Monday 21 February 2011

The Road To God Knows Where

As a parent I’ve got a lot of failings, I accept that. However, what I have instilled in my son from an early age are the virtues of sarcasm, intolerance, ultra left wing politics and a tremendous taste in music. Never mind the concept of Rock Dad, my young’un (well he’s a 6ft2 prop forward and turns 16 in June) has been brought up by the Indie Parents. Consequently we had intergenerational moshing at the British Sea Power gig at the Tyne Theatre on February 14th. It was a very successful Valentine’s Day, unlike last year when I booked a table for Laura and I. How was I to know she hated snooker?

Talking about falling out of love, the repeated tirades by St Niall Quinn towards his Mackem constituents get funnier by the second. Ever since the Drumaville Paveys parked their Hiaces on the SoS forecourt, all Newcastle fans have heard from all sections of the media both local and national, is how well the Unwashed are run compared to the goings-on at SJP. Despite Charlie Chawke’s Circus People rumbling off in to the distance, to be replaced by shadowy American billionaire Ellis Short, the unchallenged mantra among print and broadcast commentators is that the ruling elite on Wearside are doing things so much better than those on Tyneside. Frankly, to anyone who believes in proper fan ownership, being asked to make a choice between Short or Ashley is like asking whether you’d find Mubarak preferable to Gaddafi. These club-owning oligarchs are modern day despots; do not delude yourself otherwise. Quinn, who either pimped the club he purports to love or astutely secured investment funding from a surprising source, depending on your view, trousers the thick end of £1m per annum in basic salary payment, which isn’t bad considering he presided over a business that turned in a £26m annual loss for 2009/2010.

However, despite his unconvincingly dyed hair, smarmy grin and bland populism, it was undeniable that Quinn seemed less of a walking public relations disaster than the Ashley and Llambias operation has been. That is until Mr Charity started to veer wildly “off message” after the Darren Bent transfer. Whatever one’s response to that deal (hysterical amusement in my case), it is a cast iron fact that money talked. I could have accepted Bent’s logic if he’d been honest and said he was off to Villa Park simply because he wanted to double his already fantastic salary, but I saw no truth in his claims that he was going to further his England chances by moving to a bigger club. Much as it pains me to say it, the Mackems were one of only 8 Premier League teams who started this season with no fear of relegation, as were Villa, until O’Neill walked out on them. Houllier’s administration will probably keep Villa up, but they have now joined the doubting dozen and turned it in to the terrified thirteen, all of whom have the single stated aim of finishing at least 17th. Will the Mackems’ tribulations turn it in to a fearful fourteen, or are they ready to implode any day now?

On the face of it, the £24m that sunderland made from the Bent deal ought to have been enough to push them on to improve the squad (as with anything to do with the North East, naysayers will be jumping up and down to make comparisons with Ashley’s £35m for Carroll; it simply isn’t relevant here to compare the two teams, as everyone knows Ashley has no intention of spending any cash he receives), especially as a so-called “well run” club they would want to push on. Instead, they signed a bargain replacement in Sessegnon, presumably as replacement for Huns-bound David Healy, and took the terminally grumpy and unreliable Muntari on loan, but for what purpose remains as yet unclear, making a nice, fat £18m profit in the transfer window. Sadly, as this money was earmarked to pay off part of the debt accrued by signing Bent in the first place; it is fair to say Fernando Torres was not on Steve Bruce’s shopping list.

Consequently, it has become crystal clear that Short is not prepared to bankroll them any longer. Presumably, Quinn bullshitted Short saying that a half decent sunderland side would sell their ground out. Instead, they’re still bumping along with an average of less than 40k attending, which bearing in mind the club’s growing debt, is worrying. While calling them the north east’s crisis club may be a little premature, they have lost 3 off the bounce, with some seriously tough fixtures ahead and the inescapable fact that were Short to pull the plug now, any deduction for going in to administration would see them plunged in to the bottom 3.

Perhaps these contextualising features help to explain quite why Niall Quinn has decided to go public over the fact he despises the 10,000 stayaways who have stopped watching sunderland. His scattergun ravings about on-line streaming and pubs showing questionably legal broadcasts of games on foreign channels seem to have divided a notoriously fractious support that are regularly to be found coming to blows with each other. Some slavishly mouth Quinn’s party line that the supporters are letting down the owners (not the club, interestingly enough), in an embarrassing show of obsequiousness not seen since Sir Alastair Burnet stepped down as ITV’s Royal Correspondent, while the more realistic elements point to the grave economic plight affecting the mackems’ heartlands. Quinn, mere days are claiming he’ll have to sell off the high earners and scale back the club’s ambitions if the ground remains a quarter empty, has even promised to tour pubs in the Seaham area, where he claims 50 licensed premises show games on match day, trying to drum up support. Bearing in mind his self confessed problems with heavy drinking in the past; this may not be a good idea.

While some have pondered whether all this ranting and raving is symptomatic of Quinn having a mid life crisis or suffering from work-related stress, much as Bob Murray (now being rehabilitated as a “proper” fan by certain on line loonies) was supposed to have suffered a nervous breakdown during the 19 point season, it appears more likely that Mr Charity is just planting the seeds of his exit strategy. Despite now being blessed with much in the way of academic achievements, Quinn has the wit and cunning of a Fianna Fail TD; his gombeen tendencies are evident in his take home pay and his ability to be taken for a cute hoor who’d be very much at ease in Fagan’s in Drumcondra can not be ignored. Whatever happens to the Mackems, it’s a knocking bet Quinn, who presided over 5 successive defeats whilst, statistically, the worst ever manager of sunderland, will walk away from the wreckage with his reputation and bank balance in tact.

Friday 18 February 2011

Farce or Tragedy?

(First published in Percy Main v Alnwick Town programme 19th February 2011)

January 31st was Transfer Deadline Day; so crucial has this invented occasion become in our sporting calendar that it now deserves initial capitalisation, to suggest an identity and sombre gravitas it clearly does not merit. In the not too distant past, there was always a transfer deadline, but in the pre email era it used to be at 5pm on a Wednesday some time in March. It was a bit like the coming of Lent; an important event that you didn’t fully understand the relevance of, that wasn’t quite crucial enough in the wider scheme of things to get you a day off school.

While the biggest deal on January 31st 2011 was the departure of Torres for Stamford Bridge, the deal that affected me the most was a Tyneside club seeing their star striker, a home town boy with an unbelievable eye for goals and that little bit of devil in his character which had seen him in a few scrapes, heading off in to the distance for a fading giant with an uncertain future, in shaky recovery from the machinations of some dubious, former owners. However, the Newcastle Benfield fans I talked to on the Wednesday following, during their 3-1 victory over Northallerton in the Brooks Mileson League Cup, were philosophical about things and all wished John Campbell well after his move to Darlington, even if the Quakers got lamped 4-0 away to Luton on his debut. The lad was simply too good for the Northern League and had already been on trial, no pun intended, at Orient and Swindon, before signing an 18 month deal at Darlo, where he scored his debut goal in a 6-1 rout of Eastbourne on February 12th. In a way he followed the pattern of Richard Brodie, who left Benfield for York in 2006 and will line up for his Crawley side at Old Trafford in the 5th round of the FA Cup this weekend.

Elsewhere, North East crisis club sunderland lost three successive games in the wake of the departure of their star striker, whose mother had been racially abused by mackem fans not 18 months previous, to a club on the fringes of the relegation struggle, while their £1m per annum Chief Executive and apparent tireless charity worker Niall Quinn made a public announcement that he detested mackem fans who couldn’t afford to go to SoS for games. In addition menopausal misogynists Keys and Gray got the bullet from Sky for talking sexist bollocks and ended up on Talk Sport, which is the aural equivalent of Carling sponsoring an EDL march.

Meanwhile, in the alphabetical list of transfers on the BBC website Campbell J (Benfield – Darlington) was followed by the name of Carroll A (Newcastle – Liverpool) for the slightly higher fee of £35m. Not bad for a lad with only half a season’s regular top flight football behind him, not to mention a couple of brushes with the law and an injury that, if rumours are correct, will keep him out until the end of the season. £80k a week to sit around getting physio for 7 months is nice work if you can get it, even if the kid clearly did not want to leave the club, though frankly who can blame either him or Newcastle’s hierarchy for going for this deal; after all, January is a sellers’ market and Liverpool were decidedly cash rich. However, the timing is crucial and, as Biffa at http://www.nufc.com/ so perceptively put it, you can’t play a huge bag of cash up front.

As the deal unfolded on that Monday, it became abundantly clear Newcastle were time poor, to say the least, witnessed by the frankly desperate and utterly incomprehensible £12m bid for Charles N’Zogbia and rumours of a later move for Johan Elmander. Instead, Newcastle signed an injured Stephen Ireland on loan, sent Xisco and Wayne Routledge to their former clubs on gardening leave and then predictably lost Shola Ameobi for six weeks after a nasty elbow from Steve Sidwell in a 1-0 reverse at Fulham that the drama queen hand wringing tendency saw as imminent proof of certain relegation for The Magpies. Three days later, with papers, websites and local news still awash with reports of text messages and conversations between the parties concerned in the Carroll deal, all trying to pin the blame for the transfer on the other side, the astonishing recovery against Arsenal saw 4 goals scored and a point gained in extraordinary circumstances. That semi-mythical second half (I turned down a free ticket in order to watch the Ponteland game in the NFA Senior Benevolent Bowl) showed that this group of lads, to quote Chris Hughton, still had some spirit. Hopefully it is enough to get the team away from danger, though gaining 4 points away at Blackburn and Birmingham will also help.

Cheik Tiote, Joey Barton, Jose Enrique, Kevin Nolan and Fabriccio Coloccini are the ones who can keep Newcastle up, but undoubtedly the Andy Carroll deal means all of them, with the possible exchange of Gutierrez for Nolan, will go in the summer as the club has let them down by flogging the prize asset and replacing him with who? Well, as I stare at the photo of Andy Carroll that adorns the February page of my official Newcastle United calendar, the short term deal for Shefki Kuqi does not hint at a club looking to push on, does it? What the Carroll deal shows, considering all his weasel words from early December onwards and the cancellation of a Press Conference scheduled for 31st January that was rumoured to unveil Barton and Enrique as having penned new, long term deals, is that Pardew is a puppet of Ashley and Llambias. Just when a grudging note of acceptance was creeping in to the comments of Newcastle fans about the performances of the team, Stevenage excepted, following the managerial change, the empty rhetoric about keeping Carroll and augmenting an already thin squad shows Pardew to be either a bullshitter or easily manipulated by the club’s owner. However I did have to laugh at the angry, unguarded comments Llambias had about a sheet metal worker’s son and failed former Newcastle manager’s take on the Carroll deal -: “Do I care what Alan Shearer has to say? When he ran this football club [in 2009] we were relegated after picking up just five points from his eight games in charge." I hate to say it, but Del Boy is right!

Thankfully this year I managed to avoid Transfer Deadline Day, thus being spared the ordeal of watching a seemingly endless loop of a tumescent David Craig screaming in to a microphone on Barrack Road. Instead, I found myself in the rarefied environs of the Theatre Royal on Grey Street at an educational event hosted by Propeller Theatre Company in advance of their opening night of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. How appropriate it was that The Bard’s scarcely credible tale of the Antipholus twins and their constant problems with misunderstandings and false promises in Ephesus should be taking place on this day of all days. Frankly, it was excellent. I hadn’t laughed so much since I’d read the last NUST press release. Tragically, I was forced to miss the NUST AGM on January 31st as it coincided with the theatre. Well, actually it coincided with me grabbing a quick, pre performance coffee and Danish (pastry, not Hamlet) at Costa, as the NUST AGM was scheduled for 6pm on a Monday, no doubt to encourage maximum attendance. Or something.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent wakes up one morning to find his house is about to be demolished. When he challenges the workmen’s right to do this, the foreman explains the necessary documentation had been displayed in the council offices, though Dent does point out said announcement had been kept in a locked filing cabinet in a tank of piranhas in an underground vault. Similarly, NUST booked not The Irish Centre, where all other meetings had been held, but a side room in the Literary & Philosophical Society (I’m not making this up). In the end, this was ample space as a grand total of 17 people, including 7 former members of the interim committee, turned up for an organisation that has had 500 at a public meeting before. What happened? Nothing of note, as NUST is now dead in the water. Having stated they were content with a loss of 1,000 members in the previous 12 months, on account of the fact those deserters had joined a Supporters’ Club and not a Supporters’ Trust, the current committee glossed over 2 recent resignations (one of whom Neil Mitchell wrote a fantastically insightful piece about his motives for doing so) and the continued suspension of another member, before co-opting someone I’d never heard of and announcing Mark Jensen, editor of The Mag, has stepped down as Chair to be replaced by Norman Watson, who’d came 8th in last year’s election. Frankly my contacts that were present said the whole evening seemed not so much a case of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as flinging them in to the ocean to try and sink the lifeboats.

Frankly, the whole drama leaves me utterly unmoved. Indeed until such time as Francisco Jiminez Terjada returns to St James Park, I’ll stick with Percy Main and Shakespeare. Xisco, Xisco, wherefore art thou Xisco?

Friday 11 February 2011

Tweeting in a Pardew Wonderland

(First published in "Toon Talk 4" on 5th February 2011)

One of the best things about dumping your season ticket and paying, or scrounging, on a match by match basis is that you don’t have to put up with the incessant whinging of the miserable sods nearby who’d been getting on your nerves for the previous decade and a half. You’re now free to sit anywhere you want in order to hear yet more irrational, misjudged, blinkered criticism. Since I vacated the Gallowgate Centre in summer 2009, I have to say I’m not missing the dulcet tones and the continuous complaints of a pair of miserable gets from Ashington or thereabouts who would start their monotonous moaning when the team were warming up and bring it to a crescendo by the hour mark before nicking off early for their bus.

This season I’ve sat in complete silence in the official NUFC Trappist section, level with the 18-yard box in the East Stand Lower and seen both Coloccini and Williamson fail to deal with an aimless punt forward, allowing Jason Roberts to criminally steal the points for Blackburn in a desperate game. I’ve groaned in frustration at our inaccurate play and willingness of some (mainly pissed) fans to slag off our players, on a particularly frustrating day in the Leazes West Centre against a pitiful Fulham, but at least this was a freebie. I’ve also shelled out £40 for the privilege of seeing 86 pulsating minutes against Manchester City from the back row of the Milburn Paddock. It was a great seat with a charming neighbours and a superb view; certainly I saw Carlos Tevez in the build up to the first goal when Tim Krul didn’t. Thus, the enjoyment of the last 86 minutes was rather spoiled by the fact I’d seen my £40 pissed down the drain in the time it takes to boil an egg. As a consequence, the seat I opted for when the Hammers came to visit was a comfy armchair in the corner of my living room, though I was leaping around quite a lot!

Another game where I didn’t set foot in the ground was Pardew’s debut against Liverpool. I could pretend this was because of a principled stance of support for Hughton and opposition to another incomprehensible kneejerk response by Ashley, though I’d be lying if I did. I was actually at Firhill, watching Partick Thistle 1 Ross County 1 as part of a long arranged weekend in Glasgow, mainly to see my favourite band Teenage Fanclub; you can read about it here http://payaso-del-mierda.blogspot.com/2010/12/maryhill-chain.html if you like. Blogs are important, as I’m about to demonstrate.

Following Hughton’s sacking, there was a great deal more heat than light generated by debate amongst Newcastle fans about how best to respond to this turn of events. I hate to say it, but the shameful, ragged away displays at Bolton and the Baggies were not acceptable and simply could not be allowed to continue. Obviously Hughton had been undermined and overworked by the lack of a replacement for Calderwood (and as a Hibs fan I’m not exactly delighted with his new job either), but I still had doubts as to whether he was turning in to the reincarnation of Richard Dinnis.

However, regardless of Hughton’s strengths or otherwise, the way Ashley runs the club is what is really under the microscope following Pardew’s lucky break. Even if it had been Jol or O’Neill who’d got the gig, questions about the current owners need to be raised, especially by those who have the power to raise them. Obviously good journalists like George Culkin and Simon Bird do their bit, but what about those who don’t need to be objective or professional? In one of those quirks of history, all 3 Newcastle United fanzines came out Liverpool weekend; while two of them, namely Toon Talk 3 and the highly promising debut issue of Black & White Daft, had great content and showed no dilution of the contempt at the way the club is run (though the less said about The Mag 253 as a campaigning vehicle the better), publishing deadlines had conspired against them. Hughton’s sacking had happened while they were at press, meaning only Toon Talk could respond interactively to events via the website, which showed a level of fury among fans that was almost reminiscent of September 2008 all over again. Of course, it may just have been hot air in some instances, but at least it gave a flavour of how fans were feeling.

It became abundantly clear in the days leading up to the Liverpool game that NUST were not interested in the slightest in co-ordinating or indeed being involved in any form of protest, official, organised or otherwise, against Ashley. When a statement appeared on their website on the Thursday, the NUST board, now shorn of their 3 most prominent, proactive, crusading members in the shape of Bill Corcoran and Neil Mitchell who had resigned in disgust at the Trust’s inertia in the post election period and Steve Hastie, who remains suspended for hitherto unexplained “disciplinary” reasons, which may or may not emerge at the long awaited NUST AGM, were obviously intent on seeing this particular war out in Switzerland. Their call to arms was as follows; “The Trust board believes in supporting the team and for the fans to decide for themselves what message they want to send out to both the club hierarchy and the global audience watching on TV… For fans to have real influence it has to be through a financial stake in their club, that is our aim and what we will pursue no matter who owns or manages this great club.” It’s not quite Lenin arriving at the Finland Station now is it?

With only Toon Talk among the fanzine fraternity showing any interest in any form of protest either outside or inside the ground, it was made abundantly clear to me that as technology moves on, so has our support. Concepts such as Blogs, Flashmobs or Twitter were unknown half a decade ago; these days they are the global cyber underground, ripe for spreading dissent and fomenting social unrest. Witness the spectacle of fifth formers and College students bunking off lessons to protest at education cuts, then closing Vodafone and Top Shop stores in protest at the legal tax dodging of their owners. These youngsters don’t organise public meetings to plan things, or have committee elections, they text, tweet or message the time and the place of the next protest. The next generation knows the importance of using social networking sites on laptops and phones because they provide an easy, free and immediate way to organise demonstrations. It’s not anti democratic; it’s totally democratic, in an anarchic way. There are no leaders and they cause maximum embarrassment to the furious ruling elite. Of course, a new wave of articulate, radical public speakers may emerge, but only time will tell if they are needed. At the minute, anarchic rabble rousing is proving far more effective than anything the National Union of Students is doing.

As Newcastle United fans, we need to learn from these young protestors and the technologically sussed members of our support. Spontaneous protests may not run Ashley out of town, but they’ll achieve more than the snails’ pace Fabianism of NUST. One of the most perceptive of Newcastle United supporters in the cyber field is Andy Hudson (http://ganninaway.blogspot.com/) who had this to say in the run up to the Liverpool game: Over a year ago (the day the YWC campaign launched) I made my feelings known to NUST that as a single entity they will split our fanbase…The correct tactic should have been a supporters organisation that would unite all of the fans that was not going to be afraid to campaign against anything that they believed was not just or in the fans interests and that organisation should offer full transparency to build credibility amongst the fanbase. NUST should've then operated alongside that… At this moment in time NUST is dead. Outside of the current members it has no credibility; within the current members' ranks it has lost too much credibility and should not be used for anything moving forward in the short term but as something to build links within the community (which it is doing well)… In the short term the fans need to unite - which is pretty much a given - and engagement needs to begin to motivate, reinvigorate the fanbase - in my opinion there cannot be any exclusions else that becomes a mirror of the current NUST board which is in turn mirroring Ashley's toxic regime.

The most important elements to Andy’s proposals are that he is both positive in his outlook and inclusive in his philosophy, which are two vital elements that appear to have got lost in the infernal, internal politics of NUST during the past year or so. Indeed, Andy’s points need remembering and while the Liverpool protest may have came to little, in the wake of 3 great points, terrible weather and the apparent willingness of huge sections of the Newcastle fanbase to pour vast quantities of cash, hand over fist, in to Ashley’s coffers on a match day, the use of interactive technology and social networking to provide an immediate and hopefully unequivocal response to Ashley’s future outrages can not be ignored.

As Paul Simonon said “you can crush us, you can bruise us, but you’ll have to answer to” a 5,000 strong, roaring mob who just won’t take any more shit. Well, one day hopefully….

Friday 4 February 2011

Rock & Dole Years: 2007/2008

(Originally published in "Toon Talk" issue #4 in February 2011)

It’s now more than three years since Sam Allardyce was shown the door at St. James’ Park. With the benefit of hindsight, absolutely nothing at all to do with his brief, inglorious time on Tyneside, including such disparate elements as his appointment, tenure and sacking, makes any sense at all. However, the same can be said of his replacement Kevin Keegan’s odd and still to be fully explained or justified return to the SJP hot seat. 2007/2008 was an utterly insane season, considering we began it by contemplating Allardyce taking us back to the Champions’ League and ended it grateful that Keegan had kept us up, though it seemed a bastion of calmness and tranquillity when the following one is remember, but that’s for next time.

Looking back on the early Ashley era seems almost surreal, when one considers just how popular the now vilified owner was with supporters, basically simply for not being Shepherd. While both players inc and The Mag erred on the side of caution about the new regime, certain cyber hotheads were taking the idea of seeing Chris Mort and Ashley buying pints in Blu Bambu as a sign of the reawakening of the Geordie nation. How wrong they were, but in their wish to see Shepherd removed they’d never contemplated how much truth there could be in the cliché “better the devil you know.”

On the pitch, we had bid less than fond farewells to the frankly useless Babayaro, the highly individual talents of Titus Bramble, his bling buddy Kieron Dyer after 8 underachieving years, the cowardly Luque and the agricultural Craig Moore. While it was good riddance to bad rubbish for that lot, we did spend a moment saying thanks to Scott Parker, apparently homesick and the God-like genius of Nobby Solano, who both ended up at West Ham, Antoine Sibierski, when Wigan offered him a 2 year deal and Pav Srnicek, who retired.

In their place we welcomed a similar mixture of talented and terrible players. The good buys would have been Habib Beye, a quality defender, Abdoulaye Faye, a no-nonsense stopper, though with apparent anger management issues, Jose Enrique, who is still doing the business still and the portly Viduka, who was a world beater one minute and a liability the next. After three and a half years, the jury is still out on Joey Barton; for every goal versus Villa there is a punch on Morten Gamst Pederson, not even taking in to consideration his extra curricular activities. The bad buys really did stink; Rozenhal was as soft as shit and left for Lazio on 1st January, Cacapa was Titus with a Portuguese passport, Geremi appeared to be playing in slow motion and Alan Smith has still to convince me he is a footballer to this day.

Anyway, following a couple of encouraging friendly wins over Celtic and Juventus, the whole thing kicked off away to Allardyce’s old club Bolton on my birthday August 11th. A classic from Charles N’Zogbia and a Martins double saw Newcastle 3-0 up in half an hour, with a final score of 3-1 really setting the scene in emphatic fashion. The next week, we drew 0-0 at home to Villa in a dull game, though the needless booing at the end suggested Allardyce had very little margin for error among the SJP faithful. Newcastle fans again came under the spotlight the next week as we drew 2-2 in Smogland after twice leading. The barracking dished out to the eminently detestable Mido was taken up by the likes of Lousie Taylor of The Grauniad and other on-line cultural gauleiters, in the shape of polyversity Media Studies and Sociology drop-out bloggers, not to mention opportunistic Boro fans with an agenda to pursue, as racist chanting. It wasn’t. It was having a go at a detestable opposition player. End of story. Much to the chagrin of Lousie Taylor, the FA didn’t charge Newcastle United and as a consequence I’ve not read The Guardian since.

On the pitch Newcastle moved on from this shit storm in a tea cup to face Barnsley in the League Cup, when a brace by Martins and Owen saw us safely through, leading to a predictable 2-0 loss to Arsenal’s youth team at the Emirates in the last 32; ho hum.

September started with 1-0 massacre of Wigan courtesy of a lovely Owen header, before the first sign that Allardyce wasn’t up to it; we lost 1-0 away to Derby when Kenny Miller gave them their only win of the season in a game where Newcastle seemed utterly unable to pick their game up and create anything. A bounce back victory at home to West Ham was followed by a great first half away to Man City, where we went in a goal to the good, but fell apart to lose 3-1. We stood 9th at the end of the month and in the same place at the end of October, when home wins over Everton and Spurs were spoiled by a lame loss at Reading.

The main problem with Allardyce seemed to be his inability to switch tactics; it was his way or no way and, more surprisingly, given his ego, that he couldn’t motivate players. If we went a goal down, we were almost certainly snookered, but take the lead and we’d be okay. Sadly, we didn’t take many leads in November. The middle game of that month saw us draw 1-1 away to the Mackems when James Milner’s cross eluded Craig Gordon to give us a point we scarcely deserved, while the two home games that bookended this result effectively destroyed Allardyce’s credibility. The 1-4 massacre by Portsmouth, with them 3 goals up in 7 minutes, all courtesy of Cacapa and Rozenhal’s ineptitude, could possibly be seen as a fluke; the 3-0 banjoing by a Liverpool side in second gear could not. Make no mistake about it; these were the two worst ever home performances in the Premier League by Newcastle United. The repeatedly chants of “you don’t know what you’re doing” were right on the money. Allardyce had bluffed and bullshitted his way in to this job, where he’d quickly been found out.

A packed December programme saw a continued unacceptable mixture of results; a spineless 3-1 loss at Blackburn, a plucky 1-1 home draw with Arsenal, a 2-1 home win over Birmingham courtesy of a 90th minute Habib Beye header, a spawny 1-0 win at Fulham courtesy of Barton’s injury time penalty and a fluked 2-2 at home to Derby, courtesy of a late Viduka goal, when we ought to have lost, saw us 12th at Christmas. Predictably the festive period did us no favours; a 1-0 loss at Wigan, where the chants were “we’re shit and we’re sick of it,” before Barton went on a 12-hour bender, punched a young kid and ended up doing time, was followed by a 2-1 loss at Chelsea.

January started with a 2-0 home reverse by Man City that showed us as spineless as ever, followed by a truly woeful 0-0 away to Stoke in the FA Cup, which saw Allardyce removed from office. Typically enough, Ashley’s timing was neither logical nor helpful. Allardyce should either have been allowed to see the season out and then bulleted in the summer, as we were under no danger of going down, or not employed at all after Ashley took up the reins in 2007. The first game after his departure saw a 6-0 loss at Man United, where Alan Smith saw red for foul and abusive language, with Nigel Pearson in charge, offered no hope of immediate improvement. We needed a boss and it appeared as if one cockney wide boy would appoint another, with Redknapp looking to be the likely candidate. Imagine the shock on Wednesday January 16th, with a cup replay with Stoke only hours away, when Kevin Keegan was unveiled as the new boss.

Retrospect shows we should not have touched him with a bargepole; he was yesterday’s man, distanced from the modern game, running his Soccer Circus up in Glasgow and one can only speculate as to why he took the job. Yet Kevin Keegan united the fans, players and everyone associated with the club, bar Dennis Wise, until the end of that season. If he’d been given the title of Director of Football, rather than the odious taxi driver attacker, things may well have been very different in the long run, but Newcastle United, and Ashley in particular, like to do things the hard way, and sometimes the wrong way.

Despite Emre’s early red card, Keegan’s first game went well that night as we won 4-1 against a woeful Stoke, before losing 3-0 to Arsenal’s youth team at the Emirates in the last 32, again; ho hum.

We also lost 3-0 to them in Keegan’s first away game, which showed he didn’t really have the magic touch required to shoot us up the league. Indeed, it was to be 2 months and 8 games before he tasted victory. We drew at home 0-0 with Bolton and 1-1 with the Smogs, lost 4-1 at Villa, 5-1 at home to Man Utd, 1-0 home to Blackburn in the 93rd minute, 3-0 at Liverpool and stopped the rot with a good performance in a 1-1 at St Andrews. After 4 straight losses, perhaps the tide had finally turned.

Fulham were beaten 2-0 at home, then Spurs were humiliated 4-1 at the Lane after we’d gone a goal down, before Reading were blown away 3-0; 9 goals, 9 points and the best attacking displays of the season. This was followed by a 0-0 snooze at Portsmouth, before the Mackems were pulled to pieces 2-0. The first one saw a superb Geremi cross and a magnificent run and finish by Owen; two players who were held in contempt by Newcastle fans combined this day to produce the goods.

The season ended with us finishing 12th, after a 2-2 at West Ham and a brace of low-key losses 2-0 at home to Chelsea and 3-1 at Goodison. The former seemed to drive a wedge between Ashley and Keegan, when the manager on Sky TV post match basically admitted we’d never compete at the top of the table with the squad we had and the players Wise wanted to bring in, compared to the ones Keegan had in mind. It seemed a non-story at the time, but the events of the next few months proved that Newcastle United are only ever a heartbeat away from a major crisis. And 2008/2009 was a 12 month crisis from start to finish!