So Newcastle have got off to a good start in the Championship: five wins and a draw saw them topping the table by two points over the international break, but with a tough game away to Cardiff coming up tomorrow, there is no guarantee that they will remain there.

But at present, they are playing well, they are top of the league, and they have only conceded one goal in five games. Does this mean I was wrong to be tooning my back?

Well, no. The reasons I said I wasn’t putting any more money into the club while Mike Ashley is in charge of it remain pretty much exactly the same.

• The owner and managing director seem to feel that Newcastle fans deserve to be kept in the dark about what is going on at the club and/or fed misleading information (what happened to those ‘more than two bids of over £100 million’, then?).
• The continuance of the ‘no proper manager’ saga, although I have changed my stance slightly over Chris Hughton: while I still remain far from convinced he is ‘the man for the job’, he’s done well so far, and deserves credit for putting up with all the shit going on at the club. But we still need a permanent manager.
• The continuing drain on the playing squad: while I accept it was necessary to off-load some of the high-earners and bring some transfer money in, the squad was too thin last season, and we’re now supposed to play eight more games with about eight less senior players. We need more players: decent quality ones would be an advantage.
• The one thing Ashley was doing right was to invest in youth and bring in quality youth players we had to pay money for with the intention of saving the club monies in the long run. This seems to have stopped.
• …and we’ve still got that bloody horrible away strip

So thanks (and I’ll continue to support the club from whichever bar has the games televised), but no thanks.