There is a stench hanging in the air at St James's Park like a post curry and ale fart in a lift. It is the over-powering stench of fear, greed, rebellion and frustration and it is so foul it could even be enough to knock Newcastle United out of the Premier League.
The word crisis is one of the most overused in sport reporting, but it is all too apt for the Magpies. First comes a problem, then the turmoil, then the crisis and eventually the disaster.
If Kevin Keegan's row with Derek Llambias was the problem, the turmoil was the failed reconciliation attempts which followed. The crisis is the shambles of a football club we now see and which has suffered three successive Premier League defeats as meek and timid as Bambi taking her first steps.
For Newcastle that disaster will be Championship football, financial collapse and an opportunity to reacquaint themselves with some old friends from Leeds United, Sheffield Wednesday and Nottingham Forest.
Melodramatic? Maybe. Scaremongering? Perhaps. A very real and present danger? Definitely. As thing stand, it is difficult not to see anything other than a relegation battle ahead and with Hull City making a surprisingly strong start to life in the top flight, one of the so-called big boys could well go this year.
It has happened before and it will happen again. When I went to Nottingham Forest for Sunderland's Carling Cup game last month it hit home that, when I was growing up, Forest where one of the biggest clubs in the country and Newcastle, well, they were just a decent sized club in what was then, the Second Division. In fact, Newcastle were so bad, they even played Leyton Orient in the same league.
Forest, of course, are now back in the Championship after two years in League One - a division Leeds United continue to battle away in after the financial meltdown which followed their own collapse as a Premier League force.
I'm not saying this is Newcastle's fate. Blimey, they have only played five league games this season and the team keeping them off the bottom of the table is Tottenham Hotspur, last season's Carling Cup winners and a team expected to challenge for a top six place this season.
Intriguingly, these two troubled clubs - Tottenham really don't have the same cause for complaint as Newcastle - meet in the Carling Cup at St James's Park on Wednesday night, when the Sky cameras will be in attendance, and the rest of the country will rub its hands in morbid glee at the pain and suffering of both teams.
Home advantage will help the Magpies. It always does. But the way things have gone in the last couple of weeks, it is difficult to see where a win is going to come from.
Newcastle United have an owner who is no longer interested in running the club, but still wants to make a massive profit from its sale. They do not have a manager because the owner has been more interested in trying to find a buyer and they have players who, without Keegan, resemble the mediocre rabble they did before he came.
As for the fans, well they are caught between continuing to protest against the United board and desperately trying to do everything they can to help the players through the storm.
It's amazing how easy it is for professional footballers to use the lack of a manager as an excuse, but there is no question teams struggle when they do not have leadership. Yes, United fans had every right to expect better from those in black and white stripes than an abject 3-1 defeat by West Ham at Upton Park, but can we blame the players for the disarray the football club is in?
The answer is no, we can't. We can expect them to put up more of a fight than they did against the Hammers and Hull, but when they will be playing in a half-empty ground (at least) and the atmosphere is so poisonous, it is futile to suggest they will not be distracted.
If Ashley still cares about the club he wants to sell - he was at Upton Park at the weekend, albeit in a private box rather than with the away fans - as he said in his sale statement last week then he will appoint a new manager and fast. Quite who that man will be - someone out of work and desperate for any route back into the Premier League probably - I can't think.
And if Ashley can't find a buyer willing to pay his asking price then, if he has an ounce of decency in him, he will either lower his asking price or try and come to some sort of peace with the supporters. It is an olive branch they would have to accept, but when the alternative is trips to Swansea and Burnley next season it might just have to be done.
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