http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/spo...cle4838156.eceIT WAS a mild surprise that when he was eventually released from the police station last week, the dishevelled and deeply apologetic George Michael didn’t announce he had accepted the post of manager of Newcastle United. Hell, the Toon could do worse - and at least the crack cocaine would be handy.
George may know nothing about football - but he is at least used to continual public humiliation and the perpetual requirement to say: “Things are going to be much better from now on, believe me.” Instead of the singer, though, the delightful chairman Mike Ashley decided the post of manager of his club would be best served by someone with a heart condition. Are we joking here? No, we’re Joe Kinnear.
Even before the rest of the country had stopped rolling about the floor, Joe had added another layer of confusion to the fabulous study in chaos theory that is Newcastle United. He would be there until the end of October, he said, at which point Kevin Keegan and Alan Shearer would take over, a dream ticket. Who told him this? Ashley? Lewis Carroll? Is there anyone in Newcastle stupid enough to think that Keegan - having baulked at working beneath Dennis Wise - would come back to cede 50% of his power to the likes of Alan Shearer? And had anyone asked Shearer? It seems not - he responded by saying that he was “in the dark” about such a plan and that he “would have to be mad” to go to St James’ Park.
Meanwhile, there’s the “Nigerian consortium” one assumes Ashley heard about via an email out of Lagos that promised someone’s uncle had just won five hundred grand on the lottery and would Mike be interested in having some. Or perhaps it’s all fine and dandy and Newcastle will soon be playing exhibition matches in downtown Abuja. You would not bet against it. With Newcastle, you would not put your money on anything, other than the certainty of them winning nothing whatsoever for the 40th season in succession.
The irony is that Newcastle United may at last have found a manager suited to both the club and its predicament. That nobody else would touch the job with a barge pole should not detract from the suitability of Kinnear’s appointment. A substantial proportion of the blame for the running Geordie joke is their own Geordie supporters, for whom no manager is remotely good enough. That’s why Kinnear has been given the job only until the end of October, so that the new board can be given a chance to deliver someone befitting Newcastle’s status as the “biggest football club in the world” - Barack Obama, maybe (who will most likely be out of work by then in any case), or the disinterred corpse of Jackie Milburn.
So, with great hoo-ha, the Newcastle board continually try and placate their meat-headed supporters with a succession of expensively acquired big names for whom the weight of great expectations simply proves too heavy. There is a good case for saying that Newcastle’s most successful manager in recent years was the unassuming Glenn Roeder - but he wasn’t “big” enough, was he? So once he’d done the dirty work of rescuing them from what seemed almost certain relegation, he was given the push. I remember the howls of outrage from Geordieland when I suggested Roeder would not be long at St James’ Park: two months later, he was out. Big names brought in - Dalglish, Gullit, poor Sam Allardyce (who thought one could ever say that); none of them, not even Sir Bobby Robson, quite matched up to the image Newcastle United’s supporters have of their club, a magnificent delusion shared by nobody else on earth. Only Keegan or Shearer will really do - although there is little evidence that either of these men, fine though they may be, would be any better than those who have preceded them.
Kinnear’s record, incidentally, is pretty good. He excelled at small clubs - Wimbledon and Luton Town - who do not think too highly of themselves, and he did even better, you might argue, at Nottingham Forest, where the fans still hanker after an earlier, glorious era (although without quite the same barking psychosis that afflicts the majority of the Gallowgate). He is renowned as a motivator of players, which is precisely what Newcastle need right now, the players having been left demoralised and confused. None of them seem particularly happy to have Joe arrive, but then you might argue that they have an inflated sense of their own worth, too. And if Newcastle wish to persist with the ham-fisted “continental” approach of having a coach to whip the team into shape while a small gimlet-eyed goblin is charged with the task of bringing in untried and unheard-of players, then motivation is about all that is required of Kinnear.
If Newcastle United had even the slenderest vestiges of humility or the proper realisation of their predicament, Kinnear would have been given the job on an indefinite basis. But of course they do not and the circus will therefore continue, giving enormous entertainment to everyone south of Chester-le-Street
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