Do We Need To Hit Rock Bottom To Get Ashley Out?

Relegation from the Barclays Premier League might be a blessing in a particularly devilish disguise, that it would force the despised Mike Ashley to sell up and allow the club to start again.

It is based on the psychoanalytic theory that you need to hit rock bottom to start the recovery process, but ask supporters of Leeds United, Nottingham Forest and Sheffield Wednesday and they will tell you it is not quite as easy as that.

If a club are well run by smart people, as is the case at Birmingham City and West Bromwich Albion, they can bounce back.

But when was a smart, football-savvy person last seen in the Newcastle boardroom?

Ashley admits freely that he did not bother to undertake a period of due diligence when he bought the club in 2007. He bought them on the assumption that he could turn them around and sell them at a profit.

Like so many others at St James' Park, he overestimated his own abilities, ignoring the rot that lay beneath an impressive façade.

A personal hunch is that Newcastle will somehow survive on Sunday, but if they do not, God help them and their long-suffering supporters.

Their wage bill, estimated at £70 million, is among the biggest in the Premier League and whereas most clubs who exist in the bottom half of the table, as Newcastle will have for four of the past five seasons, are prudent enough to offer contracts whereby wages would drop in the event of relegation, such good housekeeping has rarely been evident on Tyneside.

They need to change whatever their fate on Sunday and, if relegation is it, they should not make the mistake of thinking that the parachute payments will provide a soft landing. Because when you fall into an abyss, rock bottom does not exist.