Bedbuggered

Issue #18 of The Football Pink is one of the best yet; you can get it from http://thefootballpink.bigcartel.com/ and I advise that you do. I'm delighted to have this piece in here, about the decline of the North East as the hotbed of soccer -:

Here’s a serious question for you; how many truly exceptional bands of the last 50 years or so have come from the north east? From my perspective I’d say only 3; firstly, The Animals, whose visceral R&B stomp, may have been inspired by the Louisiana swamp but it was a beast that grew legs and a tail in the shadow of the Wallsend and Walker shipyards, providing the authentic sounds of the Tyneside mid-60s. Go forward half a decade and Lindisfarne’s blissful Broon Ale and resin soaked late hippy, good time folk rock encapsulates the early 70s era of long hair, loon pants and signing on at the local Labour Exchange like no other. Finally, from the punk wars to the present day, that ex-pit village Lorelei Pauline Murray has soared and swooped like a stentorian Ferryhill siren behind the microphone with the truly brilliant Penetration for 40 plus years and counting.

After that, we’re struggling to make a convincing case for any other outfit being entitled to their own personal monument inlaid into the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Gateshead High Street branch, though Kitchenware Records did their best. Martin Stephenson is an eccentric jewel in the troubadour style, but his lack of quality control means there’s just too much froth in his back catalogue to afford him such uncritical praise. The exact opposite is true of Paddy McAloon, who drifted out of the game after two truly superb Prefab Sprout albums. The Kane Gang could have been contenders, but they supernovaed too soon.

Otherwise we’re looking at individual musicians rather than whole bands; Bryan Ferry (team mate of Howard Kendall in Pelton Fell Juniors football team, amazingly enough) and drummer Paul Thompson were the focal point and rhythmic heart of Roxy Music respectively. Bryan Johnson screeched and yowled his way from the Marden Estate to Miami Beach for 36 years with AC/DC until his hearing gave out. David Coverdale may sound like a minor member of the Royal Family these days, but he was brought up to preach the blues in Saltburn on Sea. Meanwhile, Chris Rea, Dave Stewart and Mark Knopfler did as much as anyone else to usher in a dreary era of CD-friendly complacent, driver-friendly AOR; whether you’re thankful to them for that is a matter of personal choice. Of course there’s also the singing milkman Gordon Sumner, but I’d rather listen to the Mackem punk tendency of The Toy Dolls, Leatherface or The Angelic Upstarts than that tantric arsehole.

What about the scene, such as it is, these days? Tough one. The contemporary does not lend itself readily to perspective, but perhaps Maximo Park may one day be remembered more for their music than their singer’s array of ridiculous hats. Field Music are the slow burning darlings of the Radio 6 intelligensia who seem set to endure. Krautrock-flavoured techno boffins Warm Digits are forever spoken of as being on the cusp of greatness or so it seems. After that, we’ve got has-beens, never-wases, great lost talents, obscure alternatives and ambitious youngsters, but what we don’t have is a defined regional legacy from a substantial canon of revered work that Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow and Edinburgh can all boast.

However one defines the north east as a region, which for the purpose of this piece I’m suggesting (with some caveats I shall return to) goes from the Tees to the Wansbeck, rather than as far as the Tweed (compulsory mention for Trevor Steven to assuage Evertonian interests at this point), it seems initially astonishing that there hasn’t been a homogenous sound born of a particular era, though that can be explained by the loose cultural and geographical ties that countermand any social cohesion between the centres of population seen as integral to any putative NE identity. I take as my text the 2004 rejection by voters of Labour’s flagship project for regional devolution, courtesy of a highly effective campaign funded by John Elliott, the man behind EBAC dehumidifiers and washing machines whose business sponsors the Northern League, which poured boundless scorn on the prospect of another tier of expensive and arguably unnecessary bureaucracy. To the great surprise of outsiders looking in, the avowedly negative attitudes of the no campaign were kicking at an already wide open door. Let’s be absolutely clear about this; there is no such thing as a shared north east regional cultural identity. Instead there are several distinct mutually hostile centres of population vehemently opposed to any moves towards homogenization. There’s no coincidence in the fact that Royston Vaysey was born on Teesside.

In Middlesbrough, their renascent sense of being of and from Teesside is a modern invention that only partly masks their innate historical Yorkshire allegiances. Sunderland sees itself as the dormant volcano of the Land of the Prince Bishops, whereby the County Palatinate in the lee of the Wear is an entity ready for reanimation; a process that may be helped by their 2021 City of Culture bid. Tyneside and South East Northumberland (the only bit of England’s Border County that anyone lives in, bar the lawless descendants of those Border Reivers still at large) remains the supposed heimat of John Hall’s mythical Geordie Nation.  Once one factors in the local allegiances and tensions, it becomes abundantly clear why over 2 million people from an arbitrary area spanning 70 miles from top to bottom and possibly 20 miles wide, have never coalesced at a particular time to produce a coherent set of similar sounds. If the famous north east can’t get half a dozen young shavers to write a few decent pop songs at any point in the last 3 decades, it’s no wonder politicians and the population in general can’t work towards a non-existent shared set of regional aspirations, beliefs and values.

Go back 200 years to the start of the 19th Century; as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace on Tyneside and Wearside, when Middlesbrough boasted a population of 25, other than coastal ports and fishing villages, the only major centres of population were scattered market towns like Hexham, Morpeth, Barnard Castle, Darlington, Bishop Auckland and Durham, with the latter pair bolstered by their theological and academic importance. Now, long after the era of coal, steel, shipbuilding, railways and heavy engineering has passed, other than the three urban conurbations athwart the Tees, Wear and Tyne, the region consists of myriad isolated communities, whether bourgeois dormitory settlements or blighted post-industrial sink towns; separated by geography and emasculated by cultural deracination. Go north of Newcastle, west of Sunderland or south of Middlesbrough and there’s nobody really living there. North Northumberland, the Tyne Valley, South and West Durham, as well as the Tees Valley and North Yorkshire are pretty much empty and isolated. Some of those mini areas of population are gorgeous little spots, like Stanhope, Fir Tree, Alnmouth or Blanchland, but there are also places like Chopwell, Pegswood, Horden and Wheatley Hill; abandoned, ignored and scarred by every indicator of chronic social, cultural and economic deprivation imaginable: bad housing, poor schools, inadequate healthcare, multi-generational unemployment, and a shrinking population, not to mention endemic drug and alcohol dependency. The real legacy of Thatcherism.

Meanwhile the IT revolution, a call centre economy, out of town shopping malls and 24 hour supermarkets mean our cities have lost their economic relevance, other than as glorified, booze-fuelled leisure theme parks. The economically vibrant sip £10 cocktails in swanky bars carved out of the basements of Grade 2 listed buildings that once hosted the mercantile camp followers of heavy industry that made the region so prosperous, for the few if not the many. Meanwhile the darkened alleys and shop doorways are awash with an ever expanding gallery of comatose Spice addicts, dying from austerity. The suburbs and exurbs stuffed with new build luxury homes; the city centres now partly vertical villages of high rise condominiums for debt-heavy, current and former student hedonists and partly teeming slums characterised by the squalid homes of multiple occupancy that provide minimal to inadequate succour for the marginalised and needy. Nowadays, the wider north east has no input into contemporary culture because The Haves haven’t the time or the wit, while The Have Nots are denied access.

It was all so much easier to explain the paucity of NE musical talent during the ascendancy of the Post War Social Democratic Consensus; perhaps Geordies, Mackems and Smogs might not have wanted to plug in a guitar or rattle a drum kit, preferring to listen and watch, pint in hand, rather than create their own vibe, but that’s because received wisdom still holds that, while the telly was in black and white and only showed two channels, every lad from South Bank to Shieldfield played football from morning to evening, six days a week with Saturday being the north east Sabbath; a Holy Day of Obligation when the whole region worshipped at the Cathedrals of St. James, Roker and Ayresome Parks.

And so, at last, we come to the topic I’m actually writing about; the regional myths referred to in Arthur Appleton’s epochal apocrypha The Hotbed of Soccer; The Story of Football in the North East. Published in 1960, it set the tone for coverage of the game in the region for decades thereafter, which mainly consisted of uncritical retellings of Appleton’s contentions with a contemporary flavour. When Appleton committed his thoughts to the public domain, the north east had accrued 10 league titles, though none since 1936, and 7 FA Cups; in the almost 60 years since then, Sunderland brought another FA Cup win to the table, while Newcastle have added 2 European trophies and Middlesbrough a League Cup. It is still a paltry harvest and a reason why Appleton’s view of football obsession and the idea that top quality centre forwards could be summoned by shouting down any pit shaft was challenged and examined by Harry Pearson’s brilliant, evocative encomium The Far Corner (1994), which is unquestionably my Desert Island book. Harry’s affectionate nostalgia is a beguiling love letter for a regional game that was about to change utterly and become unrecognisable to our grandfathers’ generation; new all-seater stadia, Sky money and local lads in the first team as rare as rocking horse shit. Has all of this change been for the better?  Try asking fans of Hartlepool, Darlington, Sunderland or Middlesbrough. Even those of Newcastle United aren’t having the best of times, despite the presence of Benitez in the home dugout at SJP.

Conditions do determine consciousness, meaning the current situation influences attitudes far more than fading memories of glorious failure and the excitement provoked by an unpredictable ride. The sense of bemused detachment and crippling alienation that both insidiously and exponentially grew to become general among north east football fans after the publication of The Far Corner is the overarching mood of Michael Walker’s 2014 book Up There; a sober and solemn assessment of football in the region he made his home after journeying from Belfast as an undergraduate in 1984. Walker, like Pearson and Appleton before him, tackles the crippling weight of excess emotional baggage that hampers any evaluation of the role of the game in the region’s psyche. He too is drawn in by the near mythic past of teams and players from the past: Victorian and Edwardian visionaries like James Allen and Colin Veitch, local legends, born and adopted, such as Raich Carter, Wilf Mannion, Hughie Gallagher and Jackie Milburn and those whose final curtain call was in days so recent the sound of terminal applause still hangs in the air; Juninho, Kevin Phillips, Alan Shearer. However, the difference between the boyish enthusiasm of Appleton and the charming, erudite romanticism of Pearson with the dour, pessimistic Schopenhauerian conclusions of the taciturn Ulsterman could not be more pronounced. For Walker, the era of prominence has passed and the final whistle is about to blow on any notion of the north east as the hotbed of soccer and it’s hard in many ways to disagree.

The autumn of 2017 sees few reasons for optimism regarding the future prospects of north east football. Newcastle may be seemingly settled mid-table in the Premier League, but the fractious non-relationship between Benitez and Ashley has the potential to disintegrate at any moment, at which point all bets on survival would be off. In the Championship, Middlesbrough have had a surprisingly slow start and lie outside the play-off spots, while Sunderland have endured a predictably tortuous run of form. Second Choice Simon was soon found out and Ellis Short seems determined to run the club into the ground, almost as a kind of punishment for being sold a dream that turned into a nightmare. Below that, we have to visit the Conference for other north east clubs, such has been the deterioration of fortunes of late; newly relegated Hartlepool are finding the going tough and poor, ignored Gateshead continue to bob along in their deserted and hated ground, to almost universal uninterest from the entire football fraternity in the region. Blyth, Darlington and Spennymoor are all doing alright, sitting top half of the Conference North, but the real success stories are South Shields FC; running away with the Evo Stik North and a game away from the FA Cup first round, in front of regular sell-out crowds of over 3,000.

Now, as someone who watches the grassroots game in preference to the sordid avarice of professionalism, I will admit that much of the information in the previous paragraph is second nature to me, because that’s the kind of football I enjoy. For your average fan of one of the north east Big Three, using that term advisedly, I accept that such knowledge may not be at their fingertips, which demonstrates my belief that while the non-league game is in rude health in this region (witness 8 FA Vase wins out of the last 9 for instance), the top level of the game is hitting its empty head against an unbreakable glass ceiling. Arguably Newcastle may have the potential to grow and actually win things (don’t laugh) if one of the shady, obscure potential takeover consortia succeed in ousting the loathed Ashley, but that day remains a long way off. At current levels of investment, they are probably slightly overachieving. Middlesbrough, partly because they’ve a sensible and sensitive owner who has ploughed his life savings into the club, offer the chance for stability in the region. Under Monk I see them as similar to West Brom; a club that may bounce between divisions for a few seasons, but will eventually learn a pragmatic approach, enabling them to remain in the top flight. It won’t be exciting, but the dogged functionalism of the club will suit the phlegmatic, cynical fan base on Teesside.

Sunderland are the ones who are in the gravest danger of succumbing to bleak oblivion. When Niall Quinn assembled the Drumaville Consortium to buy the club from Bob Murray, it wasn’t plain sailing immediately; indeed they lost 6 games in succession before Roy Keane was installed as manager and the Championship title was won at a canter. Back then, everything was set fair for Sunderland to move to another level; 48k crowds, including huge numbers flying over from Ireland for weekends on the batter and stellar signings like Darren Bent. Suddenly, the Irish economy went into meltdown and the Drumaville lads bailed, allowing the Capitalist Cavalry in the shape of Ellis Short to ride in and run the show. Unfortunately, other than a 10^th place finish in 2010/2011 under Steve Bruce, the project never took flight. Successive managers in Martin O’Neill, Paolo Di Canio, Gus Poyet, Dick Advocaat, Sam Allardyce and finally David Moyes incompetently oversaw 9 relegation dogfights in 10 years, before last season’s dismal, deserved 20^th place finish. With the club hundreds of millions in debt and Short unwilling to throw good money after bad, they are in grave danger of successive demotions and, perhaps of more pressing concern, of an imminent, potentially ruinous spell in administration. The worst part is that the club is a world away from attracting new buyers or investors. Unlike the toe-curling Benitez love in at SJP, Sunderland are seen as a toxic bad buy. With crowds almost halving (some to South Shields, some to Spennymoor but many to sofa or barstool) and those still attending adopting a dejected and confrontational mien from the first whistle, it is a poisonous combination not conducive to attractive football. Underachieving, unloved and on the verge of collapse; Sunderland FC act as a living metaphor for north east football over the last six decades since Arthur Appleton coined the phrase The Hotbed of Soccer. Chris Coleman looks to be a last, desperate, unconvincing throw of the dice; it worked in 1995 with Peter Reid, but Short may not have Bob Murray’s luck.

However, the north east’s relationship with football has not simply been about the clubs. Huge numbers of players have left their fireside to find fame far from their own native home: in the era when Appleton was writing, there were the Charltons, Geordie Armstrong, Howard Kendall and almost the entire Burnley first team, while Harry Pearson wrote his account, having seen David Armstrong, David Hodgson, David Mills and Mark Proctor depart his beloved Boro, not to mention a certain trio by the names of Beardsley, Gascoigne and Waddle sold by Newcastle United.  We’ve not even touched upon the roll call of Wallsend Boys’ Club alumni to have graced the highest echelons of the domestic and international game: Michael Bridges, Steve Bruce, Michael Carrick, Neil McDonald, Alan Shearer, Steven Taylor, Alan Thompson and Steve Watson for starters. Those lads who wore the famous yellow and green are graduates of the NE28 conveyer belt of talent; players who carried on the tradition of emerging from youth clubs. However, it’s a tradition limited to only the very best of the youngsters out there. Back in my day, I never knew anyone who played for anything other than the school team. I was aware of Redheugh Boys Club and another one at Wrekenton and there may have been Scouts, Boys’ Brigade or other paramilitary teams on the go, but they were never ideologically for me.

One of the most profound changes to the way the game is played over the past 50 years has been the evolution of how youngsters become involved, as the amount of organised junior league football has exploded in a manner unimaginable back in my youth. Then you waited until final year juniors and donned the mantle of representing the school; I still have photos of Falla Park’s 1974 team in our Birmingham City penguin kits. At high school, unless you were brilliant or incredibly hard, you didn’t get in the first team, but there were second and sometimes third XIs for the more Corinthian of us.

Growing up in Gateshead in the early 1970s we did actually play football all day, every day, whether that consisted of 15 or 20 a side games on various patches of grass with jumpers for goalposts, or individual games of gates or doors, depending whether we were in the front street or back lane, not to mention head tennis, kerbs, SPOT and a dozen other arcane pursuits designed to improve ball skills. After school each day, Saturday before we went to the match (if we were lucky or old enough), Sunday apart from when Shoot! was on, all through each and every holiday, all I remember doing with my free time before I went to secondary school was play football. Of course punk rock, underage drinking, heavy petting and mindless, destructive violence obviously came more to the fore as we subsequently matured.

Ignoring the risible folk devil canard of stranger danger, the single main reason kids don’t play football in the way we used to is the volume of traffic. There are so many cars on the road that many estates have had their green spaces tarmacked over and new builds don’t factor in the idea of communal play spaces. Instead, unless youngsters are lucky enough to have their own back garden, they’ll struggle to find local, safe spaces to kick a ball around. The longer this is the case, allied to the ever increasing array of technological toys available to bairns and kidults alike, the less likely we are to see the return of shirts versus skins pick-up games any time soon. Although as an aside, I must mention how my son and his mates, even when home from university, used to organise weekly kickabouts at Paddy Freeman’s Fields in High Heaton, whereby those in various kinds of Newcastle United shirts played against others attired in a dazzling array of La Liga tops. He was the agricultural stopper in the Athletic Club away strip incidentally.

The truly wonderful thing about north east youth football in 2017 is the enormous number of clubs, running a whole variety of male and female teams from under 6 to under 19, that are ensuring that if a kid really wants to play organised football then somewhere there is a team for them. Run entirely by volunteers, and massively improved in terms of spectator behaviour from the pushy parent millennium syndrome, teams train under floodlights on 4G in midweek and play Saturday mornings or Sunday early afternoon. Admittedly 99% of those playing do so for fun rather than out of ambition, but that’s what matters. If they can remain committed and focussed on the game then there will always be a level for them to play when they are older; just ask this recently retired 53 year old former Wallsend Boys’ Club Veterans keeper.

Where the north east remains a hotbed is, as ever, the grassroots game; the standard of the Northern League Division 1 has never been higher and the levels below this are benefitting from that fact. Sunday pub leagues continue to contract at an alarming rate, but once again social demographics influence this; young lads don’t drink in social clubs and they don’t have locals, so they’ve no loyalty when it comes to playing for them. Pubs and clubs are open all hours; the idea of kicking off at 10.30 on a Sunday morning is less than appealing to many. Also, the infrastructure and indeed the funding that the FA has put into charter standard leagues and clubs, seeking to support as many community outfits as possible, means there is administrative and technical support for anyone involved in local football, should they require it.

Alan Pardew is one of those figures who unites the whole region in abject contempt. Among his endless litany of publicity gaffes was the bizarre assertion that north east clubs couldn’t compete with the likes of Southampton, as they signed more middle class trainees than we did up here. Unless the Premier League is going to be decided in a manner reminiscent of University Challenge, then we may safely ignore his inane babbling. However, I would state that equality of opportunity is at the lowest level in this country than at any time post World War II. Consequently, a little economic positive discrimination for the blighted north east could well be in order. In my mind, the two things that would safeguard the future of north east football for future generations would be the installation of 2 floodlit, full size 4G pitches at every school in the country and a rolling programme of training current players to become accredited Level 1 and 2 coaches, as well as First Aiders, administrators and qualified officials. As a result, they’d have a stake and a reason to remain involved in the game as adults, regardless of their playing ability. Such initiatives would really give the region a sporting chance of being the hotbed of soccer for years to come.

The Great Indoors

I see The Ashes is starting; I'd best get a cricket post up.... here's something about indoor 6-a-side stuff at South North, involving Tynemouth, Newcastle & Stocksfield -:

I’ve not been well all autumn you realise. Like a tragic pre Raphaelite heroine, I caught a chill at my mother’s graveside during her funeral in late September and haven’t been myself since. Frankly, my head and upper respiratory system have felt like a large, fraying, overstuffed bag of malign bacteria for a couple of months now. Frontal headache, increased temperature, persistent clammy perspiration, vertiginous pussy conjunctivitis, pustular complexion, atrophied ear wax leading to dizziness, ringing and deafness, viscous lakes of belligerent mucus and, worst of all, a seal bark meets machine gun dry cough. It hasn’t been fun to say the least.

Of course my malaise could have another provenance; the disappearance of cricket from my life on September 17^th when rain curtailed Hebburn 2nds v Stobswood 2nds with the home side labouring on 84/6 being the most likely cause. The lack of cricket is a painful blow to recover from. Indeed, the only news that has stirred me from my emotional sick bed of late was tidings of Josh Phillippe’s 82 for Western Australia versus England in a tour warm-up game. By all accounts it was a sparkling knock, warmly recognised and richly applauded by all corners of the NEPL savvy social media milieu.  He may be an Aussie, but he’s our Aussie, if you see what I’m saying.

However, I didn’t get to see that game in the flesh and, whatever happens during The Ashes, which I’ll be content to follow on radio than television as I refuse to have Sky in the house, I clearly won’t be present at any of the forthcoming test matches either. Also, let’s face it; while The Ashes are alright, they aren’t the NEPL are they? However, there was a fecund bloom to be found in the barren, arid fields of winter. Courtesy of a welcome DM on Twitter by my pal Martin Pollard, I was alerted to the second qualifying round of Northumberland Cricket Indoor 6-a-side tournament, that feeds into a national competition, where the finals are played at Lords, no less. The ECB are great; they don’t care how counties get their winners, as long as there are some. Northumberland winners meet Durham winners and then move on to Northern championships and thence the grand finals at Lords.  It isn’t exhaustively complex, but clubs need to find 6 players prepared to have a go on Sunday afternoons.

Now when it comes to the indoor game, Polly is a bit of a specialist or even theorist and his Brearleyesque temperament and deep, philosophical thinking about the game in general, and this arcane cultivar in particular, made him ideal captaincy material.  The Douglas Jardine of the sports hall, as nobody has ever called him.  He selected a squad of Sam Dinning, Chris Fairley, Finn Longberg, Sam Robson, Andrew Smith and himself. However, Finn’s recuperation from a season-ending appendectomy wasn’t complete, so he dropped out, with young Will Perry stepping up. The location was the South North indoor centre, a place I’d only visited previously for the 2015 Beer Festival, when Laura, Gary, Ginger Dave and me were more concerned with forcing gallons of drink and freebie curry down our necks, while the home side demolished Boldon in a Friday evening 20/20 group game; 213/2 v 41 all out or thereabouts.  In Tynemouth’s group, the opponents were Stocksfield and Newcastle, for a round robin format. The date was Sunday November 18^th at 4pm, with the games being 12 overs a side.

When I arrived, I could see Tynemouth were taking this seriously, as Polly and Smudger  were already warming up, though finding a way in to watch them was a difficult task. Eventually, after trying a dozen locked doors, I affected ingress at the same time as the Stocksfield lads arrived. There was some semi-serious pondering among those present whether Newcastle were on the late shift as Josh Phillippe’s plane had been delayed…

Tynemouth batted first and accumulated 142 runs from 12 overs, with Sam Dinning and Smudger leading the way. As the innings progressed, I picked up the scoring system and rules in general, while I’ll not bore you with here, by concentrating on the comments of the NEPL’s number one James Ellroy lookalike umpire Eddy Collins, who was standing. The other umpire was sat on a comfy chair at square leg, outside the netting, as all the overs are bowled from one end. The indoor game seems to have been considerably more codified than my previous exposure to in PE lessons 40 years back. Not that these modifications have brought the crowds in; at the start of proceedings there were literally two men and a dog watching, and that was only once Gordon Halliday and his Labrador showed up. Eventually Vince arrived to double the Tynemouth Balcony Massive, roaring the lads on to a 60 run victory.

As our game ended, it was clear Newcastle had arrived and were ready to take on Stocksfield. At this point, most of the Tynemouth team made a beeline for Costa, while Vince and I headed to The County for a pair of Rivet Catchers and a giggle at West Ham’s capitulation in Moyes’s first game. Of course, it wouldn’t be Tynemouth Cricket Club if there wasn’t a minor panic in the wings; Will Perry had gone home, believing there was only 1 game to be played, so an emergency call went out to The Hallams to save the day. Cometh the hour, cometh the man; Graeme, who’d probably imagined he’d a nice afternoon on the sofa watching Blue Planet ahead of him, rather than top scoring in an innings of 99/5 in a winner takes all contest against Newcastle, captained by Oli McGee, who’d squeezed past Stocksfield. Young Patrick now swelled the Tynemouth Massive to 3. Sadly, we were to be disappointed as Newcastle reached 100/5 with 3 balls to go.

However, any sadness at our elimination was deflected when we discovered that Newcastle’s wicketkeeper Alan Brown wasn’t eligible. As a result, Tynemouth were reinstated and go forward into the regional finals on December 10^th against heat 1 winners Benwell Hill and the side to emerge from up and coming heat 3 involving Tynedale, Backworth and Blagdon, again at South North. I can’t wait.

Faustian Pact

About a month ago, Dan Williamson of These Football Times contacted me on Twitter in relation to a piece he was writing on Tino Asprilla's career. I sent him a few points that he incorporated in a long piece about Tino's whole career that you can read here -: https://thesefootballtimes.co/2017/10/23/the-magic-and-the-madness-of-faustino-asprilla/  Meanwhile this got me thinking about Aprilla's time on Tyneside, so I penned this piece which can be found in the latest issue of North Ferriby's excellent fanzine View From The Allotment End -:

The last time I saw Faustino Asprilla was a Tuesday night in summer 2015 at Walker Activity Dome (aka The Lightfoot Centre) in the east of the city. On the adjacent court to our usual weekly game of 5 a side, the first and indeed only Colombian to play for Newcastle United, attired in loose singlet, Hawaiian shorts and yellow flip flops, was giving a masterclass in ball juggling skills, while puffing on endless full fat Marlboros. After a while, he gave the ball back to his fellow players, a collection of young Spanish speakers in an array of South American club and international jerseys, and stood to one side to concentrate on his smokes, shouting occasional instructions and encouragement, lubricating his voice with regular gulps of bottled Quilmes. Anyone else smoking or drinking alcohol pitch side would have been given short shrift by security, but nobody batted an eyelid; that’s Tino for you.

Asprilla is still a tremendously popular player on Tyneside, where the lazy, disingenuous mainstream media claim that he was the player responsible for Keegan’s Entertainers blowing the title gets short shrift. Tino’s time on Tyneside, let’s face it, wasn’t an unqualified success, but neither was it the unmitigated disaster some seek to suggest. His transfer had been forecast as early as September 1995 by gossip in several papers. Obviously I knew of him only from C4 Italian football, where he lit up Parma’s glorious outsider team as an explosive show pony, capable of flashes of astonishing brilliance. He was a Keegan player, if ever there was one. When he finally arrived on a snowy day in February 1996, effectively as a replacement for Scott Sellars, he was superb in rescuing 3 points away to Boro, providing the unexpected as an impact sub.  The sight of his languid and mesmerising footwork, as a prelude to slinging over a perfect cross for Steve Watson to convert the winner is an enduring image. Subsequent stories that he’d not been expected to play and had enjoyed a glass or three of wine with lunch added to the glamour.

Being honest, it didn’t get any better in the other 13 games he played that season, in which he scored a total of 3 goals, though he was integral to a stunning team performance as we battered West Ham at home in March. The games in which he was in involved saw 6 wins, 3 draws and 5 losses; not the form of champions in waiting, but not exactly terrible; although the main memory of him in the pitch was the idiotic head-butt on Keith Curle in a 3-3 at Maine Road in his third game. Somehow he didn’t get banned for that; it may have been better if he had. Perhaps he should have been kept back in the role of impact sub, to come on for Beardsley or Lee when the team were labouring. Tino was too mercurial a talent to be effective from the get go every week. His final goal of the season was the glorious outside of the foot lob in the infamous 4-3 at Anfield; it wasn’t a goal you see every day.

If there was one signing Keegan made in early 96 who did unbalance the team, then step forward David Batty, who was completely the wrong player for us. His instinctive negativity stifled our midfield, as he was so deep lying compared to Lee Clark. His conservative positioning placed too much of a burden on the full backs, who had to push up to link up play and the wingers, who had to drop back and inside as there was effectively a huge hole in midfield between Batty and Lee. Batty played his game and did his job, but it wasn’t the job we needed and we ceded the advantage and territory in away games especially. Keegan’s teams didn’t know the meaning of stifling the opposition and hitting them on the break; it was all out gung-ho warfare or nothing.  Ironically, Batty recovered from this early disappointment to become a far more important, indeed integral, player for NUFC the season after, while Asprilla almost disappeared from view in the league. His memory, with Shearer injured and both Ferdinand and Beardsley sold, is assured by the famous treble against Barcelona and various other European evenings (witness hoisting the corner flag in celebration after scoring against Metz), but almost nothing of note in the domestic game, despite a second successive runners-up spot in 1996/1997. That was the last hurrah of the Entertainers as Dalglish’s starched, prosaic brand of anti-football held ineffective sway.  Asprilla’s departure in January 98 after being hauled off in a dreary 1-0 win at Everton in the third round of the FA Cup, with a final record of 46 league games (14 as sub) and 9 goals, was largely unmourned. In just shy of two years he’d gone from being adored to ignored. It was time to go.

While recognising Tino’s spell on Tyneside was emblematic of the performance of the club as a whole, consisting of failure oscillating between heroic and maddening, the responsibility for the destination of the 1995/1996 title is a complex question, I think the final thing that needs to be recognised is that both Cantona and Schmeichel were absolutely crucial to Man United’s eventual success. The margins were so tight that if the NUFC 0 MUFC 1 result were to have been reversed, NUFC would have been champions. On the night itself Cantona scored the only goal and the Dane was in the form of his life; the two of them were utterly magnificent from then on and were players beyond the quality of any in the NUFC squad. There we have the real reason Keegan’s Entertainers failed to win the title.

The Prosaic Inquisition

I'd like to dedicate this week's blog to former Newcastle United programme editor Paul Tully, who passed away recently. Paul was a gentleman; a dedicated, honest, hardworking and meticulous professional, who upheld the highest of standards in the job he loved for the club he loved in the game he loved. RIP Paul.

Twitter has let me down; you see, these days I’m just not getting the entire ITK lowdown on Newcastle United in 140-character bon mots from the internet superfans, such as the South Tyneside Anti Joselu Federation’s chief theoreticians: NE32 Chris, NE33 Kriss and NE34 Kris. Just as I’m about to claim checkmate on their nauseating theory that Shay Given is “a traitor” when Ashley drove him out the club, by quoting the exact passages from Any Given Saturday regarding the finest goalkeeper and finest man to play for us in living memory, I find myself hors de combat. This is probably because either they’ve all blocked me for calling them out on other servings of their dreary, supercilious baloney or I’ve lost patience with the lot of them and muted all those dreadful accounts spewing out pompous, ungrammatical toss.

You’ll recall I made my position clear about Newcastle United after the Nottingham Forest defeat in August; I wasn’t going back while Benitez was in charge and I still haven’t. There’s no realistic prospect of me changing my mind either, as thankfully Ginger Dave’s Sky TV subscription has provided me with direct access to almost all non-Saturday 3pm NUFC games, when my beloved Benfield hold sway. Hence the internet has, by necessity, provided a blurred and cracked lens which allegedly refracts the truth about those games I’ve not seen in full. That said, frankly it’s no great hardship to find that after every NUFC game I now have about 3 hours extra free time that used to be wasted on correcting erroneous piffle from the opposing wings of the lunatic fringe that patrols the cyber high seas, loosing off volleys of intemperate drivel on the slightest pretext and without any real provocation.

The two sides of a counterfeit coin are represented by the Benitez loyalists, who display the kind of fanatical devotion to their lord and master not seen since Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición was in its pomp and their sworn adversaries, the Brexit in the betting shop with bevvy for breakfast merchants, whose loyalty is to Mitrovic alone and who take each defeat with the kind of cheerful magnanimity akin to Macduff’s reaction on learning the fate of his family in Act IV of The Scotch Play.  Perhaps the only thing the two opposing factions have in common is their fanatical hatred of Joselu. Certainly, the equaliser against Liverpool provoked the kind of furious cognitive dissonance not seen since we went in 1-0 up against the Mackems during Gullit’s rainy suicide note. You’d think, with their obsessive interest in Spanish culture, they’d both be able to have a proper discussion about Catalan independence, wouldn’t you? Don’t be daft; this is Newcastle United. We don’t debate; we shout.

The vast chasm between what is demonstrably true, and the two contradictory control dramas of the Newcastle United support ironically shows how fine the margins between success and failure or what is deemed to be acceptable and unacceptable can be. For instance, in the recent series of games between the October and November international breaks, Newcastle United played 4 league games; until the 92^nd minute of the Bournemouth contest, it seemed a racing certainty that the results of that latest mini-series would be won 1, drawn 2, lost 1. Considering the opposition involved, that wouldn’t have been a brilliant set of results, but it would have been par for the course the way the season has gone so far. Sadly, Steve Cook’s last gasp winner for the Cherries managed to deflate the mood on Tyneside and, when seen in conjunction with the dreary 1-0 loss to Burnley the Monday before and the prospect a fortnight’s international break to allow discord to foment and ferment, the usual hysterical on-line civil war has broken out between the Cavaliers, who refuse to accept there is anything to worry about while El Jefe has his hand on the tiller and the Hotheads, who have already proclaimed relegation as a certainty.

I’ve not written about Newcastle United since the September international break at the end of the deeply unsatisfactory summer transfer window. In some ways that’s a shame and a missed opportunity on my part, as the positive message that could have been drawn from events in October, especially after solid wins away to Swansea and home to Stoke, the astonishingly mature on-line response to the Brighton defeat and the Leni Riefenstahl-inspired vexillophilic display against Liverpool, has been largely eroded by subsequent events. We’re back to mud-slinging, posturing and coarse invective, played out to a soundtrack of on-field mundanity and boardroom intrigue.

I’ve no idea whether Amanda Staveley is a devotee of Busby Berkley, but the choreographed hero worship for Benitez she was treated to at the Liverpool game would surely have impressed her as an unapologetic free market Tory, vehemently opposed to state intervention and consensus politics and confidante of autocratic Gulf potentates who view democracy with utter contempt. The swivel-eyed loonies in the Mitrovic Adoration Society might still be punting their scarcely credible conspiracy theories that Ashley isn’t actually selling the club, but just toying with the support and consequently tormenting the Geordie Nation still further, but I don’t buy their nonsense for a second. As most of those advancing such balderdash are probably either still bedded down in their Mam’s box room or living in sheltered accommodation with an on-site warden, they’ve no comprehension of the complexity of high finance. It’s more akin to a lengthy series of property purchases than nipping down to Boozebusters to get your white cider prescription filled.

Let’s be clear about this; Ashley wants to sell the club, but on his terms. Therefore, we ought to consider whether a life swap from Vlad the Impaler’s Transylvania to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge may not be that great a choice at the end of the day. Sadly, all hard questions are off the menu at SJP, while the servile, semaphoric Benitez obsessives conveniently look the other way whenever mention is made not only of the identity and motives of any potential new owners, but of the Inland Revenue’s ongoing interest in Newcastle United’s transfer dealings. The Rafaphiles seem to be pinning their hopes on the unfounded myth that the tax man will simply go away when the club is sold, and the Geordie Arab Spring begins. After all, if Freddy Shepherd’s death can see outbreaks of revisionist grief that has him recalibrated as the Che Guevara of Jesmond Park West, then anything is possible. Isn’t it? Well if you’re the type of person who believes the only interest the legal profession may have in Newcastle United will be in representing claim and counter claim in the civil courts by allegedly wronged guardians of Gallowgate and Leazes banners that have supposedly brought the atmosphere back to wor hyem, then good luck to you. At this point I have to say I’ve no particular brief for Alex Hurst and his mate who set up Gallowgate Flags, but they’ve been falsely accused  and maligned by the likes of Gallowgate Shots and their acolytes, who really ought to take a look at the nonsense they were peddling.

However, going back to the Pyongyang May Day celebrations at the Liverpool game, then I’ve got to say that  if you’ve spent the last six months sneering down your nose at the supposed cult of the personality that has grown up around Jeremy Corbyn, while at the same time hoisting banners bearing the image of an unimaginably wealthy financier who is attempting to broker a deal between the hated current owner and the shady petrochemical, backstage oligarchs, then don’t imagine your conscience can be salved by donating a few jars of Dolmio to the NUFC Foodbank every home game. As fans, we must have the right to question, in moderate, articulate language, the selections and tactics of the manager which have been found wanting on many occasions since he took over. Similarly, we must be allowed to question the motives and morality of those who may potentially own the club soon.

In March 1983, Newcastle lost 1-0 away to a Burnley side that ended up in Division 3; it was my only trip to Turf Moor. In March 2016, Steve MacClaren’s final tortuous team loss was the shambolic 3-1 reverse to Bournemouth. Both games ended in storms of profanity directed at players who had seemingly let the club down. Ostensibly, we’ve not made much progress on the pitch since either of these events, though the clear majority of the support seem supinely complaint to the hectoring of Benitez loyalists who do not tolerate dissent. This is a situation that surely invites challenge, especially as the funereal pace of a season that has seen a mere 11 games played in 81 days picks up considerably, with the next 11 games before the FA Cup third round played in 48 days. Of those 11 games, defeats are inevitable against Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City, leading to pressure to achieve results away to West Brom, West Ham and Stoke and an unquestioning need to win home contests against Watford, Leicester, Everton and Brighton. Were such results achieved, harvesting 15 points, Newcastle would have 29 points after 22 games and safety would be in sight.

If Benitez, whose preference for prosody over poetry is ingrained in his footballing DNA, is unable to produce such a modest, yet attainable, target, it may well be the case that El Jefe and not Mike Ashley is the main impediment to moving the club forward. Indeed, who is to say that any takeover consortia would be happy to sink the thick end of half a billion into a team playing sterile, one-dimensional, stolid, monochrome football?