It didn’t take long for a Mackem of my acquaintance to fire a mocking text into my mobile phone ‘You Get A Season Ticket With A Happy Meal, Newcastle Is A Massive Club ‘. Are they F” .

Well, you know the rest.

Actually, you don’t even need a Happy Meal but rather simply know an existing ST holder with a quick trigger finger to get one of those half-season FREE season tickets the artist formerly known as Newcastle United announced only yesterday and went on sale (sorry, force of habit) or rather up for grabs this morning.

My text riposte to my Mackem mate ‘. the worst thing Ashley has done is to have turned us into Sunderland was a bit tongue in cheek but also carries an element of truth. It was long a source of B&W amusement that Sunderland even when they were doing reasonably well in the heady days of Peter Reid and Kevin Phillips et al they were unable to sell out the SoS and Bob Murray’s desire to have one more seat than SJP just looked like the ramblings of a deluded idiot for whom the penny hadn’t dropped that his club just wasn’t up to the measure of Newcastle United. We all have tales of school-children coming home from school with offers of freebies courtesy of a dopey club currently in League One.

But that is all by the by. That was then. It’s ancient history. Ashley has turned Newcastle United into a shit club and the only thing that it can hang its hat on is that word potential ‘. but that looks like it might be draining away too.

There is a tragedy in where things now stand with Newcastle United. I have a Season Ticket for the Gallowgate End that has remained unused this season. I’ve been inside SJP once since August courtesy of a corporate freebie which enabled me to have a catch up with a great lad but the ensuing Wolves game convinced me my self-imposed exile after a life time of support was probably one of my better football based decisions over the last five decades. I take a grim satisfaction in keeping a small grey piece of plastic empty but financial sanity tells me that is unsustainable too.

I’m not going to the match because I can’t afford it (and neither are the majority of those who have chucked it)’. though my good lady reminds me of the money going down the drain each month and asks if I’m cancelling in January (I am). I’m not going to Newcastle United games for the simple reason it is a complete waste of time. I’m not going to the match because I’m part of some high octane twitter campaign to boycott the club ‘. I’m not going because going to the match makes me feel variously angry, depressed and any other adjective you’ve got but which is far from being on the pleasure spectrum. Does it hurt I’m not going? Yes, a bit but I have a growing contempt for the whole thing which would shock the supporter I was only five years ago. If I still can be called a supporter!

I have neither respect nor confidence in Steve Bruce who is little more than a plastic Geordie version of Alan Pardew – who will win the odd game here and there but is ultimately a Mike Ashley company man and like others at that club, inadequate for the role of leading our club against a proper blue print for progress. There is still no strategy, still no ambition and increasingly as this episode amply demonstrates still no clue as to what supporters want. And I’m really not arsed what his kiss-arse mates in the press opine because their opinions are for hire, influenced by personal friendships and whatever they judge to be good for their contact books.The club exists to stay in the PL while its value increases with minimal investment awaiting the perfect purchase from anyone prepared to bend over and touch their toes for Mike Ashley.

Come the Everton game about 15% of the home crowd inside SJP will have paid the grand sum of sweet fuck all to get inside and sit next to people who have tipped up over half a grand and more for the privilege. Ashley has made the support a joke and a figure of ridicule.

There is no guarantee this new breed of FREE TICKET MAG will be deserving of the ticket either coming from a disadvantaged background or be a long-standing supporter who has fallen on hard times and had to give up the match or be tied into a future deal to buy a season ticket or anything of that nature.

Ashley is randomly giving Season Tickets away to anyone who will be a bum on a seat and provide the window dressing of what once was a great football club but is now a hollowed out snide version of one. I’ve no doubt there has been pressure to make this decision from the Premier League and from BT or SKY ‘ who see their ‘product’ tarnished by those grey savannahs of grey plastic and crowds variously characterised as being sullen and uninspired.

So, cast your minds back to better days when the place was rammed with paying customers and a club managed by Keegan or Robson with players like Cole, Ferdinand, Shearer et al competing in Europe, at the right end of the PL table and in Cup Finals to what we have now ‘. Managed by a dud coach in Steve Bruce (who doesn’t even carry the title manager) relying on a crock like Carroll to tickle the media and fans alike for climbing into eleventh position in the table. Jesus Christ, is that it? ‘It would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. The bar has been lowered and then some. ‘The media and some fans seem to be lapping it up. I’m beyond despair and well into the seventh circle of resignation at the latest twitch of a Zombie corpse.

Of course divesting the distribution of these tickets to the new FREE TICKET MAG to some Season Ticket holders is a master stroke, completely muddying the waters without challenging what lies under the surface ‘ some supporters are paying top dollar to get inside SJP while others are paying fuck all. That simply isn’t sustainable as a business model. It has completely trashed the value of having a Season Ticket ‘ when prior to Ashley they were like gold dust ‘. Now they will be finding their way into the hands of someone who thinks they are getting a bargain. Ironically, it is the long standing paying punter who is being taken for a ride. Some might not even recognise that.

This is a completely random hoy-oot of something others have stretched themselves to pay for in many instances and will just not fly in the longer term. You’d really have to be off your head to renew in January in the knowledge that between 15-20% of tickets might be available for absolutely gratis at some point in the future. Well, if sitting watching a snide version of Newcastle United go through the motions is your thing.

But it also tells us something more ‘. Ashley knows he has nothing to offer and anyone expecting the club to make any significant investment in players to lift it into’ a position of respectability should reacquaint themselves with reality ‘. You don’t give tickets away for football matches if you expect to be bringing some new star turns in do you?

And here I am shaking my head at my own previous fan activism, part of campaigns for Twenty’s Plenty and affordable football for a much wider demographic railing against free PL football ‘. Ashley has fucked football and Newcastle United in ways I never thought imaginable.

The man is cancer.

MICHAEL MARTIN