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Ask Peter Hooton about Spirit of Shankly and he’ll tell you – with a rueful smile – that there are plenty of Liverpool fans who are wise after the event.

Their initial meeting, in the Sandon pub in Anfield, was attended by 350. But, he’ll tell you, there are now thousands of Reds who said they were there.

SOS, as it is known, is now the blueprint for supporter movements, having played a critical role in ridding Liverpool of American owners George Gillet and Trevor Hicks. But there were many hundreds more who opposed the idea of direct action or wrote it off as the unrealistic aims of a few hundred agitators.

This morning, those who set up and run the Magpie Group probably feel similar. In the week of their showcase protest – the boycott of the televised game against Wolves – they have taken the decision to postpone action, probably knowing that it would lead to questions about their ability to present themselves as a genuine voice of supporters.

The reaction was predictably mixed but there was more criticism than support for the stance. One reply I read simply suggested the group had been “amateur hour from the start”.

Which is a good place to start, because the individuals involved are amateurs. Fans like the rest of Newcastle’s supporters – not paid, not professional, working on the movement as they go along. Going up against a bona fide billionaire who has ridden roughshod over the idea of accountability and who, his close advisors admit, does not like people making demands of him and sometimes reacts to being told what to do by hunkering down and doing the exact opposite.

Postponing the boycott is portrayed as weakness but a personal view is that it’s a welcome return of strategic thinking. Because they have a point when they say that protests are an easy excuse if Mike Ashley doesn’t sell the club. We have already seen in the Fans Forum the club saying on the record that a campaign of protest against Ashley “hasn’t helped” sell the club. Playing the longer game is the right thing to do – and they have taken the temperature of the fanbase beyond the frenzy of social media and concluded that there isn’t enough support for the action at this time to make enough of an impact.

For what it’s worth, the group is on the record with their “deep suspicion” about Ashley’s Sky News interview. But represntatives of Peter Kenyon’s consortium are understood to have been in contact with various people they feel are influential in the fanbase to stress that not only is his interest genuine but that anything that threatens the team’s form would have a detrimental impact on negotiations. So what do you do in that situation?

Personally I felt the boycott call was a misstep. It was too early in the group’s life and taken off the back of strong feeling on social media – but how representative is Twitter of what goes on in the terraces? Spirit of Shankly was a grassroots movement; the Magpie Group was set up off the back of a viral Twitter campaign bringing together various fan groups and platforms. It was a hasty marriage of convenience but it was done with the right intentions: to provide a voice to disaffected fans.

And they’ve had some success in forcing the agenda around Newcastle – challenging some of the nonsense written and voiced about United. The hierarchy have taken note too. But to be truly representative it needed time to grow, to prove its credentials and to ascertain exactly what kind of movement Newcastle fans want.

And a boycott is the nuclear option. Coming at a time when Rafa Benitez remains in charge of a team that work as hard as any United team I can remember, it was always going to be a difficult sell. Better to hold off, surely, until the disaffection moves from social media onto the terraces (as it did in 2015 when a boycott of a supposed end of season game with little riding on it had a big impact).

The Newcastle United Supporters Trust, which is part of TMG, is probably a bit further down that line and anyone feeling disenfranchised should join them. But that doesn’t mean TMG is less important in all of this.

The mistakes made in the last few weeks are what you’d expect from a group finding its feet. But it has to learn from them – and probably to start paying less heed to what’s said on social media.

I see the Magpie Group as it is right now as a beta version of something that could be very useful in the future (and post-Ashley). It is a work-in-progress and it could be that in a year or longer we could see version 2.0, 3.0 or 4.0 which is able to carry fans with it. But equally it may dwindle and Newcastle will be worse for not having a movement that the media or fans can turn to.

After all, this is your group if you want it. If you want to get involved in the heavy lifting, they’ll welcome you in. If not, fair enough. But without more participation it’s going to be difficult to present itself as anything other than what it currently is: a small group who’ve made a significantly bigger splash than they had any right to.

There is no smoking gun when it comes to forcing positive change at Newcastle United. But the Magpie Group has the right intentions.