It is with mixed feelings I hear that the team I have supported for some fifty five years has become the fetish-object of a billionaire. They run pro and con like this:

Pros

Freddy Shepherd will sink, like the R101, below our radar for ever with his personal greed, appalling acumen, crude sensibilities and continual self aggrandisement

We will compete with Chelsea, Man U, Arsenal, Liverpool on the mezzanine that overlooks the so-called level playing field of the Premiership

The Magpies will steal great players from other nests

We will become a world-brand and all who see our stripes will know us

We will play with the artistic swagger we have always craved and only Keagan has given us in recent times

WE WILL END DECADES OF NO SILVERWARE AND WIN THE PREMIERSHIP AND THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE AND VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING WE ENTER

Cons

The beautiful game is now out of the hands of fans, becoming a backgammon board for FIFA and EUFA bureaucrats, the corporate and the rich – look at the disgraceful treatment of Liverpool supporters in last week’s final and the paucity of tickets for true fans at any major football final nowadays

We have to change our fan – image from blubbing losers, for whom all except Mankies, Scousers, Gunners, Mackems and Chelskiites have held some sympathy, to hated winners because of our untold wealth and appalling new arrogance

We’ll lose our victim-empathy and become part of the priestly cast who will pass by on the other side when other cash-stripped clubs go into free fall and liquidation

We will be left homeless and orphaned when our Sugar Daddy moves on

This is how the irrational love of the team of my life (see early blog) inspires so much intense speculation and over-wrought emotion. It exhausts me. Who can explain this bathos? Answers please……