The owner of the Italian restaurant where Mike Ashley treated Rafa Benitez and his players to a meal on Wednesday evening has revealed that the Sports Direct mogul made numerous bizarre efforts to pay the bill in kind.The purpose of the evening was to reassure Benitez and his players that Ashley would provide the necessary investment for the club to move forward, but the mood turned sour when the bill arrived.“The big guy [Mike Ashley] grabbed the bill and joked that he’d forgotten his wallet, everyone laughed hard, and then less and less hard as he repeated the joke 19 more times,” the owner of the Rialto restaurant, Sonny Miah, told FourFourTwo.“Then the corpulent gastropod [Ashley] sidled up to me, put a still greasy hand on my shoulder and suggested that there was a deal to be done.“The jowly gob-wobbler [Ashley] insisted that the leftover dregs of food on the players’ plates could still retail for at least 20% of their original value, but that offer was devalued somewhat as upon seeing the food Ashley scooped up [Jonjo Shelvey’s] remaining garlic bread and swallowed it whole.“Finally, the crapulent meat-muncher [Ashley] drew up a payment plan that would involve nearly 30 payments over the course of three years, but he stressed that several of those payments would be made by someone else, who, unaccountably, he was sure would be keen to foot the bill.”Starters XIThe bonding evening had gone well for the first hour, but trouble started to brew when Ashley requested the menu again and began to make a rudimentary calculation of how much had been spent on starters, furrowing his brow and muttering about how many Lonsdale hoodies he could have purchased for that sum.“Just after the mains arrived, Ashley made it clear that for us to have dessert we’d have to send back at least the sides,” Paul Dummett told FourFourTwo.“The lads accepted that and began scraping mashed potato and carrots off their plates. The big gaffer took the whole lot and headed towards the kitchen saying he’d get that sorted out right away.“He returned some minutes later with a ring of mashed potato around his [big, lying] mouth.”At the time of publication, the Newcastle back-line was washing dishes at the Rialto waiting to be joined by Ashley who had pledged to be there “in a little bit”.Please note: This story is satirical. But you knew that already, right?Back of the Net•New features you’d love on FourFourTwo.com
