Geordie Mafia OUT!!

Happy New Year eh? This is the first detailed piece I’ve penned about Newcastle United since May last year, when I published http://payaso-de-mierda.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/in-through-out-door.html on this blog. The reasons for my refusal to write at any length about the fortunes of the club during that time are twofold; firstly, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my role as programme editor for Newcastle Benfield FC of Northern League Division One, having produced 20 different editions so far in 2014/2015. Secondly, and probably more relevantly, the fortunes of Newcastle United’s only fanzine The Popular Side that I co-founded last June have fared so well that we’ve published 5 issues, with number 6 in the pipeline, meaning this not-for-profit, old school, A5 printed venture has occupied a great deal of my dedicated NUFC thinking time. Incidentally, the deadline for issue 6 is Sunday 1^st February for publication a week later against Stoke City; it and earlier issues are available via PayPal to iancusack@blueyonder.co.uk for £2 including P&P or £1 for the PDF.

So, why am I writing this now, when I’ll admit to anyone who asks me, that I care more about the Northern League than the Premier League and I’m genuinely more excited about the fortunes of Hibernian than Newcastle United? Basically, I have to; there are things that need saying, following the departure of Pards to Palace, now we’re well over halfway through another sterile season of sporting paralysis.

At the time of writing, 20 league fixtures out of 38 have been played, during which time we’ve harvested 27 points, at an average of 1.35 points per game which, if repeated across the whole season, would give us an eventual haul of 51 and a decent shot at securing 9^th place overall. Not only is that success in Ashley and Charnley’s NUFC world, leaving us safe by the time the clocks go forward and equidistant from the twin dangers of  relegation and European qualification, but it’s also progress, as we collected 49 points last year and finished 10^th. Another reason why we should start revving the Sports Direct liveried, open top, double decker and bathe in ticker tape while deifying stability, is the fact that the uncomfortable inconvenience of the knock out competitions were negotiated with the minimum of fuss, via abject surrenders at White Hart Lane and The Walker Stadium that firmly offset the unnecessary optimism engendered by epoch-defining victories at Priestfield Stadium and (oh the irony!) Selhurst Park, as well as the genuinely enjoyable first success at the Etihad. Due to the vagaries of the cup draws, we’ve not even had the inconvenience of a home tie to endure, so there’s not been any need to get an extra tenner on the gas card from the Londis on Stanhope Street. In many ways it was a blessed relief that Cabella’s strike at Leicester was erroneously ruled offside, as a replay at home to The Foxes would no doubt have drawn an embarrassingly low crowd of probably less than 15k on a freezing January night.

The problem with writing about a season when so much of it has already passed by is that you can’t retrospectively stop at what seem to be genuinely important points and analyse them contemporaneously; though one of the benefits of the passage of time is that the significance of events can be more properly assessed, which adds an uncharacteristic veneer of sober reflection so often missing from the more intemperate prosodic explosions of opinion on Newcastle United that all too often seem to have been composed by 4 year olds with earache and a stock of unsold sun hats. As I repeatedly said last season, my mantra was that it didn’t matter who played for or who managed the club, or where we finished in the table while Mike Ashley was in charge. Now, as then, all that matters is that we get Ashley OUT and 100% Fan Ownership IN, though I’m prepared to accept 51% as a transitional demand. The events of the past 5 months haven’t changed my opinion one iota, regardless of the day to day petty dramas related to following Newcastle United.

The opening day, glass half-full acknowledgement of the fact the team had taken a reasonable shot at Man City, when debutant Ayoze was a fraction away from an equaliser, turned to grumpy disappointment at an inability to get more than a point away to a woeful Villa, which in turned metamorphosed into outright indignation when the astonishing sight of a Mike Williamson goal was trumped by two points carelessly tossed away in injury time at home to Palace (them again!).  The following international break wasn’t a cooling off period, but a chance to turn up the gas under the pressure cooker of our support, resulting in the annual fiasco away to Southampton that was garlanded with further evidence of the disgraceful, unprofessional conduct of John Carver, a man appointed as assistant to Pards in yet another of those ham-fisted, quasi populist gestures Newcastle United always does so badly, who launched a foul-mouthed tirade at fans who’d made the journey to the south coast and dared to boo after a pitiful display, offering all comers a go the following Monday at training. Never mind the abysmal showing on the pitch by dem Pards Boys, Carver who ought to have been dismissed for gross professional misconduct following his crass touchline brawl at Wigan in March 2013, had surely transgressed once too often and consequently made his position at the club untenable; hadn’t he?

This is Newcastle United under Mike Ashley we’re talking about, so nothing happened to either Pardew, Carver or any other the other third rate balls, bibs and cones Geordie Mafia charlatans stealing a living from our once proud club. Instead, we went 2-0 down to Hull City at home, before Cisse rescued us and Brewse, having missed out on both a victory and a new job offer, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry in the post-match interviews. Pardew wasn’t so much vindicated as ignored by the support, along with the alleged 20,000 Sack Pardew posters that were conspicuous by their absence in the city and in the ground, despite a fictional narrative that claimed confiscation by stewards had hampered the planned protest. Soon Pards was doing his crying in the rain at Stoke as we lost 1-0 on a filthy Monday night, three days after Ashley had apparently told a journalist in a London wine bar that the manager was finished if we lost again. We did, he wasn’t and October dawned with us second bottom of the table. It was beginning to look a lot like 2008/2009 redux…

Around this time Newcastle’s support, never known to pass up the opportunity for hysterical, kneejerk over reaction and having already decided last summer that Ayoze was “shite” because he came from the Spanish second division and didn’t cost £20m, were announcing all across social media platforms that, without exception, the players we’d signed were garbage and that relegation was inevitable. Lo and behold Cisse, a genuinely likeable fellow even before he executed a glorious, textbook forearm smash on the loathsome Seamus Coleman, grabbed another brace in an entertaining 2-2 with Swansea. From such tiny acorns, a run was assembled. Firstly the Leicester game kicked off an hour late in a convoluted miasma of failed public transport and a sheared bracket on the massive telly in Level 7 of the Leazes End, before perhaps the most ironic and most fitting of scorers, the almost universally scorned Gabriel Obertan, won a tense game with a strike that made the pavements of Gallowgate and Stowell Street shake, such was the acclamation with which it was greeted. The next week, we won at Spurs; going in at half time a goal behind (allowing revisionists to subsequently claim this to be a lucky or undeserved victory, to suit their own, spiteful agenda), we roared back at them and won 2-1. After that, wholly deserved victories over Man City in the League Cup, a woeful Liverpool, then West Brom and QPR seemed to have changed the timbre of the season; we’d gone from 19^th to 5^th and the Sack Pardew operation had gone into hibernation, licking its wounds. Perhaps the players we’d signed weren’t so bad after all. Frankly, if someone is heard claiming that Jamaat “offers nothing,” they ought to have their season ticket confiscated and be forced to endure videos of Malcolm Brown’s performances in 1984/1985.

Of course, this is Newcastle and a non-existent, over-hyped crisis is never more than a dozen tweets away; a 1-0 loss to West Ham and a point at Burnley saw wailing and moaning back to September levels, that were only quelled by our (scarcely believable) third successive home win over Chelsea. 

The problem with that game is that Rob Elliott, who was more than capably performing with his usual quiet, efficient dignity in place of Krul’s ego, got injured, meaning Jak Alnwick was the only feasible choice in goal, as Karl Darlow had been loaned immediately back to Forest after we signed him, showing characteristic NUFC forward thinking. The problem with Alnwick isn’t just that he’s hopeless, which he is, it’s that he has zero self-confidence, no doubt as a result of being told earlier in the autumn that he wouldn’t be getting a contract next season and that if he could find himself a club in the January window, he could go for free; it’s probably difficult to come back from sustaining that crushing blow to your ego and make a convincing fist of taking up the position as the last line of defence in the most scrutinised league in the world, for a club with the most unforgiving set of supporters imaginable. Mind it still doesn’t excuse the fact he was at fault for 3 if not all 4 of the Spurs goals in the League Cup disaster in what was the biggest game of the season, though that’s not how much of the support regarded that particular tie, depressingly enough. A resolute refusal to view, or even acknowledge the existence of, a bigger picture and instead to focus entirely on regional skirmishes makes so much of our support seem desperately parochial.

It isn’t quite a JFK moment, but I can tell you exactly where I was when Adam Johnson scored for the Mackems on December 21^st. On the shortest day of the year, I was in a privately run care home in Whitley Bay, attempting to negotiate a way to bring an elderly relative, who was being detained there against her will after a stay in hospital, home for Christmas. As the Mackems broke, a disturbance in the hallway turned out to be a visibly distressed 85 year old man soiling himself, while several frail, shrunken old women lacking capacity, held their baby dolls tightly and cried out loud, asking their mothers to come and save them. All the while, the radio commentary on the game fought for primacy amid this maelstrom with an unnecessarily loud loop of the Phil Spector Christmas Album, jammed on repeat. This was reality, or a version of it, for some of the most vulnerable and marginalised members of society; to see their disconnected, baffled, uncomprehending distress was enough to make one weep. Sometimes, we really need to get a sense of perspective about football.

Two days after this game, Mike “The Mouth” Elliott: radio personality, comedian, actor, folk singer, proud Socialist, near neighbour and fanatical sunderland fan, died in hospital after a brave 18 month battle against oesophageal cancer. In all honesty, I am glad to know that the last game played during his lifetime saw his team come out on top; heading for oblivion can never be seen as anything other than tragic, but I’m sure the knowledge of Adam Johnson’s goal will have provided Mike with some comfort. Perhaps those who claimed that a fourth successive derby defeat had “ruined Christmas” could ponder on the last two paragraphs.

Anyway, a predictable Boxing Day loss at Old Trafford, where the highpoint of a superb Cisse penalty wasn’t much of a highpoint at all, was followed by the visit of Everton. This was something of a watershed moment, as it was my first visit to SJP this season. Indeed, the last time I’d seen a full Newcastle game, other than half watching the Man City home game in the Irish Centre while trying to concentrate on Cork v Tipp in the All Ireland hurling semi-final and catching the last half hour of the Man City League Cup tie in the pub after playing five-a-side, was the visit of Everton last season, courtesy of a freebie from my mate Gary who had been at work. We’ll ignore my walk-in at the Cardiff game, when I arrived after 86 minutes and saw a brace of goals for nowt. This time, I actually bought tickets, as part of Ben’s Christmas Present. Well worth the £74 I shelled out they were too.

The unpalatable truth for many of the naysaying doom-mongers among our support, who insist that Newcastle simply can’t play well and that the win was all because Everton have turned to shit this season, is that we played really well, thoroughly merited the victory and have some damn fine players on our books. Obviously there are weaknesses, such as in goal, at centre back and up front, but with Sissoko, Colback and Tiote all having excellent games and a front pairing of Cisse and Perez being by turns reliable and inspired, not to mention good shifts from Janmaat and Colo, this was a genuinely enjoyable performance. Particularly praiseworthy was the way an early goal did not knock the team out of their stride, as Newcastle more or less controlled the game from that point on. Everton’s second goal gave the score an unfair slant, but showed again that Alnwick, who hesitated fatally before coming off his line, simply hasn’t got what it takes to be a top flight keeper.

The biggest irony about this game was that it was to be Pardew’s last. Having been relentlessly hounded and excoriated for his side’s timidity and inability to impose themselves on games after going behind almost from the day he was appointed, here was a passionate and professional performance that ensured his departure was on something of a personal high note. After all the screaming and crying all over social media platforms by on-line merchandising salesmen who previously sang hosannas in his name, Pardew is able to leave Newcastle United on his own terms, double his salary and provide Ashley with £4m compensation as well. You simply couldn’t make it up, could you?

Now, don’t get me wrong, while I wasn’t opposed to Pardew’s appointment,  I think he is a smarmy, egotistical clown; concerned as much with accepting unjustified praise as he was with deflecting righteous criticism. He may be tactically more astute than Chris Hughton, but he’s vastly inferior as a man. I despised Pardew’s defence of Ashley and lost all sympathy for him as a manager after he woefully mismanaged the players given to him in the January 2013 transfer window. Even last season’s pre-Christmas window of adequacy paled into insignificance once Cabaye was sold and performances nosedived to an almost unspeakable extent, meaning any groundswell of sympathy for Pardew was decidedly ephemeral. All he had to do was open his mouth to make people immediately withdraw their support for him.

However, and this is the whole kernel of the debate, I did not see the departure of Pardew as being a necessarily good thing in itself. With Ashley remaining at the helm, his particular personal philosophy will always hold greater influence on the fortunes of the club than any of the subordinate personnel involved. Consequently I have always warned those wilful, naïve or blinkered hot heads who demanded Pardew’s heart on a platter to be careful what they wished for. It seems to me the issue that has been conspicuously ignored has been any thought about the identity or even quality of Pardew’s likely replacement, as football clubs, Newcastle United in particular, aren’t adept at succession planning. Also, it’s important to factor in the Ashley-inspired job description for the next craven bootlicker who’ll wash up on Barrack Road to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Magpies for the next couple of seasons. It is all well and good trumpeting Bielsa and Remi Garde on Twitter, but one thing that we all ought to have learned about following Newcastle United in the Ashley era is that all speculation is, by definition, a fruitless pastime. Gossip is ultimately pointless when the club appears to have combined Trappism with a vow of omerta when it comes to public speaking. We simply do not know who will be appointed, but there is always the opportunity for an uneducated guess that fails to recognise, as the sagacious Matt Charlton pointed out in issue 3 of The Popular Side, in all his time at the club, Ashley has never once given the fans what they wanted. Even replacing Allardyce with Keegan wasn’t done by popular demand; it happened almost quixotically. Now we are presented with the exact opposite of that change; replacing a long-ball bullshitter not with a hero, but with a villain.

The Burnley game on New Year’s Day was a strange affair; groggily staring through red-rimmed eyes and sweating out vast quantities of G&T, Prosecco and bottled Black Sheep, I enjoyed a first half that saw Newcastle well on top and Burnley, having hit the post in the opening seconds, only score because of a farcical own goal that must be blamed on Alnwick. At half time, all looked good, before a second half collapse that, while perhaps suggesting that to blame Pards for demotivating interval inanities was aiming ire at the wrong man, saw us lucky to hang on to a point. Unquestionably, Sean Dyche schooled his side well to push forward and in the shape of Ings and Barnes they had a pair of fluid, energetic front men who caused us all manner of problems. Taylor’s injury was desperately unfortunate, but the initiative was handed to the visitors courtesy of some personal nightmares (Alnwick, Colo and Tiote mainly), as well as some tactical idiocy by Carver.

At the break you would have to say his team selection had been vindicated as we’d managed to score in the opening half hour for the first time this season, but his substitutions and tactical incompetence in the second period showed that he should never be within a million miles of the job at a club who ought to have fired him almost 2 years ago, despite one clown on Twitter saying he should get the job permanently if he gave Ben Arfa another go. Words failed me when I read that, as they did when Adam Armstrong arrived on the pitch. Riviere was having a good game; admittedly he’d missed a presentable chance early on, but he was looking alright and holding the ball up. It was inexplicable to withdraw him after less than an hour for a 17 year old whose only touch in the remainder of the game was to inadvertently set up Sissoko for the third, by accidentally spurning an open goal. When Taylor was injured, the opportunity to bring on Haidara was there, by moving Dummett to centre half. Instead we ended up with 2 left backs on the pitch when Gouffran was withdrawn for Haidara. Surely Cabella, the one real disappointment from last summer’s signings (we’ll draw a veil over the Tyneside career of NUFC legend Fecundo Ferraya), ought to have been brought on to play wide left? It was as infuriating as it was preventable.

When looking for a silver lining, it could be argued that victory would have given us 29 points and probably ensured Carver got the job until the end of the season. Ashley no doubt may well still do this, on the basis that he won’t have to shell out any compensation and that a cheap option is always the preferable one where Newcastle United are concerned, but the longer Carver remains in post, the less likely he is to get the job. This means we will have to endure a few defeats (which will allow on-line Cassandras to claim we’re in a relegation dog fight of course), for the greater good. Certainly the howls of derision at full time after the Leicester FA Cup defeat left Charnley and Carr in no doubt what the support are thinking. Steve Brewse showed the way to lose in the cup; change your team but try your best, as losing 2-0 to Arsenal is no disgrace; certainly it was a better audition for the job than Carver has given.

In fact, Carver has made Pardew seem dignified in comparison, so desperate is he for the NUFC top job; nauseatingly sentimental paeans to Sir Bobby prior to Burnley, gushing praise of the owner and former manager in the days following that one, a cup team selection that would struggle to win a game in the Conference alongside 5 mysterious “niggles” to senior players that will no doubt clear up before the ritual humiliation at Stamford Bridge this weekend, topped off with borderline xenophobic nonsense about foreign players not understanding the cup. That’s the kind of guff that appeals to Wetherspoons drinkers who adopt Carver’s trademark wardrobe of polo shirt and Adidas trackies; Carver may look like he’d be more suited to driving for Byker and Waterline than managing a football club, but he’d be prepared to change his name to Juan Cava if Ashley intimated he’d like a foreign coach in charge at SJP. Honestly, Craig Bellamy was wrong to throw a chair at Carver; it should have been a tactical nuclear warhead. Get out of our club, you Two Ball Lonnen bastard, get out of our club.  Geordie Mafia OUT!!

If I were asked to name the person I’d like to see managing Newcastle United, I’d say Aitor Karanka. What he has done with Middlesbrough is sensational, both in terms of results, style of play and player recruitment. Admittedly this is in the Championship and Boro are no means certain to go up. If they do, I believe Karanka will leave as he is ultimately destined for a high-profile La Liga job and won’t want relegation, which would be inevitable for Boro, on his CV.  He may wish to find an intermediate staging post, which is where the NUFC job could be a perfect fit; come to Newcastle, secure a League Cup win and a top 6 spot, then head back to Bilbao and win the title for Euskal Herria. Sounds appealing doesn’t it? Sadly, it won’t happen. None of it.

Being honest I think Carver will be handed the job on an interim basis, possibly until the end of the season. We won’t do as well as if Pardew had remained, which means a Top 10 spot will elude us, meaning Ashley and Charnley have a tangible reason for ensuring Carver isn’t kept on. Then we’ll get a new boss. Almost certainly it’ll be another member of the Premier League recycling bin, probably Bruce or even McLaren, who can come to utter bland platitudes, run a tight ship, keep the football as grey and sterile as we’re used to, while turning a good profit in the transfer market that, together with the TV money, keep Ashley’s investment safe. This will fail to ignite any passion among the support who’ll be as underwhelmed as I am at the thought of another ride not on football’s rollercoaster of emotions, but a mobility scooter with the brakes jammed on.

If only, if only, NUFC would dare to fail; be spontaneous and take a risk. Bring in a young and exciting foreign coach like Karanka or Tuchel and try to make watching the club exciting again. Who am I trying to kid?

Finally though, I must pay tribute to the Sack Pardew campaign. I didn’t agree with their message or their methods, but I respect them for donating the surplus of their donations to the Making Winter Warmer community charity. Well done. You have my total respect and admiration for this gesture.