot be allowed to fade away into obscurity once again.
Non-league football is a precarious existence with absurd travelling for clubs on the breadline .... Gateshead to Dover is akin to a trek across the Sahara!
Many clubs immediately beneath the Football League live precariously juggling a full time existence in the hope of the promised land being attained against the realism of the financial accounts. Gateshead are the concern for me because I have supported them in various degrees since I was a kid. They are my mini Newcastle United. I feel desperately sorry for Watson, once one of Kevin Keegan’s Entertainers who so wants to be a manager and was so delighted to return home he left National championselect Macclesfield where he was first-eam coach to take on the considerable job at Gateshead. He only arrived in October but has been faced with a tightening financial budget and now the collapse of the club’s infrastructure to the point where the future is clouded in concern.
Bennett and his wife took over with admirable big hearts and lofty ambitions - only to find as so many do that such are the demands of ownership even billionaires can quickly become millionaires once they buy a football club.
The earliest possible concrete news would be a real blessing and if it becomes a double with Mike Ashley also completing a financial deal across the water then heyho, the sun will really shine.
I don’t want to think about the alternative.