Why Ashley AND Benitez should go

FROM the pathetic owner downwards, to the operation of the whole club, Newcastle United is like a bad egg – it stinks.

I also feel Rafa Benitez, relative to his worthless activity in the transfer market, is no longer doing a good job.

So many transfer windows have come and gone, with no attempt to recruit some top players. Do centre-forwards and strikers no longer exist?

Benitez may be playing his cards close to his chest, but there’s little attempt to trump Mike Ashley. He’s just accepting he can’t get money for players, and only sell existing players if he’s to buy new ones.

Aleksandar Mitrovic is waiting in the wings with an inflated £20m on his head (why can he score for other managers, but not Benitez?) while there’s talk of selling Matt Ritchie, to raise funds to reincarnate Andros Townsend. It’s no good robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Benitez says he would like to stay at Newcastle for another 10 years. If he’s going to succumb to Ashley’s every whim, and not hammer on his door to demand change, and get adequate funding to buy quality players, he might as well go now.

He says he was “face to face with Ashley in the summer”.

Was that their annual meeting? When will the next one be? In the winter?

Any normal manager has personal meetings, or phone conversations, every week with their chairman, or at least an executive member of the board. That should be easy at NUFC with a one-man board!

At United, I’ve witnessed managers who’ve had to live with fans baying for their blood, yelling for them to be sacked, such as Sam Allardyce, Graeme Souness, Kenny Dalglish and Alan Pardew.

The same could happen to Benitez, if his sub-par teams continue with no success on the pitch. If he can’t handle Ashley, and I don’t think he can, then he should resign, and let a stronger man take over.

Benitez isn’t God, and in the past has been fired at Real Madrid and Inter Milan, he resigned from Valencia and left Liverpool by “mutual consent.”

Nobody is indispensable, and if there were strong managers waiting in the wings, I think a £6m salary could be an attractive carrot?

Ashley, put under pressure by ambitious new blood, could realise that he was never qualified to run a football club.

He could then fully return to his beloved Sports Direct – his only real interest.

Maybe then, those ghastly Sports Direct hoardings all round the ground, would also bite the dust. CHRIS ROBINSON, Gosforth.