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Four Thousand Reasons Why Guthrie Left Newcastle

12 years ago
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The press had a field day in the summer when Danny Guthrie’s wedding do turned into a free for all with amongst other claims of unruly behaviour, guests throwing lobster thermidor at each other at the reported £40,000 do at Allerton Castle, near Harrogate.

As a follow on to that story it has now emerged that Guthrie has apologised after failing to return rented wedding suits, with a Tyneside based wedding hire shop taking him to the small claims court. The matter now cleared up and the shop compensated.

One detail that is of interest is that this storm in a wedding cup led to Guthrie’s Newcastle United earnings back at the time being revealed.

I had regularly heard that a lot of the fringe players at Newcastle were on a fraction of what other players were on, not a sliding scale as is the case at most clubs.

The wedding furore revealed that Danny Guthrie was on £4000 a week at Newcastle, which most of us would be very happy with but in terms of Premier League football…

As an illustration, the average Premier League footballer is on over £20,000 a week and while you might think the likes of Tevez, Rooney, Toure push this average up, obviously at the other end you have many more players bringing the average down.

While I didn’t rate Guthrie very highly he was clearly in our top eighteen and guaranteed at least a place on bench.

I think it is a worry that Newcastle/Mike Ashley are trying to run not just as a tightly run financial operation but on an unrealistic basis if the team/squad have any chance of moving forward. My understanding is that there are others getting money close to what Guthrie was getting despite being regulars in the first team squad.

Also, Danny Simpson might not be on quite as much as fans assume and his contract ‘demands’ not as unrealistic as those who have it in for him want to believe.

Having an elite group of ten or eleven players on competitive wages and then a huge divide with no budget for a sliding scale, could cause real problems in both the short and long-term.

Knowing that players talk it will be no secret to Guthrie’s old Newcastle teammates as to what Danny Guthrie is on now at Reading.

If you would like to feature like Richard on our/your website, get writing, ‘The Blog’ is where we profile contributions from anybody who has something to say. Send in your opinions/hopes/fears/articles and we’ll put them up on the website for everybody to enjoy.

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