Caulkin sums it all up well.
This is what purgatory feels like. Newcastle United are dead but not quite damned, existing in a stasis that brings no joy and no resolution. As they keep being told — by people who look no deeper than the league table — things at St James’ Park could be worse and quite right too, because this is not a club threatened by extinction, they are not in League One or broke or even particularly close to the relegation zone. So why is it so hard to find a pulse?
If you watch the television or listen to the radio, you will be asked what the fuss is about. You will be told that Newcastle supporters expect the world, or at least the Champions League (Mark Lawrenson), and are perma-griping fantasists. You will hear that they are not a big club — when did they last win anything? — and so they should accept their mediocrity and cease making all these unrealistic demands (Chris Sutton).
Most tiring, you will read continual comparisons between Steve Bruce and Rafa Benitez and the contrasting levels of public support they receive, as if the fortunes of a historic sporting institution should be settled not by playing every team twice a season but by two portly middle-aged gentlemen wrestling naked in front of an open fire. Note to Channel 5: if this gives you any ideas, I’ll take a 10 per cent cut.
If you do care about Newcastle, it feels ridiculous to still be talking about this, to be explaining the long and wearisome context, but it is necessary when so many of those who are supposed to educate us about football get it wrong so often. There is a deep disconnect on Tyneside which, before all stadiums were barred and shuttered this spring, saw 10,000 part-season tickets given away free of charge. Ten thousand! For free! How come nobody questions why?
This is a metric which should inform the Bruce vs Rafa debate, but never does. Instead, it’s “both men finished 13th over consecutive seasons, but one tickled the fans’ bellies and whinged at the owner and the other got on with his job and still gets pelters for it. And, yeah, so Brucie-ball is criminal to watch, but why didn’t the same punters get on Rafa’s back when all his Newcastle did was defend and hang back?”
The background here is nuanced, emotive and incredibly tedious. When Benitez arrived — last posting, Real Madrid — he arrived at a club circling the drain and he spoke about history and potential and ambition, words that had been scratched from Newcastle’s consciousness. A man who had won everything, stayed after relegation, risking his reputation, got the team back up and kept them up, twice. A lot of it was harrowing on the eye, but there was a purpose.
When Benitez left — out of contract, with two offers: one big contract from China, and one from Newcastle that reduced his say in buying and selling players, amid broken relationships and no clear way of progressing — it marked the end of a brief spasm of hope. There has not been a lot of it under Mike Ashley’s ownership. There have been two relegations, an average finishing position of 13th in the Premier League, one appearance in Europe, a miserable record in cup competitions and a plethora of terrible, corrosive decisions.
And so when Bruce arrived, he was not given the same latitude because he did not inspire the same affection. He did not bring hope. To be employed as a manager for as long as he has, to work in the Premier League for so many games, it means he must be competent, but nobody was massively interested in that. They saw another Steve McClaren or Alan Pardew. If he could accept what Benitez couldn’t, he must be desperate or a patsy. To repeat: 10,000 fans walked away.
Was this fair, was it nice? No. Bruce was coming home, but the locks had been changed, which should really give the lie, once and for all, about Geordies hating Cockneys or only wanting one of their own as manager, one of the other putrid myths which has now, conveniently, been parked. Toxicity has been a feature at Newcastle for a decade and more and the new head coach walked headlong into it. It was why Alan Shearer, his big mate, pleaded with him not to take the job.
Is the decline and what happened before overplayed? Well, yes and no. Newcastle were indebted and failing when Ashley arrived in 2007. The ownership was besotted by vanity signings. The season before, they had finished 13th. Yes, 13th. Plenty of their managers had struggled; Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness, Ruud Gullit, Glenn Roeder. But there were also two seconds, two thirds, two cup finals, three semis, 9 seasons in Europe. They beat Barcelona in the Champions League (oh, hello again Lawro).
There was plenty of mitigation last season, from that atmosphere of chaos, a very short pre-season, the disastrous recruitment that saw Bruce lumbered with a
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(the manager didn’t help himself by taking ownership of Newcastle’s “remarkable transfer window”), to COVID-19, lockdown, the destabilisation of a takeover that promised much but didn’t happen. In the end, they were uncomfortably comfortable, with a rare appearance in an FA Cup quarter-final.
Why uncomfortable? Because, by and large, the football was god-awful. Bruce wanted to transition away from Benitez’s dogged defensiveness — which was, in turn, born out of fear that anything else would see Newcastle go down — but it did not work. The statistics were damning and yet, in spite of all that, the team had heart and found a way to eke out to results, to respond to bad defeats. Bruce deserved great credit for navigating it, but you must appreciate why love was sorely rationed.
This is a long and unhappy dribble — like
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, which are occurring a bit too often right now — to the present tense. Newcastle are 15th in the Premier League and in another quarter-final, this time the League Cup. Not great. But not woeful, surely? Just sort of middle-of-the-road Newcastle, pretty much where they tend to be under Ashley, their rightful place. Nothing to get massively worked up about.
In some ways, this is precisely the point — nothing ever gets better — but in others, it is simply wrong. We do not have a full St James’ Park to tell us how supporters are feeling about the owners, the manager, the team (probably just as well after that first-half against Chelsea), and so judgment comes from elsewhere. There is nothing middle-of-the-road about that. That judgment is damning and ferocious and loud. Aside from anecdotal evidence, it is all we have.
When I talked about purgatory at the start, it is based on this heavy context. There are generalisations in all of it, but everybody, by and large, wants Ashley out, including Ashley,
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. The takeover was so close — — and still hangs over the club, but we wait for a definitive outcome. The football which was supposed to lift morale during lockdown — remember that theory? — does exactly the opposite.
And the head coach is at the epicentre of a club wrestling for identity and meaning. Each week, he is asked questions about criticism, keyboard warriors and grumbles and each week Bruce repeats those phrases in his answers, which makes it look as though he is having a pop at the critics and the keyboard warriors and the grumblers, and all that does is inflame the situation further. And so he is asked about it more and it all kicks off again, while the ex-pros stick up for him and say he’s being maligned.
Behind all that is a feeling that nothing can or will change for the better until Ashley goes. So although plenty of people didn’t want Bruce in the first place and plenty don’t want him now, the prospect of Lee Charnley, the managing director, headhunting another manager is not enticing. And is it likely with a takeover still in the offing? And is it likely anyway, when Newcastle under Ashley stick with managers way beyond the point that all kinship is fractured? It is a never-ending circle of purgatory.
I’ve said this before, but look at the league table and you assume that Newcastle are plodding along. You look at League Cup results and wonder if it might, belatedly, be their year. Then you study the numbers behind their performances and find it difficult to fathom why they are not in the bottom three. And then finally you open social media and marvel at the fact that Bruce still has a job. It is a club of extremes, with a huge divergence between appearance and reality.
To try and demonstrate that, I set up a few polls on Twitter. Something like that can never be scientific and is open to abuse (on a Sunderland fans forum, there was an invitation to “hijack” the questions), but the numbers that responded — well over 5,000 for each question — and the starkness of the figures do tell a story, even if it has to be acknowledged that plenty of supporters live offline. That story is one of polarisation.
I mean, I was taking the piss somewhat, it obviously went over the lad's head. Fair enough. I quite enjoyed reading my old post 
