BRITAIN’S BEST COLUMNIST AT THE KING POWER

IT is now comedy gold – or comedy black and white.

The time for hand-wringing, moralising and loftily berating the motives of an owner who does not give a toss has gone, ended by this insult of a performance.

There is only one way this team and this club can dismount a runaway horse to humiliation – and that is to be SHAMED into it. Ridiculed, laughed at. Now, we know Ashley does not shame easily. If at all. Mock him and he mocks back with the smarmy smile of a billionaire. And what is the point of taking the rise out of John Carver, whose public slaughtering of Mike Williamson and the rest was the desperate diatribe of a doomed coach, taking a spear to the consciences of the men who don’t try a leg for him? Over Over-promoted,promoted, over-excitable, over as a manager beforebe he has barely started… but a seemingly decent guy, who deser deserves a touch more than to have thisth group of players look at him as though he is still putting out cones and scooping up tracksuits.

With a minute of this meeting of the wants and want-not want-nots, the triers and the non-triers non-triers, remaining, Nigel Pearson w wandered over to Carver andan slipped an arm around his w waist.

Had he lit up the words ‘HOW HAVE YOU ENDED UP WITH THIS SHOWER,SHOW PAL?’ on the fourth official’soffici numbers board, Pearson’s se sentiments could not have been anya clearer.

Moment Moments later, Fabricio Coloccini headed towards a knot of Ne Newcastle supporters pop-eyed with despair. That h he got nowhere near his tar target was in bitter keepi keeping with his and his team team’s performance.

O Ordered away by the sig signs and spittle of br broken loyalists.

And elsewhere, disinterest turns into disdain, sadness into scorn. Ashley’s ownership of a football institution has been so insulting that a club once loved way beyond its geographical boundaries will, by many, be cheered into the Championship.

The odds are still against that eventuality. But not if the players continue to avoid the mirror. If they don’t shy away from a true reflection, they will see characters who have a different, yet equally heinous, culpability to Ashley’s.

Coloccini was far from alone in his culpability. This was a shocking, collective abdication of responsibility.

There is no other way of explaining the dismissals of Williamson ( left) and Daryl Janmaat or the offence committed by Emmanuel Riviere, which gave Leonardo Ulloa his second goal of a vibrant, rollocking, rumbustious Leicester performance.

Leicester were everything Newcastle were not. Put simply, they cared. Newcastle did not.

They couldn’t even kick off properly, for goodness sake. The defending of set-pieces – responsible for the opening goals from Ulloa and Wes Morgan – simply reflected the stark absence of commitment.

This latest turn in an eight-match roll of dishonour was a stark low point.

And now, Newcastle supporters can – apart from the realism that 35 points might yet be enough for survival – cling only to the hope that the shame, the ridicule and the laughter can somehow galvanise this sorry bunch.

That Williamson listens to the claim from his OWN MANAGER that he earns a suspension on purpose, that Coloccini and company hear the howls of pain from inside and of derision outside, loudly and clearly, and somehow, drum up a response befitting their professional status.

By the time sporadic insults – “gutless, spineless cowards” was a favourite – helped them on to the team bus, their manager was in talks with club executives.

There is even an outside chance Carver could be replaced before the next game.

Maybe replaced by a man who has just managed to engineer a pretty spectacular fall from grace in English football’s second tier.

Newcastle United, eh? Comedy black and white.