Newcastle United will never be a decent football club until they appoint Alan Shearer as manager. Admittedly, Shearer won’t be any good. Certainly, he will take them into worse trouble than they are in already. But until Newcastle have gone through the Shearer experience, they won’t be able to do anything.

The reason that Sam Allardyce has been having such a difficult time as manager at St James’ Park is not that the job is beyond his abilities. It is because the job is beyond anybody’s abilities. Nobody who takes it on can live with Shearer’s record.

Shearer’s record is perfect. He has never lost a match as a manager. True, he has never contested one. But he scored a lot of goals as a player, speaks the language, is a jolly good chap, and who needs experience anyway? Everything will be all right as soon as he is given the job. Or to be more accurate, nothing will be right until he has tried and failed, because his existence makes the job untenable for everyone else.

Newcastle are living in the future rather than the past and that is an even more debilitating way to live. It involves a belief that everything will be all right some day soon, which means that we don’t have to bother with the problems we have now. Soon they will magically disappear. It is like expecting a legacy, or the Lone Ranger.

Newcastle have become football’s Bleak House: a club forever wishing their life away in the belief that a favourable judgment will somehow reverse everybody’s fortune and make everything worthwhile. This is a club that pride themselves on a great past and look forward to a golden future. Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today. They are dying of messiahitis.

When football is turned into watery farce

As the African Cup of Nations looms, many people in English football are wondering why they insist on playing it in the middle of the Premier League season, thus affecting the leading clubs. One of the reasons is because in January you can be more or less sure of escaping the rains. This is not an argument that sits well with everyone. “It rains in Europe as well, doesn’t it?” Avram Grant, the Chelsea first-team coach, asked.

Well, try playing football in a tropical downpour. I have. It was great, actually. I was playing for mighty Gwai-loong in Hong Kong and neither side wanted to be seen giving up. It would be something we Englishmen call losing face. And so the match became a glorious absurdity.

It was a tiny pitch, yet from my goal I could scarcely see the one at the other end. Long before the finish, three separate streams had established themselves across the pitch and they flowed like white-water canoe courses. The rain affected every pass, every attempted bit of control. It was farce, football for clowns. And, since it was not a test of skill, I think it might have been one we won. The score was 17-16 or something.

Never mind the neocolonial attitudes that are sweeping the Premier League — football is not contestable in these conditions. Marvellous bloody fun, but that match was not a lot like football.

Let he who has never sledged complain about others sledging

A pity that a great Test match had to end in a row about sledging. Australia v India is beginning to replace the Ashes as the game’s biggest contest but it is fair to point out that neither side is adept at taking setbacks philosophically.

The Australians are saying that Andrew Symonds was sledged by the rotten Indians. Well, no doubt it was all very reprehensible, but I don’t find it easy to pity an Australian for being sledged. Sledging, as we understand the term, is an Australian invention. They say that this went over the line; I think that the line is crossed as soon as any sledging begins.

The modern fashion in cricket for aping – perhaps that last word could have been better chosen – the Australians has led to a situation when you can hardly take guard without someone telling you he was up your missus last night. Am I alone in finding this unedifying? I am not defending the Indians, or any other other bit of sledging, it’s just that cricket would be a better game if the Australians had never invented it.

Scot can marry character and technique to succeed in 2008

Normally, with a young player of any sport, it is the technique that gets to you first, the revelation of character comes later. You can say he has the ability to win, but only time will tell whether he has the bottle, the ambition and all those other intangible things that make sport an endless fascination.

I think most of us had the exact opposite experience with Andy Murray. He first came to prominence at Queen’s Club, West London, a couple of years back, and there was all that vomiting on court at the US Open in 2005 and then staggering back to hit heroic winners. It was clear that we had a man with an awful lot of fight. But it was only at the end of last year, watching his late run in the indoor season, that I was won over by the beauty, the near-perfection of his technique. He’s not just a feisty Jock. He’s got the lot. Now he has won his first tournament of the season and – well, let’s shut up right now, yes? I just hope I will be writing about his technique and his temperament in the first week of July.

Scars from one session in Adelaide are still raw

It is more or less the anniversary of England’s 5-0 defeat in the Ashes series in Australia. I wonder if we will ever recover. It was a truly shattering experience, and I was only watching.

In fact, in terms of vivid sporting experiences, it was up there with Ben Johnson’s victory in the 100 metres at the Olympic Games in Seoul and the England football team’s defeat by Croatia last year: something that has become a part of me.

It was Adelaide that did it, of course, that shatteringly impossible defeat from a situation of complete dominance. It was like witnessing a public castration. I don’t think any of the players have ever been quite the same since. The glorious Ashes-winning summer of 2005 seemed like another lifetime, happening to quite different people.

It all seemed so good back then, the England players going at Australia like equals, and the side with the stronger will prevailed, just. It came down to the fact that England’s best player, Andrew Flintoff, was marginally better than Australia’s best, Shane Warne.

But in Adelaide the situation was reversed in a single session and it was the will of Warne that brought it about. Warne wielded the knacker’s knife – England go into two successive series against New Zealand still looking to begin the process of becoming uncastrated.