I would imagine all
true fans of Newcastle United will join with me in applauding the moment the
other week when the absolute worst player on the club’s books was drummed out
of the club. After endless last chances and repeated false dawns, the sight of
this smug, arrogant, under-achieving egotist ineffectually preening on the
pitch as he somehow wangled a few desperate minutes as a substitute, during which
he contributed the square route of jack shit, sickened me to the depths of my
soul. Frankly, whatever happens next, I will take no interest in his fate, as
he is now a non-person to me.
Anyway, enough
about Shane Ferguson’s loan move to Birmingham City, what else has been
happening on Barrack Road of late? Well, Nile Ranger’s contract has been
cancelled “by mutual agreement,” which caused waves of approval to flood across
the inert coastal plain of social media. These shallow, portentous,
grammatically incorrect screeds of judgment were mainly penned by the very
sorts who despise Ranger because of his off field conduct, but at the same time
and without any sense of irony, want Andy Carroll back at SJP, unquestioningly
supported Joey Barton during his time on Tyneside, welcomed Lee Bowyer and
Jonathon Woodgate to the club while demanding everyone let bygones be bygones
and excused Paul Gascoigne’s propensity towards domestic violence as the lies
of a gold digger. To coin a phrase; what’s all that about?
To me, the root
cause of such abuse is potentially the lingering effects of a kind of
pernicious, unconscious, institutional racism the writers were exposed to at a
young age, whereby the fact that Ranger is young, black, muscular, rich and a
Londoner pushes all the stereotypical buttons that the media and society
constructed in the 70s, when the ageing anti Ranger ranters still had a head of
hair. I don’t for one second think these people are actually xenophobic; their
affection for players such as Sissoko and Yanga-Mbiwa, who combine dazzling
skill with an air of exotic mystery, is both profound and genuine. However, I
do wonder whether the contempt that the Ameobis and Ranger endure, and Titus
Bramble suffered before that (though he was a frighteningly bad footballer) has
anything to do with the lingering effects of Powellian rhetoric on those who
abuse them. Either that or they’re jealous of Ranger’s money, physique or
hairstyle. One wonders just what sort of opprobrium James McClean would endure
for his musical tastes if he were to grow tired of playing for a club whose
supporters, in an unconscious tribute to Monty Python vie to win a food
hamper containing £50 of Spam in a competition run by the sunlun
ekkow and sign for Newcastle United…
Twitter may have told us innumerable untruths about
Nile Ranger, but it also managed an equal number of preposterous accusations
after the unlucky 1-0 loss against Swansea. Thirty years previously, I’d been
on the Moordale coaches to Burnley and seen us lose 1-0 to an 83rd
minute goal after missing half a dozen gilt-edged opportunities; so it was on
this occasion in South Wales. Back in the day during the aftermath of defeat, I
alternated between dozing, reading the programme I always used to buy in my
callow youth and dreaming how good my first pint of Ex in The
Hotspur would taste. In 2013, I was able to discern, via Twitter
of course, that the Swansea loss demonstrated Elliot and Santon are both “shit”
and that a large percentage of our supporters handle defeat in the same way an
over tired toddler handles a late night.
In all seriousness,
it is a tragic waste of talent that sees Ranger without either a Premier league
goal or a club to his name at this time in his life. He needs to take a leaf
out of the book of one Francisco Jimenez Tejada, who has also left Newcastle
United after 5 glittering seasons, to ply his trade in the Spanish second
division with Cordoba, who announced his arrival thus -:
Xisco jugará en el Córdoba C.F. hasta el
final de la presente temporada. Francisco Jiménez Tejada, Xisco, (Santa Ponça,
26 de junio de 1986) jugará en el Córdoba C.F. hasta el final de temporada
después de rescindir su contrato con el Newcastle United. Tras forjarse en las
categorías inferiores del Club Atlético Baleares, firmó en 2003 por el Real
Club Deportivo de la Coruña para formar parte de su cantera. Xisco debutó con
el primer equipo coruñés el 26 de abril de 2006 ante la Real Sociedad. Ese
mismo año anotó -el 15 de mayo- los dos goles de su equipo frente al Real
Zaragoza. Sus dos primeros tantos en la élite. En la siguiente temporada el
jugador fue cedido a la UD Vecindario
(Segunda división), donde consiguió 13 tantos en 27 partidos antes de
regresar en la campaña 2007-08 al
Deportivo. Ese año Xisco fue el máximo goleador del equipo gallego con 9
dianas, lo que le permitió firmar por el Newcastle United. Durante su estancia
en el conjunto británico fue cedido primero al Real Racing de Santander y
luego, ya en la pasada 2011-2012, al Deportivo de la Coruña, equipo con el que
anotó el 2-1 ante la S.D. Huesca que permitió a los albiazules regresar a
Primera división.
Excitingly, Xisco
scored his first goal for Cordoba last weekend against Barcelona B; they lost
4-3, but at least Xisco wants to play for his team. I wonder whether we can say
the same of those currently out of the first team picture at SJP. The
disappearance of Captain Colo with apparently 2 broken bones in his back after
a routine overhead kick versus Southampton, which may mean we’ve seen the last
of him as a Newcastle United player seems as suspicious to me; luckily
Yanga-Mbiwa and Steven Taylor, despite his embarrassing histrionics towards
Begovic before Cabaye’s sublime equalizer in the Stoke game, have played
superbly so far. Equally suspicious, though equally propitious, is the injury
that kept Steve Harper off the bench in the early part of Krul’s convalescence.
How on earth did Harper get injured? Unless of course, he’s still got a stiff
neck after watching Cleverley’s mishit punt fly over his head in his last first
team appearance last October. The great news, of course, is that it has allowed
Rob Elliot to so admirably step up to the plate. He may be light years behind
Krul as a shot stopper, but he’s an able deputy and his distribution is
significantly better than the Dutchman’s aimless hoofs in to the ionosphere.
Elsewhere in the
team, eyebrows were raised when Cisse was not even on the plane to Moscow as he
was apparently unwell. Perhaps he was another of the reported 250+ cases of
food poisoning recorded after the Street Spice gourmet festival in
Times Square the other weekend? It would explain his lethargic showing against
Stoke I suppose, though would not excuse the 90 minutes of abuse meted out by
the replica shirted goon who was next to me in my unfamiliar spot in the
Milburn Paddock towards the Gallowgate last Sunday. In contrast, there was
little debate when Shola didn’t make the starting XI for the game against Anji
(or the bench against the Potters, which probably kept Cisse on and indirectly won
us the 3 points), even though this meant we’d be playing an unfamiliar 4-6-0
formation.
I can’t even face
trying to analyse whether Hatem Ben Arfa was the false 9 last Thursday, as I
got home well after kick off after cycling in to the teeth of an unyielding
breeze the whole length of the Coast Road; indeed the first action I saw was of
Willian apparently impersonating James Brown in his defining version of Please
Please Please, being led from the pitch in tears and a pashmina (one
for the grammarians there). I did notice
that the difference between ESPN and ITV was that the quality
of commentary by Beglin and Drury demonstrated a gear shift in quality from the
relentlessly banal to the tediously inane.
As regards the game
and the tactics employed by Newcastle, what I can say is that Haidara and
Yanga-Mbiwa were colossi, that if Ben Arfa been match fit, he’d had won the
game, that it was no surprise he wasn’t involved against Stoke (regardless of
what the on-line conspiracy theorists have to say) and that, dangerous though
it is to even think this the day before Anji come calling, I suspect Pardew is
back to being a tactical genius again, even if the first half against the
Potters saw us out-Stoke Pulis’s loathsome team. I must admit that we were
brilliant in the second half; Tiote put one foot wrong the whole game (and a
bloody big error it was too) by giving them the penalty that was their only shot,
but for the third Premier League home game in a row, we came back from being
behind to win the game. The upturn wasn’t just hard graft though; it was
inspired substitutions and a sublime pass by Marveaux, second only this season
to Cisse’s lay off to Gouffran for the equaliser versus Chelsea, which got us
where we needed to be. That shows true grit and determination. Incidentally, I’m
not sure about Pardew’s beard, as it looks like he’s been back-packing around
Thailand during his gap year; sort it out please.
The effort the
whole team put in to getting that 0-0 in the Lenin Stadium, as well as the win
over Stoke on the Sunday, would have made Comrade Ulyanov’s successor, Mr. Vissarionovich
Dzhugashvili, a very happy man, in the way the team dug in, much in the manner
of Alexey Grigoryevich Stakhanov. In Soviet history and iconography, a
Stakhanovite (стахановец) follows the example of Aleksei Grigorievich
Stakhanov, employing hard work or Taylorist efficiencies to over-achieve at
work. The Stakhanovite movement began during the second 5-year plan in 1935 as
a new stage of the socialist competition and was named after Aleksei Stakhanov,
who had mined 102 tons of coal in less than 6 hours (14 times his quota).
However, his record would soon be "broken" by his followers. On
February 1, 1936, it was reported that Nikita Izotov had mined 607 tons of coal
in a single shift. If Newcastle United can overcome Anji and reach the quarter
finals of the Europa League, it will have been as a result of Izotovite
Labours. You can quote me on that.
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