JOHNGIBSON Hope springs eternal ... even under Ashley
WHICH of Newcastle United’s big beasts will prevail as we prepare for Premier League resumption? Rafa Benitez or Mike Ashley? In many ways there can only be one winner but I am not having it. I can’t. Benitez has successfully managed to swim against the tide for so long and I am taking him to do it again. Sure I am. I must because I dare not contemplate the alternative. Benitez will decide the immediate future of a historic club, not Ashley. However, we have to face facts – Ashley will be the longterm dictator because he holds all the big cards. Heaven help us. With the transfer window slammed shut we are about to enter the world of reality after the falseness of summer hope, frustration, anticipation and anti-climax.
All has been swept aside and tomorrow, upon turf which for 125 years has played home to United - the heartbeat of a proud city - Geordies will be alive again with Premier League action.
The aristocrats of Tottenham Hotspur, top-three dwellers and Champions League participants, are the curtain-raisers who will lay bare precisely what sort of health, rude or frail, the Magpies are in at the beginning of a long, exhausting campaign.
Hope abounds, mixed with a liberal dash of apprehension.
Hope in the form of Benitez, apprehension attributed exclusively to Ashley.
At long last this week Benitez gained the striker he has craved all summer in Salomon Rondon, even if he had to sacrifice Dwight Gayle to do it.
It has been like drawing teeth, a ghastly will-he-won’t-he taken right to the wire.
Hope remains with us over the season but here and now the challenge is of Becher’s Brook proportions even if Harry Kane is traditionally a slow starter and many of Tottenham’s stars are not up to full power and pace after the World Cup.
The belief has to be if Spurs can sharpen some of their international talent enough to send them to war then maybe Rondon and Yoshinori Muto can equally take up arms without ideal preparation.
Spurs have been much more inactive than Newcastle in the transfer market, though of course their squad already had so much depth and variety it puts them way ahead of their opening-day rivals.
Every neutral loves Tottenham and their manager Mauricio Pochettino, just as they do Liverpool and Jurgen Klopp, but both clubs MUST win trophies starting this season.
That makes them doubly dangerous.