Farewell Gini

For a team that has been relegated there have been an awful lot of positives coming out of Newcastle United this summer. The feel good factor began when Rafa Benitez agreed to becoming the permanent manager in May and since then, Newcastle United fans have experienced nothing but positives. Fringe players have left the club, five signings have been confirmed with Grant Hanley expected to be confirmed as the sixth at some point today, ticket prices have been cut, family days have been arranged. We have won our first friendly of the season 6-0 and we fought back from a 2-0 half time deficit against Doncaster Rovers last night (ok, perhaps that is stretching it a little). The good news continued yesterday with reports stating the Wonga sponsorship deal would not be renewed. Allardyce is the new England manager. Things have been going exceedingly well.

However, with relegation, there will be some downsides. Most fans will have expected the likes of Steven Taylor and Fabricio Coloccini to leave and there won’t have been too many tears shed when they inevitably left the club a few weeks ago.

However, I think deep down, we had hoped to keep some of the so called “big names” even if our head was telling us there was no chance. Tim Krul, Daryl Janmaat, Cheick Tiote, Jonjo Shelvey, Moussa Sissoko and Gini Wijnaldum are the names in question and I was personally suprised that the first to leave was Andros Townsend, especially to Crystal Palace. I had hoped that the January signings at least would be willing to stay for one more year but unfortunately this is seemingly not the case.

The two names that have recently been heavily linked with huge money moves away from the club are Moussa Sissoko and Gini Wijnaldum and the magpies fans made their feelings clear with chants of “Gini Wijnaldum we want you to stay” and “Moussa Sissoko we want you to go” at the pre-season friendly match against Doncaster Rovers last night, tongue in cheek I know but there is some truth in it to be fair. I’ll leave the talking about Moussa Sissoko’s exit for another day as right now, he is still a Newcastle player but news this morning has broke that Liverpool have matched Newcastle’s £25m (up front) valuation of Wijnaldum and the player, despite getting fifteen minutes on the pitch last night, is expected to sign for the Merseyside club in the next 48 hours.

I like Wijnaldum a lot. He seems like a decent fella who is well liked and at times last season he showed us the class he has. He ended up being our top scorer, notching up 11 goals throughout the 15/16 season, not bad for a midfielder who was playing in a poor side, often out of position on the left wing. The thing with Wijnaldum though, much like most of his team-mates, he was anonymous for far more games than he produced the goods. This is the most frustrating thing about last season; as fans we know the players we have are good - the fact that Liverpool are willing to pay £25m for him kind of proves that - but time and time again they fail to show up in games on a consistent basis.

The same could of course be said for every other Newcastle United player - Wijnaldum’s inconsistency was consistently matched by his team mates throughout the entire season and this was one of the major reasons we were relegated. Being played out of position is always going to be tough and this has become a fairly regular issue for a number of players under the recent Newcastle United managers. Sissoko on the right wing. Wijnaldum on the left. It never added up.

We have to take Wijnaldum’s imminent departure on the chin. This is a bit of a blow but the positives this pre-season are (so far) outweighing the negatives by a long shot. There will be more exits of course, that is inevitable, but I am also confident that we will get more players in and this time, under Rafa’s guidance, I am sure we will be getting the right players in. The sales of Wijnaldum and Sissoko are likely to bring in nigh on £50m - not a bad turnover for two players costing a combined £15m. I have every confidence that the money will be re-invested in to the side as I suspect the money brought in from the sales of high profile players would have been fairly close to the top of Rafa’s agenda when negotiating his contract. We are witnessing the rebuilding of the club and part of rebuilding is knocking walls down and building from the ground up. Gini will be replaced, I am sure of it.