Today is my birthday. Here is an article I had in last night's Percy Main programme (beat Rutherford 4-1; played brilliantly) about football on my birthday -:
Welcome
to the second game and our first home fixture of the new season, everyone. I’m
penning these words in advance of the opening day trip to Brian Smith’s (Boys
in) Blue Star and Newcastle’s home encounter with Nottingham Forest, so let’s
hope we saw a pair of positive results from the two games. I intend to
contribute a feature to each home programme this season, as well as match reports
for every game I attend. Of course, my commitment to Carry on Cricket, by
attempting to remain inconspicuous at short fine leg in the Northumberland and
Tyneside Division 5 (South) with Tynemouth 3s means I’ll not see a Saturday
game until September 17th.
I’ve not done a forensic check, but I do feel August 6th was an incredibly early start for the Alliance, even if it is the traditional week later than the Northern League began in earnest. Not that I like the game, but I do note from the fixture board I pass at Percy Park on my way to Preston Avenue that rugby union doesn’t kick off competitively until September. Growing up, it always seemed to me that the August Bank Holiday weekend was the appropriate time for cricket to give way to football as the main focus of my sporting attention, though it appeared that another date seemed to be right on the cusp of the changing of the seasons. My birthday is tomorrow: August 11th. I spent a good few hours poring over reference books and checking on the internet to come up with some facts and sparking some recollections about football, and Newcastle United in particular, on and around my special day. I’m 58, in case you were wondering; I know I don’t look it.
The earliest date I can find for a Newcastle league fixture is August 5th, when Benitez managed in the Championship for the first time back in 2016. That woeful 1-0 loss at Craven Cottage is probably best forgotten about, even if the campaign ended in a triumphant return to the top flight. Back in the 60s and 70s, football inevitably waited until at least the third week in August before the season kicked off, with the notable and inexplicable exceptions of the 68/69 and 69/70 seasons, which began on August 10th and 9th respectively. Strangely, Newcastle faced West Ham on both occasions, home then away respectively, sharing the points with 1-1 draws on both instances. Back in the pre-Sky era, it was mainly pre-season friendlies that took place around Cusackmas. I remember being one of 4,952 disgruntled, sunbathing punters in the Gallowgate calling for Jack Charlton’s head as we stumbled to a truly awful 1-1 draw with Sheffield United on the day before my 21st. By the time The Pink was out at teatime, Jack had quit. In 1991, we faced up to Ujpest Dosza in a repeat of the 69 Fairs’ Cup final. Suffice to say Mickey Quinn’s hat trick as we repeated the score from that famous night 22 years previous, didn’t have the same impact on Geordie folklore as Bobby Moncur’s brace.
In point of fact, the first game I ever saw on August 11th was the unfriendliest friendly in history; Man United eviscerating NUFC 4-0 at Wembley in the 1996 Charity Shield. I’ve managed to erase all memories of the game, but not of the biblical thunderstorm afterwards that caused flash floods all across northwest London.
Of course, it had to be the Premier League that caused the football calendar to be ripped up and thrown in the bin, in terms of the starting date, with the opening day of 97/98 seeing Newcastle beat Sheff Wed 2-1 with an Asprilla brace on August 9th. Perhaps most memorably that day was new Blackburn boss John Dahl Thomasson squandering a gilt-edge chance after only 20 seconds. I wonder how much different his time as a Magpie would have been if he’d buried that one? Even more memorable was the start of 99/00 when Sheffield’s Uriah Rennie almost matched the obloquy endured by his South Yorkshire colleague, the late and still infamous Trelford Mills from Barnsley, by red carding Alan Shearer as we went down 1-0 to Villa. This was on August 7th and two days later, we lost 3-1 at White Hart Lane to further advance the process that saw Ruud Gullit on his way after that notorious debacle in a downpour.
The next Newcastle game on my birthday was Robert Lee’s damp squib of a testimonial against Bilbao in 2001, though I wasn’t there. In point of fact, I was acting as an English Language tutor to the Chinese U17 football squad, who were at a training camp at Wycombe Wanderers’ ground. That Saturday morning, we took a minibus to Millmoor (though not the same one I’d been on in September 82 with Gin Man, as Jeff Sharpe will tell you) and got free tickets from Crystal Palace’s Chinese international, Fan Zhi Yi. It was a hell of a game and Palace, under the charge of Steve Bruce for the first time, came back from 2-0 down to win it 3-2 in 13 minutes of injury time, occasioned by a loose clearance knocking a linesman spark out on the touchline.
After that, we move on to 2007 before August 11th appears in the Newcastle United calendar and the false dawn of the Sam Allardyce era, when he took Newcastle to his former home of the Reebok Stadium and cuffed Bolton Wanderers aside 3-1. I wasn’t there that day either; Benfield 4 West Auckland 1 was the source of my entertainment on my 43rd birthday. That was undoubtedly the highlight of Allardyce’s brief and inglorious reign, but certainly better to remember than the last 2 losses on August 11th; home reverses to Spurs (1-2) and Arsenal (0-1) in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
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