40 years, 400-odd goals

Per the previous post: someone who’s made the best of their allotted time to date is Gosforth's Alan Shearer, 40 today, and most likely treating himself to a few holes of golf somewhere nice. Hard to imagine a second career sat on a sofa with Alan Hansen will ever quicken his pulse in the same way as banging them in before that sea of black-and-white. Of course, one no longer stares at the NUFC fixture list with the nagging hope that Al could yet be persuaded to get his boots on... But still, Old Trafford, this coming Monday night... I certainly hope somebody in stripes has plans to step up...

Fenham Eusebio: Incredible Hulk?

Listening to this affable, decent, thoroughly professional, dishwater-dull post-match interview with NUFC’s top homegrown striker… whey, it could be wor Alan Shearer talking, back in his prime. But no, it’s Shola Ameobi, restored to the side after a frustrating break for injury, and back where he left off, scoring goals for fun in Division 2.
Is Shola about to get another shot at being a top-flight striker, a Toon #9 even? He seems to have held off the challenge of young Nile Ranger, very much a bench-warmer of late, sad to say; also that of Leon Best, who was bought as Shola-cover just as 'Marlene' Harewood was borrowed, and now seems to be struggling to get in the squad. Well, as Shola points out, there’s team spirit about NUFC these days, of a sort not seen since the Robson years. (When Souness was boss Shola was at times deployed on the left-wing, to little effect i.e. the occasional prolonged, gangling, aimless dribble.) The forging of a good team means competition for places, and exclusion. You need to earn your place, and in Shola, Carroll and Lovenkrands NUFC have had three proper notching strikers this season. Next season? Hmm. Even Wolves, as pundit Shearer pointed out recently, could score for fun when in the Fizzy Pop League…
A final Shola/Shearer point: it looks to me like Ameobi has used his convalescence to hit the weight-pile. His upper body has, to my eye, a newly rock-like aspect, reminiscent of how Shearer came back from his ankle break c.1998, shorter of pace but strategically self-reinvented as a serious tough nut. Some might say that with Carroll we have our bruising/eye-watering striker already in place, nee further applications, thanks. But aggression was a quality Shola always needed more of, and a bit more muscle will help with that.

Shearer-Berbatov: Football's Philosopher Kings

I always enjoy the experience of shifting my views about people and things, especially if the transformation is 180-degree: such changes of heart are what gives God hope for mankind. Initially I took something of a dislike to the Bulgarian Dimitar Berbatov as a footballing personality, perhaps in part because he's one of those guys who wears an alice-band in his hair on the pitch, but mainly because of his associations with Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United, two 'problematic' clubs; and the unsavoury, protracted, big-money saga of his transfer from one to t'other.
Anyhow, what did I know? I was blind, prejudiced - I just never knew Berbatov's hero and role model was Alan Shearer, not until the two sat down for this Football Focus interview, in which Berbatov's quiet-spoken admiration of Al is incredibly and touchingly direct: 'I was a Blackburn fan when you become champions... I was only a fan of Newcastle because you were playing there.' Good lad, that Dimitar.
Shearer compares Berbatov to his old teammate Matt Le Tissier, a hugely gifted player of questionable work-rate. I've always liked players who walk until they absolutely have to run, so long as the eventual running ends up yielding something splendid. (Consider, for one, Zinedine Zidane.) So, in this light, I now rather like Berbatov's style. But I like even better the flabbergasting way he chooses to express his commitment to the aesthetics of the game, namely by quoting Saint Augustine at Shearer: 'Unless there were beauty and grace in them, they would be powerless to win our hearts.' Truly I have never heard the like of it, not even from Eric Cantona... I don't think Al picked up the theological reference, but I hope he made note of it for the future.

Sir Bobby Robson 1933-2009: From Langley Park to St James's

‘I’m black and white’, said Bobby on the day he walked into the job at St James’s Park. And he said it in that doughty fashion that made clear, even in his mid-sixties, he was not to be treated as anyone’s affable grey-haired uncle. Fact is, the stature and esteem in the game that Robson bore with him from his services at Ipswich, Barcelona, Porto, PSV, and for the English national team, were more than Newcastle could have hoped for from a boss at that particular low ebb in fortunes.
He was born in Sacriston and raised in Langley Park, and County Durham, town by town, village by village, can go either way when it comes to football loyalties and the rivalry of the region. But there you have it: black and white was Bobby, proven thus by years of boyhood terrace allegiance. His dad was black and white, and so Bob got on the bus to St James’s, every Saturday.
I recall rather more hope that expectation when Bobby took charge, but obviously I should have known better. Robson’s five more or less full seasons at Newcastle were, on the whole, wonderful. Twice he put NUFC in the frame for the title, right at the sharp end of the race. He saved the club from relegation in 1999-2000, largely by getting Alan Shearer to stop playing with his back to goal. 2000-2001 was a big letdown (though we’d take it now) and, for all that he could buy, Robson bought poorly. But 2001-2002 was in many ways a glory season, thanks to his acquisitions of Craig Bellamy and Laurent Robert. Robson seemed rejuvenated that year, never more endearingly than when asked to comment on the somersaulting goal-celebrations of another of his smart purchases, Lomana Tresor Lua Lua. Quoth Bobby, ‘Yeah, he’s quite gymnastic. Very fantastic…’
Robson should never have been sacked by Newcastle, not even in August 2004, by which time the team he had built looked spent. Nevertheless, and without doubt IMHO, this was round about the time he was due a graceful retirement. In 2003-2004 I think we won about thirteen games in the course of sneaking a highly flattering fifth place on the last day. Craig Bellamy’s big mouth and execrable manners had become more conspicuous in NE1 than his (occasional) goals or assists, and as Robson told David Walsh of the Times, retrospectively but feelingly, ‘For how long do you put up with that sort of guy?’ Not too long when you’re pushing 70 and you’ve already been grievously ill, and there’s the considerable matter of your being a bloody cast-iron legend in the game. Robson had more than earned the right to spend his days in the company of a better class of person, i.e. free from the likes of Kieron Dyer and Lee Bowyer too.
Still, be it said, Robson’s Newcastle departure should have been a mutual matter, carefully negotiated, for the sake of strategy and continuity as well as dignity and just deserts. That it wasn’t tells you much of what you need to know about the rancid karma Newcastle United has stored up for itself in recent years and the payback they’ve rightly suffered.
As Alan Shearer is reported to have said of SBR this morning, ‘He was a great man, a winner and a battler...’ Many more tributes from greats of the game will surely follow.

NUFC: Incapacity = No Benefit

Ever since he took charge, and especially so as hope has dwindled, Alan Shearer has talked a first-rate game about what his team needed to do, indeed ought to do, to save themselves. And if only his starting XI could have performed in anything like the same spirit then Newcastle would have pulled themselves out of the hole they're in prior to today's final horror-show. Alas, it remains the case that Newcastle are one of the three worst teams in the top division over this season, and so deserve to go down however it plays out over 'Super Sunday'.
Bagging the extraordinary luck of a combination of results sufficient to squeak past Hull or Sunderland - both of whom beat NUFC on their own turf, and whom NUFC failed to beat at SJP - is in itself a fairly rancid karmic outcome, however avidly all Mags would seize upon it. But in any case NUFC go into this game without their two best, most consistent players, Beye and Bassong; with two strikers fettled and a third playing on one leg; and without a shred of pace or creativity in midfield. They go to 5th-placed Villa, a quality side, well-managed, keen to finish on a high. And you reckon NUFC are going to play their hearts out, defend like giants, nab one on the break and generally exhibit all the attributes missing ever since Keegan walked early last September? Gerraway, man. Sorrowfully I have to say I can't see how it's conceivable to imagine them doing anything of the sort.
So the crisis continues, rather than starting today, and only enormous structural remedies can begin to address it as of this summer. The ever-staunch NUFC.com have offered the following advice to fans as and when the axe has finally fallen this evening:
"Please do yourself and your club a favour and make sure the Sky cameras don't catch you snivelling into your scarf or blubbering into your best mate's shoulder. Show some dignity and don't bring this club into disrepute. We suggest you turn your back and make a hasty retreat for the exits. Once outside, walk straight past reporters and cameras in the streets and maintain your silence until you are well away from prying lenses."
Sounds like the sort of thing Shearer would say, if he accepted we were as far gone as everybody else believes. Not daft, though, our Alan. I trust he'll have his own dignified face prepared.
Howay the Lads! No shame in the Second Division, man, we've seen it all before, and the only way out of it is to play better.

"Saving a Relegated Newcastle" - Gabrielle Marcotti

"Would it really be such a tragedy for Newcastle fans if the club went down? I don't think so, not if you believe that the club can only go forward once Mike Ashley sells the club..."

Shearer, if you're planning on staying on then you might want to give this man Marcotti a job, or at least try to keep him close by and friendly, because he knows football and he seems, strangely, indeed miraculously, to care a bit about the fate of Newcastle United - enough to have written out and costed a careful plan for the management of the squad after relegation. I don't think I quibble with any of it, bar the absence of a mention for Ranger and LuaLua as striking options next season. Good man, Gabrielle. This in the Times too, where some toe-rag who's supposedly a 'multi-award-winning' sportswriter pens a semi-regular Saturday morning bit willing Newcastle to lose and so 'slither' further into the relegation maw...

Shearer: Work in Progress...?

I yield to no-one (well, one or two...) in my admiration for Alan Shearer, and so mates of mine were knocked back a bit on April Fool's Day of 2005 when I queried Al's decision to reverse his planned retirement and so play on another season for NUFC: this in the belief that the club was 'going places' under Graeme Souness and that he had a bit more to give to the effort. 'Were he a horse', I actually opined in one rash moment at the time, 'he'd have been shot by now'... As it happened, he shouldered on under Souness, suffering strangely-fated defeats in an FA Cup semi and a UEFA last eight. Then, with Owen crocked as usual for most of 2005-06, he often played as our main striker in his supposed twilight season, a much-dulled threat overall, though overhauling the Milburn scoring record and chipping in some vital goals to get what was now Glenn Roeder's team into an Intertoto-qualifying 7th place.

So, what does the jury make of Al's most recent hopeful/faithful punt on behalf of the Toon, made, like the last one, on All Fool's Day? It seems to me, as it did decisively about 6 weeks ago, that we're going down, and we deserve to, because we're largely rubbish and barely half of a proper team. Still, the Portsmouth draw, a massive but not unexpected anti-climax, immediately had fans yet more cynical than me getting out their calculators again and redefining what might be sufficient. Shearer declared that it might yet be 'a good point', which tells you everything about his current responsibility for dressing-room morale.

Morale, plus discipline and 'heart', are the things that he has surely brought into the set-up. The team's few good players - Beye, Bassong - have said as much. But the sheer headless awfulness of the first hour at Tottenham, and the hopeless nervy 'finishing' versus Pompey, are death-knell sounds to me. They look like a side who'd need to be doomed before they could start to play again. Defeat against Liverpool this Sunday will certainly take them to that very brink. If they won their last three, which might be the least they can do, then they could at least 'deserve' to stay up.

But really, see, I'm thinking now about Nile Ranger and Andy Carroll trying to score the team out of the second division. I'm one of those dreaming of a cleansing of the Augean stables, if the club doesn't go into administration first. Will Shearer be around for any of this?

Alan Shearer: Banzai!

Opposing fans rather than Mags got to me first with the great and terrible news of late Tuesday, so I'm still wiping the spit off my face, figuratively speaking. It's a good job Shearer has broad shoulders and a stern face in adversity, as he'll need to summon both these qualities as and when we're relegated. But, fair's fair, it will now officially be recorded in the Book of Time that whenever Newcastle called then Alan Shearer always answered. If I were him, I'd have had the missus say I was out creosoting the fence and couldn't come to the phone, like. But that's why he's the fella who scored about 500 goals in his career, and I'm the fella who stood by, usually intoxicated, and watched him score most of them... Good luck then, Al. Or should I say, 'Banzai!'?

Kevin Nolan is a Geordie; Craig Bellamy isn't.

Can it be 7 years ago tonight that I was sitting in White Hart Lane, ecstatic (for a change), as Bobby Robson's Toon turned it round and beat Spurs 3-1? Already it seems like a sepia-tinted bygone age... We could have been more than one behind at the break, but Bobby’s introduction of the tempestuous £9.5 million signing Laurent Robert 'changed the game.' Bellamy got us a free kick, Robert crossed, Clarence Acuña nodded in the leveller. Then Bellamy hared down the left and laid it across the box for a newly-interested Shearer to slam home. (At this point, having sat politely among home fans for 70 minutes, I got off my backside and bloody well cheered.) And then Bellamy helped himself to a third with ten minutes left.
That was the team that brought Champions League football back to Tyneside after the previous season (2000-2001) had been as mediocre as any NUFC had managed in the so-called Premier League. 2008-2009, however, has been much, much worse, and relegation rather than Europe is the matter at hand today.
Wednesday's unsurprising defeat at Man City was rubbed home with Bellamy’s second goal in successive games against us for different clubs. He must have an issue... Bellamy was and is a canny player, but a mean little piece of work, and any lad who referred to himself in the third person before he'd won anything in the game was never going to be content at Newcastle while Alan Shearer was there too. Actually, back in 2001-02 a significant body of Toon fans were just as endeared to little no-necked Craig as they were to the increasingly immobile Shearer. But where Shearer’s commitment to the cause was endlessly tested and found to be staunch, Bellamy ended his Toon career feigning injuries so as not to play, and making risible defences of his conduct directly to Sky cameras. End of story.
Generally the City game was a dreadful night. Injuries to Owen and Barton, 6-8 weeks out for the former, 10 for the latter. It wouldn’t matter so bad if we didn’t already have Beye and Martins on the sickbed, the most vital of our many current casualties. If Shay Given is now off to City then good luck to him and no hard feelings but it’s a strange old mob he’ll be joining. At least we have Steve Harper in nets now, and he’s from Easington, y’knaa.
The flighty Charles N'Zogbia looks to be off somewhere too, or one hopes. ‘Having been insulted by Joe Kinnear,' said high-minded CNZ, 'I will never play for him again while he remains Newcastle manager.’ (Kinnear called him ‘Insomnia’ in an interview, you see.) I’d like to think JFK was being sardonic but his way with words is, well, a not-good way. (‘You can see why a lot of big names out there didn't have the a*sehole to take this job’, Kinnear remarked elsewhere this week.) Well, any road, au revoir N’Zogbia. Happily the staunch Micky Quinn has said all that needs saying of Charlie: 'He’s got the heart the size of a peanut and no respect for anybody, including the fans.'
Today I hear we’ve bagged the Scouse Bolton midfielder Kevin Nolan for £4m. Good signing, good grafter. He’s said the right thing already: ‘I can't wait to play in front of these fans every week.’ Ryan Taylor, the Wigan fullback whose name I’ve taken in vain all four times that he’s scored against us, might yet follow Nolan. It would be nice if he could make it in time for this weekend’s 141st Tyne-Wear Derby, a game that, if it goes the wrong way and other results follow suit, could plunge us into drop-zone damnation from which we’d struggle to recover, in terms of morale alone.

Get Shearer, or, The Medals of his Defeats

I know a fair few Newcastle United fans, and I reckon they’re all pretty smart and astute and ironic about the football club and the game of football in general. Indeed some of them write on these very themes with great acuity, as at the excellent nufc.com. None of them have ever entertained any daft delusional ideas about Alan Shearer as some sort of Geordie messiah. Rather, there has been a general admiration tinged with scepticism.
Geordies are canny, they don’t suffer fools and they can sniff a wind-up. (In fairness, the very Geordie Shearer is made of the same stuff.) So any idea that the self-professed sheet-metal worker’s son from Gosforth was a flawless/selfless professional and immaculate team-player/leader who walked on Tyne waters and will one day come walking back to lead NUFC to the Promised Land… Get away, man. Never heard the like of it, other than on those Sky Sports vox-pop packages where the reporters bribe kids on the Barrack Road to say what they need for their preordained story. All this nonsense arises again over the reports stirred up by a dozy Joe Kinnear that a post-Ashley NUFC has Keegan and Shearer ‘parked round the corner.’ No-one in NE1 is losing any sleep over this fantasy.
All this said, it’s important to stress that Alan Shearer was an effing magic footballer. There’s not a football team the world over who wouldn’t be proud of a local-born striker who identified himself so strongly (and, in the main, unaffectedly) with the area, and also scored 200+ goals for the side in 10 seasons. So-called football experts make themselves ridiculous when they try to Get Tough with Shearer’s record, on which he always tersely asserted that he would be judged. Take the utterly third-rate Rob Smyth of the Guardian who last week attempted a critique of Shearer’s career stats so dripping with snide ill will and so foolishly argued as to constitute its own rebuttal.
The various Get Shearer factions are a funny old bunch. Man United fans are generally excused from this as their bragging rights are so strong, all the way from the ‘Let’s all laugh at Shearer’ chants struck up at the 1996 Charity Shield when Man U diddled the newly Shearer-enhanced Toon 4-0. That’s the main anti-Shearer plank: that his medals were largely born of defeats. True, other than his Blackburn league win Shearer’s career ‘victories’ were mainly pyrrhic. But Alex Ferguson knows football better than anyone in these isles, and his admiration of Shearer was avid and unfeigned if unreciprocated (twice), so Man U fans just have to swallow that little truth.
The other main hate-rap on Shearer was that, after his ankle injury of 1997 that robbed him of his pace, he became a bit of a lazy bully on the pitch. I have stood or sat in many an away ground and listened to fans delighting themselves with mucus-filled chants of ‘F@?k off Sheera yew c**t.' I have mingled with fans of the national side who thought Shearer as England captain and #9 was ‘a f@?king arrogant disgrace.’ Shearer himself tended to thrive on this stuff – not that he always got the last laugh, no sir. But I think the animosity he attracted is part of what made him special. He just really got up the noses of rival teams and their fans, and people generally don’t like it up them. And the main way he did that was by being a classic big English #9 - big shoulders, big shooting boots, same old Shearer, always scoring.
Management, by comparison, is a thankless task and requires a different skill-set, so for me as for thousands of Newcastle fans, I’d be perfectly happy if Shearer remained himself a Newcastle fan and kept smartly clear of the NUFC dugout.