Mike Ashley faces the price of doing it on the cheap at Newcastle

Sky Sports are trumpeting the final day of the Premier League as Survival Sunday and for once they don’t need to hype it up.

Either Newcastle United or Hull City will be the ones surviving. The other will be playing Championship football next season.

If that’s the Tigers it will be bad enough.

They are an ambitious club, whose owner Assem Allam has invested more than £70m of his own money to back Steve Bruce’s efforts to establish the team in the Premier League.

Allam has already said that Bruce will stay as manager if the club are relegated.

The owner may have provoked controversy among fans with his attempts to change the club’s name to Hull Tigers, but there is no sense that everything will fall apart if Premier League status is lost.

If it’s Newcastle United who drop down a division, relegation will be catastrophic. The club could go into meltdown.

Owner Mike Ashley took a calculated gamble in December to allow Alan Pardew to move to Crystal Palace.

He looked at the £3m compensation being offered and the team’s ninth place in the table, and made a business decision.

He reckoned that he could afford to let his manager leave, give the job to his assistant and keep the chequebook closed in the January transfer window.

There was £34m sitting in the bank and 26 points on the board. What could possibly go wrong?

There were plenty of teams worse off. Leicester looked to have one of the relegation places sewn up. Burnley were surely doomed. QPR seemed a basket case. Sunderland, Hull, Palace and Aston Villa were all struggling.

John Carver had half a season to get the dozen or so points needed for safety. There was surely no way he could blow it so spectacularly that the team would need to win on the final day to be sure of staying up?

But after taking nine points from his first eight games, Carver has collected just one from a possible 30 points since the end of February.

In that time Leicester miraculously saved themselves, Villa appointed Tim Sherwood and got an immediate bounce and Newcastle’s ex-manager comfortably steered Palace to safety.

Worst of all for the Toon Army, Sunderland got out of trouble in midweek.

In mid-March, the Black Cats brought in Dick Advocaat to replace Gus Poyet. At the time they were 17th in the table with 26 points. Newcastle were 12th with 35.

The Dutchman was a firefighter appointment. A gun-for-hire with a career record of never having been relegated in nearly 30 years as a coach.

Advocaat organised his team like a battlefield general and collected 12 points from eight games. Over the same period Carver gathered one. Sunderland also made a significant January investment in Jermain Defoe. He may have scored only four goals but three of those have helped produce wins including the Tyne-Wear derby and the other a draw.

Owner Ellis Short has been rewarded for being pro-active. Ashley has paid the penalty of trying to get by on the cheap.

Carver bleeds black and white. He wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s a 50-year-old coach forced to deal with the modern media maelstrom without either on-the-job experience or years of PR coaching.

He’s passionate and he fronts up. But he says things that come out the wrong way and, as a result, he’s become a bit of a laughing stock.

That’s not fair. He’s given everything. He’s simply underqualified for the job.

Whether Ashley is punished for his mistake where it hurts the most the loss of the Premier League TV money now comes down to two games of football played 99 miles apart on the east coast.

If Bruce can beat his old team Manchester United for the first time in 22 attempts as a manager, Carver will have to get the better of Sam Allardyce.

He may be taking charge of West Ham for the final time and there’s no love lost considering one of the first decisions of the Ashley regime was to sack him.

If Newcastle drop through the trapdoor, there could be carnage ahead.

Ashley’s business brain will dictate that there must be swingeing cost-cutting that will impact on both playing and non-playing staff.

Salaries will be slashed. Jobs will be lost. There will be a summer fire sale. A low-cost manager will come in.

But there is also the chance he will look to sell the club. And for many fans, that would be the most welcome of silver linings.