It may not be by design that Alan Shearer has grown larger in Geordie minds than the Angel of the North, or that by his very presence in and around the team he is also the biggest impediment to Newcastle signing the manager the club needs.
In the words of Glenn Roeder, who has stepped up from the youth academy to coach the team short-term, with Shearer both a player seeking further glory and the coaching assistant: “If you get to know him (Shearer) and watch him on the pitch, he is a manager waiting to happen.”
Shearer does not deny it. He only says now is not the time for him to manage the big club that Newcastle is — or wants to be. Few would deny that if ever Shearer learns to transmit his single-minded determination to others, he is going to become a formidable manager. In time.
If you are a Martin O’Neill, a Guus Hiddink or a Sam Allardyce — men presumed to be in the frame for the England coaching role this summer or perhaps sooner— why would you go to the northeast to be Shearer’s bench-warmer?
Why, with the best will in the world, would you take on the role between the heir apparent, the most fickle board in the Premiership and a guaranteed 52,000 crowd who, justifiably, are fed up with winning nothing domestically in half a century?
Newcastle are a paying club.
Somehow, the chairman, Freddy Shepherd, and the second major shareholder, Douglas Hall, find tens of millions to throw at the spending whims of successive managers, but neither the judgment nor the patience to back their team-building when the money is spent.
It is reckoned that Newcastle, after allowing Graeme Souness to turn over £50m in playing stock in 17 months, are worse off as a team and as a company than when they considered Sir Bobby Robson to be past it and sacked him early in the 2004-05 season.
Generous, gullible and impressionable are words that come to mind for the directors. And with the exception of Sir John Hall, the father of Douglas and the entrepreneur who, with Kevin Keegan as resident Messiah in the 1990s resurrected the club so that the fans could dream of European glories again, Newcastle have not in our lifetime been well served with visionaries in the boardroom.
In some ways, it is the best and the worst of football hotbeds. Again it was Roeder, a decent man burned by team management at West Ham, who put his finger on the pulse. “Talk about football being a religion in Argentina, Brazil and Italy,” he said. “But if a team doesn’t win, the fans don’t turn up. Yet 52,000 Geordies will turn up for every home game. If we strip away everything and be honest about it, it’s a great club because of those supporters.”
Spot on. Roeder played for them, and captained their team and so, like Shearer and all the way back to Wor Jackie Milburn, whose club scoring record Shearer eclipsed yesterday against Portsmouth, the players have run on the unique passion of the Toon Army. Unique? Certainly. Newcastle are no greater as a club than Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal. But they do have the city, the region, all to themselves.
That passion, once as engrained as coal dust in the people of Tyneside and Durham, has only one outlet, one club, one cause with which to identify. If you belong to Newcastle, you support the Magpies, and no other club can steal your allegiance away.
Where does Shearer fit into this historical, some might say almost hysterical, blind passion? Near the top, up there with the great names that resonated through his own boyhood as a born and bred Geordie.
A mercenary he may be, a player brought home for £15m after he had won his only honours with England or Blackburn Rovers, and still a player paid more for the boots that he endorses than most professionals earn on their contracts, let alone the workers in the Toon.
Those supporters that I know do not begrudge Shearer a penny, although it would be a different matter if they could do anything about the million pounds per season that Shepherd and Hall take out for their salaries, or the near £4m the directors declared as their total dividend on the shares last year.
The abuse Shepherd and Hall gave to their own club fans when they were duped by the News of the World has doubtless been repaid in kind many times over. But to move the pair out of the boardroom, to get them to sell up would probably cost more than £70m. So the turmoil circulates around the club. It bounces off the fans to the players and to the managers who come and go biennially, with the exception of Robson.
And this, again, is where Shearer is the man in the middle of everything. He insists that this is his last season. He diplomatically defends what Souness brought, or wrought, to the hot seat. He stays behind on the training field to work the players, not least those whose crosses he needs to serve his astonishingly unrequited lust for goals.
And that too is a Geordie trait. It was always the No 9, the man with eyes and heart for nothing but making the net bulge, that Newcastle fans took to heart. Keegan once told us that returning to Newcastle and being cast as the Messiah was thrilling, but frightening.
Shearer, for all that his words downplay the situation, and for all that he is associated with in terms of sitting on the fence, has thrived on the expectation and, very often in poor teams, delivered. The essence of him is hard graft, timing and, if truth be told, selfishness. Goal-scorers generally are like that, although Milburn was an exception. But who is right about Shearer’s place in Newcastle’s recent history? Roeder, who describes Shearer as a man who has shouldered massive responsibility for the good of the Toon; or Ruud Gullit, who took on the managerial chalice in 1998 and resigned with bitter words about the influential role played by Shearer?
Gullit and Shearer was an ego clash of monumental proportions, put together under Shepherd’s aegis. Gullit tried to drop Shearer and found he was messing with the club’s idol and, moreover, with the man who had the all-powerful communication with the fans and the chairman. “I still think I made the right decision,” Gullit reaffirmed last month. “It’s still the same situation, nothing has changed.”
Among the charges laid against Robson when Shepherd removed him was that he was too old to control the miscreants he recruited to the team, and too prone to call time on Shearer.
The day is coming when Shearer must do that, and then he must choose between the contract held for him as a Sky TV pundit, or the immediate fruits of the Uefa coaching certificates he is working to acquire. “I would like to give management a crack one day,” he said on Friday. “But I’m not ready for this club yet.”
That final word will be removed in time. Shearer will get his crack at management, and the club he knows best is at St James’ Park. Should he start lower down the ladder? Ask Freddy Shepherd, ask Manchester City and Stuart Pearce, ask Holland and Germany, who have put their trust in Marco van Basten and Jürgen Klinsmann as former players accelerated straight to the top job in their profession.
If it’s a cult, Tyneside was built on cults as much as on coal and shipyards.
The one problem is persuading a national or international figure to tackle the job in the interim and to tackle it with the Angel of the North still in the camp, biding his time.
