Newcastle United: Pairing Jaissle with that transfer business a high-wire act with no safety net
A shame, in many ways, that Michael Carrick has already locked down the role as this season’s ‘not the problem but is he the solution?’ manager of choice.
Maybe his now imminent departure will free the spot up for another, because Matthias Jaissle appears to be, if anything, an even more worthy candidate.
No manager could realistically be expected to thrive at what was laughably dubbed ‘Newcastle 2.0’ after a summer in which three of the club’s very best and popular long-standing (by your modern standards) players all departed to be replaced by a small fortune’s worth of promising yet unproven youth on the pitch, to be then entrusted to a 38-year-old manager the bulk of whose experience as main man in the dugout came in the Saudi Semi-Retirement League.
It was a bold strategy. And sure it was one forced upon Newcastle rather than one embarked upon of their own free will, but nobody forced them to engage in the wanky 2.0 self-dubbing.
It doesn’t really matter how entirely fair it might be now to point out that this is likely to be a transitional season with a bottom-half finish a probable outcome; the salient point is that such harsh realities are not what Newcastle fans agreed to sign over their souls and ‘neutrals’ choice’ status for. They thought they were going to be Manchester City. And now they kind of are Manchester City.
But only as a social experiment to try and work out whether it’s better to a) win a load of trophies in a decade-long run of unimaginable success, only for it all to go to sh*t and be taken away, or b) to never have that in the first place. We think it’s a).
Absolutely none of that background to Newcastle’s current position is Jaissle’s fault, and while 12 points from 10 games isn’t a stunning return, it’s still a significant distance away from the calamity many had predicted.
There are troubling elements. What Jaissle’s side have done so foolishly is to get their points in the wrong order, losing only one of their first five games when they could have been excused more strife but then losing three of the next five. As well as losing consecutive games against Everton in the league and Carabao, something football clubs only do when they’re very distressed.
More troubling than Newcastle’s downward curve, though, are the grumbles starting to leak out. When Jaissle accused his players of not following ‘the plan’ against Everton, the counter stories of confusion about the nature of that plan were quick to emerge. Jaissle has attempted to play it down with a well-deployed ‘language barrier’ defence, but it’s a card you only get to play once. And when this kind of strain twixt manager and players starts to bubble, it generally ends only one way.
Which would be a shame. Jaissle was a monumental gamble off the pitch for a club that had already been forced into similarly hefty ones on it. Nobody could have blamed them for taking a safer option at a time of stress when the future of the whole project lies so firmly in the balance.
There have been enough warning signs over the last couple of seasons about the dark places hubris, arrogance and complacency can land even the largest clubs. Newcastle must know and accept they are far from immune.
Yet while we can’t quite decide whether it was bravery or folly to decide to go all in by pairing a high-ceiling, low-floor manager with the high-wire transfer business thrust upon them, we still rather admire it. And we hope they retain enough bravery or folly to stick with it a while yet. We want to see how this plays out, chiefly because we have a) no skin in the game, but also b) no idea. Cannot work this guy out.
