With Newcastle United in complete turmoil, now would be a good time to move in for some Newcastle players, that a new manager may want to keep.

Mike Ashley - a complete disaster for the Newcastle United club

But since we don’t have a manager right now,  any bid that meets Newcastle’s asking price for a player will be accepted, and any new manager appointed in the future, will just have to pick up the pieces of the squad, or so it would seem from Ashley’s reckless actions.

And one of those players, Newcastle’s 22 year-old Player of the Season last year Sebastien Bassong, is drawing interest from both Arsenal and Tottenham today.

We believe that Shearer, if given the Newcastle job, would make retaining Bassong one of his priorities, but Shearer and everybody else associated with the club right now are helpless, after Ashley has concentrated 100% on selling the club, and presumably its assets, at the peril of everything else.

And if  Arsenal and Tottenham meet the asking price for the former Metz player, now said to be around £12M, he could and probably would be on his way.

It seems that Ashley is looking at Newcastle purely as a business right now, and is trying to sell as many of its assets as possible, but of course that will hardly help the club once a new manager comes in.

We don’t want a lot of players to stay, since most are in disgrace given the sky high wages they received last season, but there are some, and Bassong is one of them.

Seb could be great for us now and in the future, if we can just hang onto him, but with the turmoil going on, he’d probably be relieved to get out of  Toon.

But none of that appears to bother Ashley, as he moves as quickly as he can in selling the club, and if he can do that it would be good, but there could be a lot of  damage once that is finally achieved within 3-4 weeks or so.

And who he thinks is going to buy players or get ready for the pre-season is an open question which he will not answer, probably becasue he cannot.  But his actions of late  would seem to show that  he doesn’t much care.

And that’s a huge problem for the Newcastle fans and the club that is rocketing down in a downward death spiral right now, and is the laughing stock of the land - again.

However, a rapid appointment of Alan Shearer, who would no doubt burst into action, if given the chance, would help to alleviate many of these concerns, but it seems Ashley is more than determined to keep Shearer on the sidelines, and the club in hand-cuffs, until he sells it.

This man has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster for Newcastle - and that’s the truth - based entirely on the facts.  There will be books written about his tenure at Newcastle, we have no doubt about that.

He has managed to take a club worth around £300M at the beginning of last season and reduce it’s value to £100M, by some ridiculous and naive decisions (and more than one), as the club has dropped perilously into the Championship.

We also have to hold the players primarily responsible for this shambles, and the squad of 2008-2009 will not soon be forgotten on Tyneside.

This is not meant to be a personal attach on Mike, but an attack on his business failings at the Newcastle club, which have been enormous - and we’re all open to professional criticism, especially when things go so wrong.

As we said yesterday, most managers would have been sacked given Ashley’s performance this last year.