Clownshoes Off!!

It is an inescapable fact that a haul of zero points from fixtures against West Ham, Swansea, Southampton, Stoke and Fulham, despite vaguely encouraging performances in the latter two games, is a completely unacceptable state of affairs for Newcastle United. Sadly, things are no brighter away from the glare of the first team; I arrived fashionably late for an 11.00 am kick off on December 2^nd and saw the Reserves go down 3-2 at home to Villa on a blindingly sunny and remarkably temperate Sunday morning at Blue Flames, when the young swains with the high squad numbers failed to convince me that they’d ever make successful careers in the professional game. I must say that it’s a great idea playing these sorts of games at non-traditional times; a warm Monday afternoon around Easter two years back saw a shirt sleeved crowd pinting it as we put the Smog stiffs to the sword, for example. 

Meanwhile, the Thursday evening following saw me assuming the usual Europa League away game position, not on the peeve in my best socks, but in front of the laptop, watching a semi-legal stream of the Bordeaux game. The referee was an Israeli fella called Masiah, but it’s our team who were the very naughty boys, with the naughtiest of them all, Nile Ranger, astonishingly and seemingly pointlessly restored to a starting XI who put in an abject performance in what was arguably our least important game in the last decade. That said, this dead rubber ought to have been a chance for our shadow squad to show they were not destined for imminent undisclosed fee sales to Derby County at best and free transfers to Gillingham at worst, but with the exception of the impressively beefy Abeid, they utterly failed to make any impression on the game, while a thousand or so fans treated this trip like the end of Prohibition in the States. Enlevez vos chaussures si vous aimez La Ville, peut etre?

In some ways, Monday evening league games are a positive boon, as they stop the weekend being ruined by football, meaning you can get off to sleep on a Sunday night in a warm glow of cruel schadenfreude after the end of Peep Show, but they do mean football looms large at the very start of the working week, if you let it.  Having committed toon apostasy in the eyes of the toon stasi by opting out of the last two Premiership encounters (the Wigan game came second to a hugely entertaining evening at Team Northumbria 3 Bishop Auckland 1, which is where I would have been again on Monday 10^th December, only for the visit of Durham City game to fall victim to a waterlogged pitch, causing me to take to my bike and head eastwards to the coast as soon as kick off loomed at Craven Cottage), I presume my opinions on the Fulham game are of negligible value. Just as well I suppose, as all I learned from Twitter in the second half was that Simpson, Williamson, Colo, Tiote, Jonas, Anita, Ba and Cisse were, to various degrees, shit.

While I’ve no regrets about missing the Wigan game, as I nervously took one for the team at a chilly Coach Lane, I do wish I’d been brave enough to tune in to the Fulham defeat, on the day Gateshead shamefully dispensed with the services of Ian Bogie, their most successful manager since the late Ray Wilkie, just so I could have formed an informed opinion. I must make it clear is mainly because I don’t actually regard the on-line hysterical, childish bellyaching at a defeat that I read  as anything resembling an informed opinion, mainly because I seriously wonder whether the lip pouting and foot stamping that polluted my time line from 10pm Monday is as much to do with fear over a set of up and coming fixtures that throws up Massive Club citeh, The Arse, Man United and the Scouse Mackems as four of the next five games as it did with an unlucky reverse in SW6. The missing fixture from that list is against QPR, which is the only maximum I can see on the horizon, with perhaps a point from Everton, meaning we’d go in to the New Year on 21 points from 21 games and probably in 16^th place at best; a sobering state of affairs. In looking for a semi silver lining, there is the fact that Reading’s 3-0 thumping by the Mackems effectively means that 2 teams are relegated already. Or so I’m telling myself.

Pardew celebrated the second anniversary of his widely vilified appointment with the Fulham reverse and, alleged 8 year contract or not, I can see a set of circumstances whereby the current owners getting rid of the current Manager of the Year early in the New Year, if my hunch is not only proved correct, but topped off with a cup exit to Brighton.Admittedly many others feel that even if Pardew were to take us down, and I’m not imagining this is the likely outcome of this season, he would be given at least one opportunity to bring us back up because he is their man in every possible way.

Personally, even if the Festive Season is replete with hammerings by the big lads, I still don’t think Pardew would deserve the bullet, but I’ve a nagging  feeling that may be the outcome, not because of a supporter led clamour to see him replaced, unless the backwards element are given scarecely deserved credence, but because Ashley and Llambias could probably find some poor sap (I’d be terrified to suggest any potential incumbents) who’d be grateful enough for a job that they’d accept being unequivocally told there would be zero cash in the January transfer window, as the new bloke, according to the likes of Lee Ryder no doubt, would need time to “assess the squad;” a time scale which would cunningly take us in to February.

While we’re becoming skilled in the art of defeat, the only Corinthian crumb of comfort to be gained from this is that, as a support, we’re not seeking to go beyond childish tantrums and in to the realms of racist abuse. Two days after Spurs got back from several chibbings in Rome against Lazio, West Ham welcomed them home by climbing back in to a 1970s era ideological cesspit with Nazi salutes and anti-Semitic songs at The Lane. Last weekend, a Swansea supporter was done for racially motivated abuse at the end of their 4-3 home loss to Norwich, while Massive club citeh lived up to their nickname of the Manc Mackems with a volley of coins aimed at celebrating United players, a badly dressed boy by the name of Stott (surely he’s a Shildon fan?) on the pitch acting the chap with a bleeding Rio Ferdinand, as well as one collared in the ground and another on Twitter for racist abuse. In the wake of this, some journalists are wondering aloud if fans need to be shrouded in netting to prevent throwing coins, which is about the worst idea I’ve heard since Ken Bates dreamed up the electric fence proposal at Stamford Bridge. For a start, just how fine would the mesh have to be to stop coins? We’re talking 70 denier minimum.

I was glad Manchester United won their game, as would I imagine, deep down, were fans of FC United of Manchester, who were in the region the other week to play Blyth Spartans. Now I like FCUM, especially their brilliant fanzine A Fine Lung, but I wasn’t at the Croft Park game as Percy Main were falling to a 2-0 home loss to Walker Central. If I had been there, I wouldn’t have been supporting FCUM, not when the home team are the region’s finest and most famous non-league side (cap doffed to Bishop Auckland in this context as well). Those who paid a tenner at the turnstiles, but chose not to follow Blyth may have been too young to remember the Spartans 1978 cup run and the Wrexham game at SJP or otherwise engaged at the time, but they can have no excuse for failing to recall another cup tie at SJP in February 1990, this time involving Newcastle United and Manchester United. Who were those masked men running amok in our city that fine Sunday lunchtime? Well, there’s a more than even chance they’re FC United followers these days I’d warrant. If you want to follow FCUM, follow them, but don’t adopt them as your non-league side, no matter how good the quality of their socks, when there are other teams in this region deserving of your patronage.

For example, watching Whitley Bay destroy Causeway United in the FA Vase by 6-0 at a healthily occupied Hillheads, on a cool but dry December day was one of the finest adverts for non-league football I could think of; certainly preferable to an afternoon in front of Jeff Stelling. However, as my companion speculated, it seems to be with some folks that it isn’t a case of enjoying the game, but of making the choices about being seen at the right game. Having opted for Vic Godard at the Star & Shadow on the night Peter Hook played the 02 Academy, I have to agree. Mind Bay’s 3-1 league cup win over Consett the following Tuesday was one for connoisseurs of hypothermia only.

Prior to all these events, Mark Clattenburg accepted a less than gracious apology from Chelsea for how they’d handled the situation after their game with Manchester United, when they questioned his behaviour in such a vindictive manner, and assumed his role back in the middle of a Premier League game, with the sound of warm welcomes from Nigel Adkins and Chris Hughton ringing in his ears, that gave way to a relentless castigation of his performance following at the end of a 1-1 draw. Concurrently, in a case that’s drawn little publicity, John Obi Mikel is banned for 3 games for threatening behaviour towards Clattenburg, with the punishment being so mild as it was accepted that Mikel believed at the time he was going at Clattenburg like a day’s work in the changers at Stamford Bridge that the ref had racially abused him. There is a fascinating legal debate to be had, regarding whether provocation can only be used as a defence if provocation has occurred and not simply is believed to have occurred, but I don’t think I’ve the skill set to host it. Suffice to say, responding on instinct, I’m not sure I’m happy with my own opinion on that; rather like the revelation that Newcastle United have failed to pay Corporation Tax over the past two seasons, I need more thinking time before I commit myself to an ideological standpoint. Watch this space is my message.  I do know I’m not happy with the Talksport theory that Mikel has “got away with it;” I do know that I agree with Lord Ousley, head of Kick It Out that football is a “moral vacuum,” but then again, I know that society is too.

And yet I’m still naïve enough to wonder why seemingly intelligent people throw their hands up in disgust at South Yorkshire Social Services taking two eastern European children away from foster parents who are card-carrying UKIP members? Especially when said foster parents actively campaigned for a party I regard as being The Daily Mail worshipping functionally literate version of the BNP in the Rotherham by-election? At the southern end of our region on the weekend before last, the EDL held a hush-hush gathering in Shotton, near Peterlee and were apoplectic when, not only did local Asians hold a counter demonstration aimed at driving this filth from their streets (don’t even dare mention Free Speech in the context of this lot), but the Poliss turned up to move the Fascists along, as the boneheads were the side fingered as being the ones inciting racial hatred and getting ready to breach the peace. When will these morons ever learn? Meanwhile a certain Liam Smith, the bovine Mackem clownshoe caught doing a monkey gesture at Lukaku in the 4-2 home loss to West Brom, claims as part of his defence it was not a racially offensive gesture at all, but a Kevin Nolan style chicken dance. I’m not sure what’s worse; this argument, which we’ll see in full when he gets his day in court early in 2013, or the sickening attempts by certain Newcastle fans to use this event as point scoring against them, rather than recognising that defeating racism is far more important and not something that can be done with half a dozen snide messages on a social media site. There are plenty of Mackems who find Smith’s conduct abhorrent and are prepared to say so, even if they are shouted down by crazed paranoiacs who claim the case against Smith is “political correctness gone mad” and symptomatic of the way the modern game is going. Where to those who claim to make a stand against modern football place themselves in this debate? What mileage is there in the slogan “stand against the aspects of modern football you personally don’t like?”

Perhaps the next thing the armchair ideologues can do is make up songs and tweets about the Seaburn Strangler, Stephen Grieveson who, having already been convicted of three previous murders of teenage boys, is on trial for the slaying of a 14 year old boy between 17^th and 28^th May 1990, which was the time between them beating us in the play-offs and losing to Swindon at Wembley. Attempting to make light of tragedies like this by mentioning it in the context of football rivalry is simply disgusting.

Away from football, things get no better; the Nationalist community in the north of Ireland may have emerged from the current flag burning controversy with their dignity intact, but there’s an awful lot of navel gazing needed when it comes to GAA, with the Ulster final between Crossmaglen (3-9) and Kilcoo (1-9) marred by incidents of racist abuse by Kilcoo fans towards Aaron Cunningham, whose father Joey played county GAA for Armagh and Irish League football for Portadown in the 1980s. Cunnigham Senior states he received abuse on and off the pitch in both codes throughout his career, but is deeply in despair that his son has to listen to the same sort of shit 30 years later. In the wake of comments from former Dublin star Jason Sherlock and Wexford hurling pair Lee Chin and Keith Rossiter that they have received abuser from other players and spectators, it is time the GAA faced up to the fact that it’s no longer De Valera’s island and the country is changing.  Rather than simply highlighting that by allowing counties to train in December for the first time ever they’ve responded to a changing sporting landscape, the GAA must recognise that a multi-cultural, multi ethnic Ireland is a reality, not just in The Pale either, and that if it wishes to grow the GAA, then it is time to embrace and celebrate this fact.