(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?
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