Graeme Souness: buzzer, cruncher, spreader

‘We called him Sowness when he was at Middlesbrough.’ This, if I’m remembering right, was Bob Mortimer’s memory of how Graeme Souness was welcomed when he joined Jack Charlton’s team as a player on Teesside; and I think it’s true, because my granny in County Durham called him that and all - even when Souness was at Liverpool, skipper and top 'Jock' who could no longer be imagined to hail from anywhere other than Scotland.

You would tend to want to get his name right in person, I'd guess. There was a flair to how Souness carried himself on and off the park, but at Middlesbrough he acquired his principal reputation, for a flint-like toughness. What a player he was, though. ‘Most midfields are made up of a buzzer, a cruncher and a spreader’, Bob Paisley once observed. ‘[Souness] is all three.’ The crunching is what we recall most feelingly, maybe. But the ‘spreading’ was the flashiest element: Souness had a rare gift for abrupt switches of play from left to right through pinpoint flighted passes. He also rifled in some brilliant goals.

Souness is widely felt to have impaired his footballing reputation through management, even though he won a fair few trophies with various clubs. He alienated the Liverpool support by talking to the Sun after Hillsborough, though in 2011, however late it was, he made a pained and dignified apology. By the time he finished as a boss at Newcastle in 2006, though, it was clear that Souness felt the game had gone to the dogs, full of players to whom he wouldn’t have given the time of day when he was playing. But the modern manager simply has to finesse such matters, and Souness is maybe an arch example of a player who was too formidable an ex-pro to sit easily in the dugout.

Souness has just published a new memoir and I must say I enjoyed his previous ones. In an interview-feature with Souness for the Glasgow Herald, Teddy Jamieson does a good job of getting lines out of the great man and is kind enough to quote me appositely from Keegan and Dalglish.

Keegan, Dalglish, and all the money in football

Most interested to read this piece by top commentator Chris Deerin for the new-start website Unherd, in which his account of the what-we-might-conceivably-call 'financialisation' of football becomes almost dizzying to people of my vintage who grew up with such a different game (albeit one in which Kevin Keegan seized on all of the limited opportunities then available for players to put money in their purses - see the illustration to your right, one of many lovingly curated at the witty nostalgia website Who Ate All the Pies?)

I'm reminded that when Newcastle United FC floated on the Stock Exchange back in 1997 its share-flogging brochure cited the club's primary activity as (I paraphrase) 'selling the rights to watch football matches.' As long as the customers are there - wherever they are, i.e. whether or not in such numbers through the turnstiles as once was - the money is liable to remain as bizarre as it is.

Such vertiginous sensations about the sums sluicing through the sport were, of course, a point of departure for my Keegan and Dalglish, which is kindly cited halfway down the Deerin piece:

Kevin Keegan: superstar, and "emotional lad"

We’ve just seen another ‘Charity Shield’ go by, the current league champions and FA Cup holders playing out a big curtain-raiser for the new football season. 43 years ago today this match threw up one of its most incendiary stagings.

The man who struck the spark was Kevin Keegan: the superstar of 1970s English football, the game’s first millionaire and multi-media celebrity, twice winner of the Ballon d’Or and one of precious few British footballers who made a success of a career overseas, winning the Bundesliga with Hamburg in 1979. That was Keegan’s last winner’s medal in the game, though; and his huge achievements were, over time, to be weirdly eclipsed by incidents arising from his determined, passionate temperament – the same one that had driven him to singular success.

On August 10 1974 champions Liverpool were led out by their recently retired manager Bill Shankly, a show of respect to the great man. Striding along beside them were cup holders Leeds, behind their new boss Brian Clough, who had already been typically outspoken in his disparaging view of the Leeds brand of football. It soon became apparent that the Leeds players hadn’t cared for that: having been stigmatised thus, they were about to make a great show of holding up their bloody stigmata.

Kevin Keegan’s views, expressed in his 1977 memoir, were even more radical than Clough’s: ‘I hated Leeds and everything they stood for.’ From the moment the Charity Shield game kicked off, Revie’s team seemed to fancy a scrap. Soon the game became one big niggle. As Johnny Giles would tell the Guardian with relish, ‘Keegan was quite an emotional lad and he was in one of his moods that day.’ Giles and Billy Bremner were happy to buddy up for a sort of tag-team toughness: together they helped to make Keegan’s afternoon a misery, and Keegan felt he was getting no help from the ref.

Around the hour mark, incensed, Keegan pursued a loose ball and went through Bremner, then hared after Giles, who felled him with a right-hook. From the resulting free- kick the ball went up into the Liverpool half, but Keegan went after Bremner. ‘I have Irish blood in me,’ he would write, ‘and sometimes my temper rips.’ He and Bremner exchanged blows in front of the ref, and though Keegan protested when they were pulled up together he surely knew he was for the early bath. He stripped off his shirt and flung it away. Bremner copied him, though he might have thought twice about showing his pale gut alongside Keegan’s ripped and muscular torso. Joe Keegan was in the Liverpool changing room to console his son, and when Bremner entered to make an apology Keegan’s dad told him to bugger off.

Keegan would be made an example of – fined and banned for 11 games. In the aftermath of the game he chose to drown his sorrows in beer then awoke blearily to the unwelcome news that he was required to play in a testimonial for Celtic’s Billy MacNeill on Monday night and had to get himself up to Glasgow. On the other side that night was Kenny Dalglish, Scotland’s finest player, whose path had crossed with Keegan’s before and would do so again.

Keegan ran into Leeds United again, famously, in 1996. He was now managing Newcastle United, they were bidding for the league title but had let a 12-point lead over Manchester United dwindle to nothing and were now having to chase.  Man Utd made hard work of beating a Leeds side reduced to 10 men, after which Alex Ferguson resorted to his familiar psychological tricks, suggesting that Leeds had tried extra hard against his team but would likely roll over when they next met Newcastle.

Keegan’s team eked out a win over Leeds: they were three points behind Man Utd, two games left apiece. Sky was covering every game in the run-in and it was a tolerably satisfied Keegan who left the Newcastle changing room to do his duty before Sky cameras over a relay to studio presenters Richard Keys and Andy Gray. Keegan set forth cheerily enough. But soon there was a reference to ‘slanderous’ remarks by Ferguson – and Keegan was not having this marked down to banter.

He spilled his vessels live on TV, louder than he had intended on account of wearing heavy headphones for studio relay, jabbing a finger for unneeded emphasis: ‘I’'ve kept really quiet, but I’'ll tell you something – he went down in my estimation when he said that…... I’ll tell you, you can tell him now if you’re watching it, we’re still fighting for this title, and he’s got to go to Middlesbrough and get something, and… and… I’ll tell you, honestly, I will love it if we beat them. Love it.’‘'

It was quite a show. McDermott, having watched the broadcast in some incredulity, reached Keegan on the phone. ‘Ah, sod him,’ said Keegan, still seething with regard to his nemesis at Old Trafford.

Keegan could not have envisaged the extent to which his public image, into which he had put so much graft and applied so much polish, would come to be defined by that flailing and profitless outburst against Ferguson. No golden goals for Liverpool or England or Hamburg, no pop records or Brut TV ads or BBC Superstars heroics would be recalled with such relish in the coming internet age as ‘I will love it if we beat them.’. And yet, for seasoned Keegan-watchers it was nothing so unusual: the resurgence of the heart-on-his-sleeve ‘emotional lad’, as observed so vindictively by Johnny Giles. Reputation-wise it’s a poor return for what Keegan has done in – done for – the game. He was always his own man, and there has been no one quite like him within football or without.

(For a more multi-stranded version of this argument, I refer you to my Keegan and Dalglish, published today.)

Keegan & Dalglish: together again, tomorrow...

From the Introduction to my new book, available from tomorrow:

Across 50 years the careers of Keegan and Dalglish have shadowed and mirrored one another, both for good and for ill. Now in their mid- sixties, they are elder statesmen – resemblances to their shaggy- haired Panini portraits of the 1970s long faded. Keegan now wears a trim crown of grey and a perpetually rueful mien, while Dalglish has grown a face of quintessential Glaswegian cragginess.

They are two highly talented, quietly complex men from equally unglamorous backgrounds, born in the same year, who ascended to superstardom almost in tandem. Their playing styles were notably different, as thumbnailed cannily by Dalglish: ‘He ran onto flicks, while I went about my work slightly deeper.’ But though as players (and again as managers) they were on opposing sides, they served the same clubs at different times and seemed not ‘rivals’ so much as exemplary figures in the game, capable of inspiring youngsters and fans not just by heroic feats on the pitch but by rigour and dedication on and off it. 

Keegan and Dalglish were football royalty, sporting kings – as intensely revered as any players these isles have produced. And yet, having made their names and reputations in the 1970s and 1980s, they would become recognisable to the next generation as top managers – albeit more fretful, troubled figures, given to big gestures and stunning departures. Both men acquired airs of enigma, as a consequence of strong- willed decisions made in private then dropped onto the heads of a startled public.

What had kept them both in football so long? The love of a club, and a principled, even romantic vision of how the game ought to be played? That’s what some hardcore supporters believe, and there’s evidence in their favour. But the desire to remain a big player on a big stage, the interest in a big paycheque, the resumption of old rivalries and unfinished business – these things, too, may have had their pull, serving to draw both Keegan and Dalglish into a Faustian pact...

NUFC: Demba Ba is a Geordie

As you's know, it’s mainly Twitter for me these days; and there the other week I was joshing with some Newcastle fan whom I’ve never met about whether we would take Andy Carroll back, in the event that Liverpool thrust him in our direction, nose and eyes averted toward high heaven... Just banter, as I say, because despite big Andy missing something of a sitter the week before he was said to link up well with Suarez in a win at the weekend. In any case, I expect the much-rumoured ‘psychological flaws’/’refuelling problems’ of the young Bensham Beast would now pose a really unsettling problem for the newly world-famous Team Spirit and United Dressing Room of Alan Pardew’s NUFC.
We are 3rd tonight, and some might say we are walking in a Demba wonderland. It’s an outstanding effort from this squad in every department, and respect is due to the manager whom some of us used to pretend was called Curbishley. Moreover these results and this placing are a useful if temporary two fingers up at free-spending bigger clubs, some of whose fans, despite their mob being several points/places behind Newcastle, are still making free with the patronising remarks online about how they’d gladly consider giving Coloccini a run in their side.
I don’t know one Newcastle fan who thinks European qualification is achievable – not unless Mike Ashley gets so drunk on New Year’s Eve that he goes out and buys half-a-dozen high-waged hot-shots with his own money. Even the much-vaunted Sky/Talksport ‘Battle for Fourth’ is hard to get excited about, since to be involved in that is only to waste a lot of quality time having to think about Spurs and Liverpool. And looking up is an impossibility, first among many reasons being quite simply that right now it looks like Man City have bought the title; and bought it in a way that makes what Jack Walker did at Blackburn with Kenny Dalglish seem hardly more substantive than what John Henry et al are now doing at Liverpool with... oh aye, Miserable Kenny. What should be the ambition be, then? To edge 'The Battle for Eighth'? To be 'North East Top Dogs'? It’s all down to the players, isn't it? God knows what they’re on right now, but I’ll have a shot of it whenever you’re ready.
Anyway, past half-way to safety... and the pleasures of this Newcastle run are in the attractive, smart, committed football that the side are playing, and also in points won that, given the low expectations back in August, almost have the sweet feeling of being stolen - or should I say twocked?

Sylvain Marveaux is a Geordie. As is Demba Ba.

In a fortnight NUFC return to action, as they say, with the first pre-season outing at Darlington Arena, followed by a US tour and games against Sporting Kansas City, Orlando City and Columbus Crew. How's the recruitment plan looking then? Alan Curbishley, sorry, Pardew has said "I am really pleased with the way the squad is taking shape." But Al, shouldn't that be more like "Je suis vraiment heureux avec la façon dont l'équipe prend forme."? Because aside from those long-term crocked lads who "will feel like new signings" (and actually this does go for one of them too) we seem to be entirely in the business of adding Frenchmen or French-speakers to the ranks.
No, since you ask, I'm not over L'Affaire Carroll yet. True Faith speaks for me:

"I’d foolishly allowed myself to imagine myself sitting in my SJP pew watching the Bensham Van Basten develop over the next ten years into a bona fide No.9 legend, smashing goals in, leading the line and providing the essential link between team and the terraces he also supported the club from... But the fact is Andy Carroll is not at Newcastle United but £35m of Liverpool’s money is... I didn’t imagine that the big answer to Carroll’s departure would be Demba Ba, on a free with a dodgy knee... and us having had the bum’s rush from No.1 and No.2 targets Gameiro and Gervinho."

NUFC: Limping to the line

Gettin’ beat 3-0 off Liverpool is a wearyingly familiar experience, as indeed is getting beat 2-0 off Liverpool. Nine years ago one such 3-0 finally robbed the wheels off what had been our very real push to the top-division title under Bobby Robson - wistful to think back on it now, but in that season of 2001-02, with 11 games to play, the title was mathematically in our hands. Seems like dreamland tonight...
Today’s special discomforts: for one it was our owld manager King Kenny in the Liverpool dugout, looking like he’s really enjoying his football, as he never once appeared during his tenure at NUFC (at least not after the day of his coronation and mandatory mobbing by adoring Geordies.) And for two, owld King Kenny reckoned it would be canny just to bring on Andy Carroll for a 20-minute run-out even with the match won. You could have spared us that one, Ken, let it ride for another day... It’s only amazing that Carroll didn’t score, since NUFC alumni nearly always score crucial goals against us, as do the non-Toon-related glamour signings of other clubs, especially when they’ve otherwise been having a lean spell (so back Fernando Torres for a brace at least when we face Chelsea on May 15.)
The corollary to this gloom is that Newcastle rarely ever get to enjoy a reciprocal pleasure in ‘putting one over.’ I remember the hype and the chatter back in 2005 as Michael Owen prepared to face Liverpool for the first time in a black-and-white shirt. What happened that day? That’s right, we’s got beat 2-0, and Owen had the sort of disconsolate just-in-it-for-the-money-pal day that was his stock-in-trade at Newcastle.
The excellent True Faith seemed to me to get it right with this Carroll comment piece before the game. The sad - indeed pathetic - thing is that I dreamed I met Carroll last night – honest – in a crowd amid some kind of post-training canteen chat situation; and he seemed a very nice lad, and told me casually that he reckoned he’d probably be re-signing for Newcastle eventually, after the whole Liverpool thing had gone off the boil... So, alas, I clearly can’t say I’m over this thing yet. Worse, a Liverpool fan of my acquaintance, a good lad generally speaking, seems to have no conception of the pain he causes when he tells me cheerily how much he’s looking forward to having Jose Enrique on the left of defence next season.
In other Toon news the mighty nufc.com kindly transcribes some comments from Kevin Keegan uttered in his capacity as ESPN pundit – another warning that Carroll’s transfer fee will not be spent on new players, and this about our erstwhile #9:

"He (Carroll) was on the fringe when I was there. He was raw. This kid is the best header of the ball I’ve ever seen. That’s his biggest plus point for me... His minus points have always been there. Can he get his head down? Can someone make him realise that all he has to do is train hard, work hard and be a good pro for 10 years and he’ll be a very rich boy? He needs to get rid of the other stuff...”

Ah yes, the other stuff. ‘Very nice lad’? In your dreams, as they say...

True Faith: Inside Mike Ashley's Mind...

I simply have to quote the following from the latest editorial at the staunch and pawky True Faith site:
"I’ve often wondered what Ashley gets from owning Newcastle United. Quite apart from why he bought the bloody thing in the first place. I don’t believe he makes money from United, he has hardly gilded his business reputation and if it’s a 50,000 new mates he was after when he walked into SJP in May 2007, then he has been sorely disappointed. Ashley has at rough estimate £900m+ available to him. If he never struck another bat in his life he would never want for anything and neither would his grandchildren or their grandchildren. I think I could think of a few things I’d rather be doing with my weekends than sitting in the best seat in a football stadium at the other end of the country on match day watching a team I aspire to be average go through the motions, surrounded by thousands of people who would love to see me fall down the steps and burst my face open..."

NUFC: Bugger-All Money

How are things in black and white then? 36 points on the board as February ends, right enough – a decent place to be. Personally I would want 43 for safekeeping, remembering what happened not so long ago to West Ham... But the main point is that this Newcastle team have shown plenty spirit in adversity. It’s not been a bad season yet, on balance, and that is quite something, given the sum of what’s been inflicted on supporters, again as before and always, by its repulsive present ownership.
Andy Carroll is gone and I must live with that, as must all black-and-white-eyed supporters, including those who actually believe that a shred of the £35 million we got for Carroll will be re-invested in the team. For the prosecution, though, I call Kevin Keegan, who talked to Gabby Logan at the BBC for a spot transmitted tonight and who cited his own thoughts when recently he heard Alan Pardew telling the press about his hopes for what he’d do with the Carroll money: “Alan – you ain’t gonna get any of that...”

L'Affaire 'Andy' Carroll...

... et les cons 'Gros Mike' Ashley et 'Degsy Llambias'... Eh bien, plus ca change... mais l'homme le plus sage est M. Keegan...
The 'disco' in the clip below, BTW, is at 02:15: 'Mike Ashley doesn't know anything about football... Derek Llambias knows even less.' But to be fair, Mike knows a lot about fizzy lager and can sell you a cheap pair of elasticated shorts, while Degsy is just the man for you if you happen to own a casino and are seeking some insufferable little big-mouth to run it.

NUFC: Loveless Marriage, Divorce Too Expensive

Admirable professionalism from the Newcastle United team this weekend, carefully worded responses to media from Captain Nolan, and exactly the right response from the fans at the game – all the way to the final whistle and the segueing effortlessly from cheers for a top performance/three points to renewed jeers for that minty pair of toe-rags still squatting in the board-room of this club. The Match of the Day cameras kept looking for Ashley’s pie-eater grins, but the microphones must have been pointing the wrong way, i.e. not at the Leazes End. Memo to Ashley & Llambias: we wish most earnestly and urgently that you could live your dream, get shot of us and go catch your effing taxi. Yet you persist (like morons, really) in going quite the wrong way about making NUFC appear an attractive saleable entity. Thankfully there are some footballers at this club, many of them improved immeasurably under the management of Chris Hughton, and yesterday it was clear they were still playing for him. Moreover we were lucky it was Liverpool visiting: a club clearly in an awful lot of bother. Had it been Blackpool or Blackburn or Wigan, strangely enough, I expect we’d have lost. The next four games are looking tough, though, with Spurs and Citeh in the middle of the sandwich. Over to you then, Alan Pardew. Or ‘Sort it out, Curbishley’, as I believe some comic genius sat near the NUFC dug-out addressed the new ‘gaffer’ on Saturday...

#9: The number of the Beast

Is it only 18 months since I sat there most weekends worrying whether Andy Carroll had adequate goals and technique in him for the 'top flight', rather being just another of those Academy nearly boys...? It's the Rooney/Walcott syndrome, 'they need to show they've got it before their 18th birthday' etc. Well, as of today the Bensham Battering Ram looks set for a first England cap. Not that I care, indeed I'd rather he kept clear of all that muck, but then there are distinguished precedents for the national team being spearheaded by pure Geordie instinct for goal... As long as Big Andy comes back from his little holidays safe and well and ready to do it all again for NUFC...

Mind you, Carroll does give the air of being impregnable as well as often unplayable. 'He's a beast', said a West Ham mate of mine during the Boleyn game of a fortnight back - said so not quite admiringly neither. And Carroll's off-the-pitch manners are a big matter for concern, no question. But as Arsene Wenger put it in his programme notes on Sunday, 'Andy Carroll has stature, charisma and quality...' Over 90 minutes on the park, in other words, he is exactly What The Boys Want.

Photograph: Stephen Pond/EMmpics Sport

My beef with Andy Carroll

Jason Mellor writes amusingly for the Independent on the court-decreed arrangement whereby Andy Carroll must currently lodge with his club captain Kevin Nolan, under strict curfew. (The PA picture shows them together at the Old Firm match the other weekend - Nolan presumably cheering for the Hoops, I wonder what side Carroll was on?) Nolan comes over as a decent fellow: his kids are around the same ages as mine, and I identify with his description of the domestic regimen. Obviously I'm not paid seven figures to pull on a black and white shirt, nor do I own an X-Box, but other than that I'm encouraged to think me and the skipper might get along. The towering issue on which we agree is Carroll's barnet: "I keep telling him his hair is absolutely shocking. I've been trying to get him to cut it for ages..." But, tell you what, if the lad can do the business in today's not-insignificant 1.30pm kick-off then I promise to quit my carping for good.

NUFC: Half-Term Report 2010-2011

1. Seven points from seven... Would one have taken that back in mid-August? I suppose so, expecting wins over Stoke and Blackpool, a point at either Wolves or Everton, losses at Trafford and Eastlands and - pessimistic, like - home to Villa... So my radar’s about 50% askew.

2. Call the Blackpool result an off-day when none out of many chances got converted. But it was 2-2 with Stoke at SJP in 2008 when I knew we were going down. So one has to hope this season’s 1-2 will prove no more disastrous (i.e. merely depressing) than the 1-2 home losses to Sunderland in the reassuringly mediocre lower-than-midtable seasons of 1999-2000 and 2000-2001.

3. There we were thinking we had another French bobby-dazzler, younger and possibly with a better attitude than the last few, in Hatem Ben Arfa; and then that despicable Dutch Nigel from Millionaire’s Row near Moss Side goes and breaks the lad’s bliddy leg... My slightly one-eyed regard for the Orange, which even survived that last thuggish World Cup, has gone in the dustbin of history.

4. The Steve Harper injury had a cruelty to it and all. Tim Krul has been in our hearts ever since his UEFA Cup heroics of four years ago, but he’s being tested now, questions about his positioning here and there, though of course he’s not playing behind Cannavaro.

5. We’ve had some dastardly refereeing, and they’d better start giving us at least a few throw-ins, just to level it all out, y'knaa.

6. Andy Carroll - signed to 2015. He only wants to play for NUFC. May you stop at the top, bonny lad, by banging in enough savers for us this season.

(Illustration is the front cover of the latest issue of the mighty True Faith)