Newcastle Transfers: Yohan Cabaye Would Be An Idiot To Return

Whenever any former Newcastle player moves to pastures new and fails to make quite as big an impact as they might have wanted, the fans are united in their hope and expectation that said player will "come home" like a war-beaten hero, into the welcoming arms of those who always loved him. When Demba Ba's Chelsea experiment failed, Newcastle fans called for him to return. He went to Besiktas and European football. When Andy Carroll was deemed an over-priced nag by Liverpool, Newcastle fans called the long-haired lover home from Merseyside. He went to West Ham for a contract that is probably making Sam Allardyce sweat currently. And now Yohan Cabaye is struggling at PSG - what a surprise - and Newcastle fans have put deux and deux together and got a glorious homecoming. The latest in the Cabaye story is that le10Sport's French journalist Daniel Riolo has openly criticized Laurent Blanc for buying Cabayein the first place:

€œIn the last transfer window, was it a good idea to buy Cabaye? They spent how much on Cabaye? Twenty million? What does he bring? €œI€™m not saying he€™s a bad player, instead Cabaye is a good player but is he is for PSG? Bah, no! A guy like Leonardo would never have bought players like Cabaye or Aurier.€

The 28-year-old who has come out in support of Alan Pardew, despite the manager blaming him both for the side's poor start to last season and the club's poor end to last season, has made only 13 starts since his move to France, and according to ESPN, he's decided that if his inability to dislodge Thiago Motta and Marco Verratti affects his France career, he will move on:

"You're never certain. The important thing is that when I come here, I'm good. If, one day, the national team coach decided to make me play less because I'm not playing enough with my club, then we'd have to see and talk it over with my representatives."

Interestingly, he was also asked if he misses English football:

"Yes, sometimes I think about it, but I try to quickly get it out of my head because it would not take me to a very good place, even lower. And when I'm at the Parc des Princes, I feel that atmosphere again. I love that stadium, the fans, it's a magnificent pitch."

Inevitably that has already had some NUFC blogs falling over themselves to say he's definitely going to come back and be Newcastle's messiah again. But that misses the small fact that Yohan Cabaye is not an idiot. He would not turn down the opportunity to sign for Arsenal, who would leap to the front of the queue for his signature after so very publicly courting him last year, to come back to Newcastle. It's just not going to happen, regardless of his happiness to say Pardew is a great guy and a good manager from the distant, safe comfort of France. Why would he come and join a relegation battle when he's not going to get anything like the wages PSG pay him to play a cameo role? Why would he play under a manager who fundamentally does not know where most of his players' best positions are? And why would he come to a club that has now fundamentally identified him as the missing link? If he was to come back to Newcastle and struggle even slightly, he would be doomed, and it would surely not be long before Pardew was giving interviews about what's going wrong with his talisman and indirectly criticising him in his usual passive aggressive manner. So no Yohan, do yourself a favour: don't come back.