The great David Ginola was one of the many former great players who came back to St. Jame’s Park last week,  to play in a Newcastle United side against an AC Milan side captained by Paolo Maldini, and the charity game to celebrate 20 years at Newcastle by Steve Harper was a huge success,  with over 50,0000 fans turning out for the game. and it raised £300K for local charities.

David Ginola – too many Frenchmen a problem?

With six Frenchmen signed this year, including Loic Remy on loan, Newcastle now have a third of their squad being French players, and David had the experience of coming to Newcastle and playing for the club from 1995 through 1997, and David played 75 times for the Kevin Keegan led Magpies – the Entertainers.

This is what David had to say today in the Daily Mail:

“You can’t just arrive in Newcastle and say, “I’m just going to live my life, I don’t want to understand the culture.” “It could be bad in a way, if all the French players stick too much together.”

“You don’t speak English, you speak French together in the dressing room. I guess there will be some rules in the dressing room that the French should speak English. That could be a problem.”

‘It’s also a problem with the English players. I’ve been in this situation before when I was speaking in French with some of my friends, sometimes English players start to get annoyed because they think we are talking about them. It can bring some issues in a dressing room and this is something you have to avoid.”

“When you come from Saint Tropez, and you play four years in Paris, and you arrive in the North-East in England, you think that people speak English, but in fact they speak Geordie, so for me it was like a foreign language – but another foreign language.”

“So I said to myself that would be difficult. But having said that, I did everything I could to be accepted – learning the language, doing my best every day in training.”

The Geordie dialect another foreign language – that’s a good way of putting it – why aye man. 😀

David’s right though that it could turn out to be a problem, but it hasn’t been up till now, but maybe even more Frenchmen coming through the door could tip the balance.

We would expect Newcastle to go after some home-based players, but they will be more expensive,  and Mike Ashley’s rather frugal running of the club may mean we keep recruiting from France, and that could turn into a problem for the club.

But at the moment it certainly doesn’t seem to be,  with players like Mathieu Debuchy, Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa, Moussa Sissoko, Ben Arfa, Yoan Gouffran and Loic Remy  all playing very well in the famous black  and white stripes of Newcastle United.

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