Season 2008/09 was not a happy or productive time for Newcastle United.
It had all started so promisingly - 4 points from tricky looking games with Manchester United and Bolton despite a raft of injuries, some good looking signings in Danny Guthrie and Jonas Gutierrez and a sense we could, at long last, get a simple top 10 finish.
Then everything imploded. Kevin Keegan resigned after a ridiculous fall out with Director of Football Dennis Wise, leading to an awful whirlwind that chewed up and spat out Joe Kinnear, Charles N'Zogbia, Alan Shearer and, ultimately, Newcastle's Premier League status.
There are various middling reasons for the club's relegation - hair-brained tactics, poor signings, bad managerial appointments, incompetent owners, bad luck, a failure to score one goal or keep out one goal in games against strugglers - but the memories provoke various painful recollections.
Thankfully, season 2012/13 did not end in a preposterous relegation that had been threatened. But it's not as if the club has provided any knowledge they haven't learned the lessons of recent history.
It's weirdly fitting to have these comments in the week the club has discussed the history in retrieving old cast-iron gates from Sir John's Hall house, even if some Toon Army fans dispute the actual iconic status of said gates.
But the re-appointment of Joe Kinnear - unconfirmed by the club but loudly trumpeted by the man himself - is not exactly a positive omen.
There are two ways the club has not learned history - returning to a structure that we deployed in 08/09, to great success, and returning Kinnear to his position.
This is slightly harsh as it is arguable Kinnear could have kept us up. We lost our Premier League status in the run after he left, where we picked up just six points in 13 games. It is conceivable that the security of a stable(ish) appointment in the manager's hotseat could have given us at least the one more point that would've kept the team up, maybe even more.
But this is not praise, and merely a comment that having 4 managers in 1 season was ultimately a huge factor in our relegation. Poor tactics, poor self-awareness, repeated excuses, calling journalists fuckers and cunts in the same press conference, and mispronouncing players names is hardly a great omen.
Be interesting to see him pronounce the name of our French centre back Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa.
His new position is that of director of football - a role that has always struck me as one of the most pointless roles in football. The manager and scouts are the men best suited to run transfers, as they will liase to find talent to fill in the gaps in their squad. Getting somebody to do this for you seems fairly pointless, because of the fact there is nothing to stop manager and scout doing this.
Alan Pardew and Graham Carr operate in the manager and scout roles on Tyneside, and found the talent that fuelled the surprise success of 2011-12. Following the great drop down the league a year after, the club had to change tack. The ideal option would've been a new manager, or failing that, some new tactical theories to help work on things.
Although the club agreed they needed a new direction after such a disaster of a campaign, reverting to the structure that led to the disastrous relegation season is not it.
In that season, Dennis Wise was bought in as a Director of Football, with various scouts looking for players while he and Kevin Keegan were supposed to discuss targets. Instead, Wise bought several players we didn't need as a favour to shifty South American agents, while wilfully blocking players Keegan actually wanted, leading to the resignation and various truths exposed in a tribunal.
This situation is ultimately where the fiasco that was the 2008/09 season begun. Unfortunately, after a few years, it seems the board wants to reinstate such a paradigm. This is a flawed arrangement that struggled to work the first time around and just shows all signs pointing as failure the second time around.
Mike Ashley has certainly developed a somewhat unsurpassed level for PR bollocks since his buyout of the Toon Army some 2 years before the trapdoor opened. It remains a true miracle he has overtaken Freddy Shepherd, for whom bad publicity was the only publicity, in the fuck-up stakes.
But after a litany of errors that have ranged for poor managerial appointments to never putting in any more money than the minimum, and arranging a deal with the truly detestable Wonga.com, errors in judgement like this are so common place you almost tend to forget to notice them after a while.
It is hyperbolic to suggest this situation is about to lead to the club repeating the litany of mistakes that sent the team tumbling downwards. Certainly, one can see talk of boycotts as excessive.
But it is hardly a move in an acceptable direction, and one that provokes more questions than answers amongst a fanbase getting more and more agitated before the fixtures even come out. The chief question among all this surely being "What the hell was Ashley thinking when he came up with this bollocks?"
The publicity-shy Ashley surely has to, at some point, justify an increasingly outlandish series of boobs that seem to help the club in no way whatsoever.
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