Barbarians at the Gate

I wasn’t at the 146^th Tyne Wear derby. Indeed, if it had not been for a sequence of complex events that began with the euthanizing of Francisco Jimenez Tejada (aka Ronan the dog), I wouldn’t even have been on Tyneside that particular weekend. I should have been at Aberdeen v Celtic and then Arbroath v East Fife with Andy, Michael and Shaun. Texts and Tweets told of a pair of blinding games, 1-1 and 2-2 respectively, with an uproarious real ale session in Dundee on the Saturday night; it seemed like I’d missed out on all the fun.

In the event, staying home was quite pleasant, on the Saturday at least; Winstons beat Hartlepool Camerons 3-1 and I won the domino card for the first time ever, then Percy Main came from behind to defeat Shankhouse 2-1. Come Sunday, I was awake early with all the usual stresses, fears and worries that accompany a game I’ve always felt was the sporting equivalent of an exam you’d not revised for.

Of course I didn’t watch it; I couldn’t. Too nervous you see. I know that’s a pathetic admission from someone who is almost 48, but unlike Seamus Heaney and the Bloody Sunday funerals (see last week’s blog for more details), I can admit to my sin of omission, or cowardice if you prefer. Instead, I followed the first half on Twitter at home, nervously pacing the kitchen, hallway and lounge, regularly checking the lap top for updates. Bendtner’s penalty and the ill-luck of Coloccini and Ba in trying to equalise made up my mind how I’d cope with the second period; I decided to cycle to Tynemouth.

It was a lousy day; freezing cold and sleeting as I left Heaton, though that turned to driving rain and a punishing gale from off the North Sea the closer I got to the Coast. My shoes were sodden before I’d crossed Station Road in Wallsend. Every mile or so, my curiosity defeated my need for cover and self preservation; I stopped regularly to check Twitter and the BBC website on my phone. Time crawled as I read of Sessegnon’s red card, of incessant black and white pressure, of 19 wasted corners and, depressingly as I passed The Spring Gardens in North Shields, of Ba’s missed penalty. In my usual fit of self doubt and fear that surrounds the game, I’d predicted a 0-1 score line; how guilty and glum I’d felt for seemingly inviting such ill luck. Then, it changed.

A hundred yards ahead of The Spring Gardens are a trio of other pubs; The Albion (Top House), The Old Hundred and The Oddfellows (The Little Bar). Stopped at traffic lights at a deserted junction, depression cloaking my mood, I observed an incredible sight. Literally hundreds of shrieking, hysterical, joyful punters burst through the doors of each of these bars; embracing each other, punching the air, profaning loudly. I noticed that not one of them was attired in a mackem top; those that wore colours (and it wasn’t many as we’re talking proper hard lad Shields here) were in black and white. Then the singing, to the tune of the Hokey Cokey began.

Getting off the road, I propped the bike up against The Oddfellows and watched the dying embers of the game. Despairing of discerning anything through breath frosted glass, I stepped indoors. On October 31^st 2010, again too fearful to attend or watch the game, I’d followed the demolition derby on my phone, finally deigning to enter licensed premises once we’d established a reasonable 5-0 lead. Back then, the first action I saw was Darren Bent scoring for them; this time I saw Mike Williamson spurning the chance to gain legendary status by stabbing a presentable chance wide as the game ended in a draw.

Suddenly, I was alone; the bar disgorged its entire clientele who were soon sparking up on the pavement outside. Exiting, I rescued a pushbike I’d expected to be nicotine stained and coughing, then began my task of finding out the real story behind the game on the modern sporting battleground; the internet. Preludial phone calls were made to Dublin and Vitoria-Gasteiz to see how the game had been viewed by those of a black and white persuasion in The Ha’Penny Bridge and Café Viena respectively. The story I was hearing was of a game that belonged to them for 40 minutes, but could and should have replicated last season’s 5-1 demolition, alongside crass mackem thuggery and an appalling lack of class on the pitch, which I subsequently learned from eyewitness accounts was replicated and redoubled by a seething, brutal band of brigands on the terraces, aboard public transport (predictably enough) and in the streets.

From all I’ve read and heard in the aftermath of this game, I can only conclude that in the near future, a Tyne Wear derby will be marked by the death of a fan. Undoubtedly this fan will be one of ours, perhaps a solitary teenager at a bus stop or a middle-aged family man looking for his car, but he’ll be a black and whiter who will fall under a flurry of boots and fists, or a single stab by a bladed up sewer rat. I don’t want to sound alarmist, but the fact is, the mackems hate Newcastle United with such fury they will kill one or more of us to demonstrate that fact. The victim who dies will join Bobby Robson and Gary Speed in the litany of sick songs that are spread on sunderland message boards in preparation for games against us.

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of not going to the game was that I could watch the re-run of it with dispassionate, disinterested eyes. Having done so, all I could conclude is that sunderland, both players and supporters, are completely out of control and that this mass, snarling hysteria is fed and nurtured by the highest echelons of the club.

Examine the conduct of both sets of fans; on Sunday, Shola Ameobi’s 90^th minute equaliser was met with joyous scenes in the ground as well as Nile Street in Shields. However, not one person encroached upon the field of play; compare this with the Mackem reactions to Gyan’s equaliser last season when Steve Harper was assaulted or in October 2008, when Kieran Richardson’s goal was greeted with a mass pitch invasion and Shay Given being assaulted. Admittedly Alan Pardew did go slightly over the top with his celebrations, but at least he had the grace to apologise; unlike O’Neill who didn’t have the grace to accept the traditional post match glass of wine, artlessly preferring to get straight on the coach back to his Wearside midden, presumably to concentrate on his fictional narrative for Tuesday’s BBC Radio Newcastle interview.

While there has been trouble in the past, in recent years Newcastle fans have travelled to Wearside, by Metro, train, bus or car and caused not a scrap of bother. On Sunday, the Mackems followed up their destruction of a train carriage en route to their cup replay in Smogland by trashing a Metro. This wasn’t a regular Metro, but a special one that went non-stop Park Lane to Central to allow them to get to the game. En route to the game, the windows of The Forth were put in; presumably in the belief that it is still 1983 and the NME were supping inside, rather than because it is an effete gastro pub, with a similarly effete post 92 clientele, even if the prix fixe menu is of an extraordinarily good standard.

In the ground several seats were smashed, two stewards were assaulted (a female punched in the face and a male pushed down a flight of stairs) and the toilets were wrecked, as well as having excrement smeared around them, presumably as some kind of Dirty Protest tribute to Niall Quinn, the Drumaville Pavees and their current manager, of whom more later.

However, such cretinous behaviour is perhaps to be expected as their club glorifies boorishness and encourages bellicose posturing. The famed free taxis home paid for by Niall Quinn for the sizeable number of their fans who were drunkenly out of control in Bristol airport in 2007, planted the seed in their minds that anti social behaviour will not only be tolerated by the club hierarchy, but rewarded.

The only reason Newcastle did not hand out another severe thrashing to the unwashed is that in the first half, Pardew’s team allowed themselves to be dragged down to the mackems’ level and engaged in a hideous kicking contest. The tone was set by Cattermole’s premeditated attack on Tiote after 40 seconds; having reputedly told Tiote in the tunnel that he’d “do” him, the man who wears the captain’s armband  for sunderland deliberately scythed down Tiote in an assault intended to injure the Ivorian. Cattermole ought to have walked then. I remember Gordon Armstrong doing the same thing on Paul Bracewell in April 1993’s game that was decided by Scott Sellars’s free kick. Back then, Keegan’s team laughed it off and got on with the business of winning; sadly this was not the outcome in this instance.

Newcastle’s disappointing adoption of strongarm tactics saw 4 rapid bookings, even if Simpson was rightly furious following McClean’s vile lunge on him. McClean is a nasty piece of work; precociously talented he may be, though those of us with long memories remember Kieran Brady’s supernova career. When the FA examine this incident in detail, having charged both teams with failing to control their players, I’d imagine McClean’s conduct will be rightly excoriated.

The predictable conclusion to this passage of ale house clogging by the Magpies was the nonsensical penalty conceded by Williamson for a tug on Turner, which was celebrated in a deliberately provocative way by Frazier Campbell, intended to enrage Newcastle fans and no doubt the cause of an imminent FA charge for incitement. Following this goal, a brief period of phoney war almost saw the Mackems go 2-0 ahead, but Krul made an excellent save from Bendtner and with that the Mackems retreated to their own 18 yard line for the remainder of the game. Despite being deservedly behind, the previously mentioned efforts from Ba and Coloccini could have seen Newcastle ahead at the break.

In the second period, especially after Sessegnon’s forearm smash on Tiote, who was himself booked for the only significant foul committed by a Newcastle player after the resumption, Newcastle were a joy to watch. Hatem Ben Arfa was Man of the Match by a street and showed exactly what Newcastle fans love to see; football artistry, poetry with the feet. We are the fans who idolise not only our number 9s, but the glorious ball players who’ve graced the Gallowgate turf; Beardsley, Tony Green, Len White, Bobby Mitchell, Hughie Gallagher, Colin Veitch and Pat Heard to name but a few. In contrast on Wearside, brutish, cowardly hatchet men like Joe Bolton, Charlie Hurley, John Kay, Kevin Ball and now Lee Cattermole are lauded.

Off the top of my head I can recall Gary Bennett, Howard Gayle, Paul Hardyman, Titus Bramble, Phil Bardsley, Sessegnon and Cattermole being dismissed from the field of play in derby games; not one of those names belongs to a Newcastle player. The meaning of that is self-evident; sunderland cannot control their players in these games. This season alone Bardsley was sent off for a stamp, Sessegnon for an elbow and Cattermole for an unprovoked foul-mouthed tirade against a referee who’d done his level best amidst the mayhem, even if he missed at least 3 other penalties we should have had.

Laughably Cattermole’s conduct was excused by O’Neill in a post match interview where, summoning up all the traditional Celtic paranoia from his stint in Glasgow , he felt there were “mitigating circumstances.” According to O’Neill, there had been a Newcastle United presence in the referee’s room at half time. John Carver at this point interjected and pointed out, in no uncertain terms, that O’Neill was a liar. Obviously as far as the unwashed goes, if a lie is put out in to the real world, especially if it appears on the internet (the real source of the bile, vitriol and invective that disfigures the game), it becomes a fact; perhaps being caught out was the reason why O’Neill flounced out of Tyneside, preferring instead to make a cowardly interview with local radio on the Tuesday, replete with lies and innuendo.

If you want to see real class and the conduct of perfect gentlemen, seek out the ESPN post-match interview with Shola and Demba Ba. Articulate, incisive, humble and intelligent; these men are a credit to our club and the polar opposite of the scowling, snarling, spitting vermin from down the road.

As a minimum, the FA need to charge sunderland with failing to control their players, while both Campbell and McClean, for his comments on Twitter, should be brought to book. However, this will not be enough; when a sunderland message board contains death threats against Pardew, things really need to stop. Back in 1996, the ban on away fans at derby games allowed for the formation of Wear Fans United to protest against the decision; 16 years on I can see no possible hope of a similar organisation being formed to calm the situation down. However, it has to be said this is not necessary on one side of the divide.

At Newcastle United, we fans police ourselves; we love the club and we respect our history and traditions. The same cannot be said of our local rivals; unless sunderland fans come to their senses and gain a sense of proportion about what is after all only a game of football, people will die on derby day. Those on Wearside must accept that this is where their conduct has them headed; they need a reality check before it is too late.

Remember, it really is only 22 blokes kicking a pig’s bladder around, or 21 blokes if sunderland are playing.