Lack of logic

Brian Woolnough asks his guests if they could make sense of the shambles at Newcastle.

Brian Woolnough asked three of Fleet Street's finest if they could make sense of the shambles at Newcastle. "No, not really," said Martin Samuel of The Times. "Not when everyone keeps on telling us what a shrewd operator Mike Ashley is and that in the City has this fantastic reputation. Clearly a clever guy as far as business is concerned but not when this is concerned. "Sometimes you can't work out why guys like Ashley do not apply the same logic that they have in their business life to when they take over a football club "This stuff about due diligence and putting in a management structure that from day one you could see how flawed it was. It was doomed from the start. "There is so much in football that surprises you, but this was not a surprise. On the day that Keegan walked in there everybody in the room is looking at it going 'this is a disaster. This cannot possibly work.'" Ian McGarry of The Sun believes that Ashley has not surrounded himself with the right people and has in fact hired his mates. "For the start he clearly has no fundamental knowledge of football or how it works," explained McGarry. "Instead of bringing in people who do, obviously you will say Denis Wise but Wise is thick as thieves with Ashley , so he is bringing in his mates and no one is going to say it is a bad idea. "The day Mike Ashley walked into Newcastle I believed they were up for sale -- for a profit. He bought the club to make a profit." The Mail on Sunday's Ian Ridley disagrees that Ashley is looking for a profit; instead he believes it was all about his ego. "I don't think he needed a profit," said Ridley. "Mike Ashley is one of those men who has been in business his whole life. The City describe him as a recluse for a start, he made nearly a billion pounds in the flotation of a company that since has struggled very badly, he is not liked by the City and lost a lot of money. "He bought Newcastle United as one of these blokes who wanted to step out of the City pages and the grief he was getting, and be popular and enjoy being part of a football club and the adulation he thought he would get with it. It was a way to buy all that. "He just loves this whole ego thing of being owner and chairman. But it has turned and it has gone against him as it was not as simple as he thought it was going to be."