Considering Mike Ashley's decision to back his manager to the hilt no matter what results he managed to guide the team to, it was inevitable that we would spend the international break suffering endless column inches and soundbites from former players, club employees and current squad members proclaiming Pardew to be the man for the job. Some took the inevitable track of "he got us to fifth, he CAN turn things round" - including the manager himself - while others said there'd be nobody else able to do as good a job in the circumstances (garbage), but the most surprising was the revelation that he's a "fantastic" and "great" manager. Those two assessments came from Mike Williamson, the centre-half who has a particularly vested interest in praising the manager who stuck by him even when it looked like he was no more than Championship quality, and Peter Beardsley, who couldn't not say it. Whether Beardsley believes it to be the case behind closed doors is a different matter - and wouldn't play into the PR campaign - but he was convinced to give that statement in a very public forum. Without going too much into why they said it, and why the rest of the squad continue to back a manager demonstrably unable to get them out of first gear, the thing that really matters is what impact it will have on Pardew himself. For the fans it's a blinkered red flag to a bull, and a provocative invitation to prove quite easily that he definitely bloody well isn't a fantastic manager, but for Pardew it's the unjustified massaging of an ego that really doesn't need it. When the manager came out and said he'd go home and polish his Manager Of The Year award to get over fan criticism it offered a look behind his eyes: he genuinely thinks he is still the same manager that achieved that, and that he masterminded the fifth place finish himself. In reality, it was a blip of over-achievement, when he recognised how to get the best out of players quite by accident, and profited from the individual brilliance of Cisse and Ben Arfa (no matter how much he'd prefer to forget that), but to Pardew it was easily the pinnacle of his career. And fair play to him, winning that award is no small thing, considering the calibre of managers in the Premier League, but reverting back to that state of mind, and hearing constantly that you are a great manager when your team is at the bottom of the league is helping nobody. If we are to persist with Pardew, the manager needs some serious home truths, and he needs to be hauled over the coals as much as his under-performing team. In any other industry, you would not praise a manager guiding the business down the drain, nor would you allow him to rest easy in the frame of mind that looking back on former achievements is perfectly fine. If he wasn't to be sacked, there would be serious reviews, shareholder reassurances and a tangible change in the atmosphere of a club. Of course the PR campaign wants us to think everything is fine and dandy at St. James' Park, but when it gets to the point where the man who is the problem believes the spin as well, it's gone way, way too far.
