Football Shirt

Well, you would surely think so if you looked at the odds the bookmakers are offering today.

Or, for that matter, if you listened to the ever-optimistic fans on the phone-ins on various radio channels.

For some reason or other, it’s being treated as an inevitability.

Cold logic tends to wonder how all this bullishness is justified, however. The ownership saga, which has dominated the headlines for so long now, has taken so long to unravel that preparations for the coming Championship season have not just been disrupted but are more or less non-existent. Talk of players threatening to leave the club if Alan Shearer isn’t appointed; of every member of the playing staff being available for transfer if the right offer comes along; and no chance of signing anyone until the whole mess is sorted out – it’s one long soap opera at St James’ Park.

And all this after that humiliating relegation last season when a team which, let’s be honest, really did look as if it had players far ‘too good to go down’, then succumbed without that much of a fight. Incredibly, perhaps, an average crowd of 48,750 attended Newcastle’s home fixtures last season – only Manchester United and Arsenal had higher figures. As their reward is to see the team play at home to Blackpool, Doncaster and Scunthorpe in the coming year, it’s perhaps not surprising that, with everything the way it is, the take-up of season tickets for this year is reportedly very low.

And yet it is not that long ago that Newcastle United could really be considered a ‘top team’; after all, they were, famously, twelve points ahead of the opposition at one stage during the 1995/96 season. They only narrowly failed to qualify for the Champions’ League for the third successive year in 2004, under Sir Bobby Robson’s astute managership. How the fans must regret the premature departure of the one man who seemed capable of overseeing the club’s future. Since then it has been one false dawn after another.

So why has there been this optimism that the Toon Army will be ‘coming your way for one season only’ – as the banners and t-shirts at away grounds will undoubtedly state? After all, after the 1989 relegation they almost slipped down to what was then Division Three until Kevin Keegan began the resurrection which resulted in promotion in 1993. And it’s unlikely he’ll come back to try it again – although you can never rule it out, I suppose.

Well, there remains this conviction that Alan Shearer will return and persuade some of the better players to remain for the coming season. Even if it’s not Shearer, the new owner will surely bring some stability. Whoever the new owner turns out to be, though, he has to recognise that Newcastle United is a club like no other. Fans of the ‘Big Four’ will inevitably disagree, but Magpies’ fans are the most vociferous, passionate, devoted followers around. They’ll always pack out away ‘ends’, where they still exist; sing whatever is happening on the pitch (often with their replica shirts off,I’m afraid) and, if ever supporters deserve to be called ‘the twelfth man’, it’s at Newcastle.

Whatever league they’re in, it’s an amazing place to watch football. The fans congregate during the morning and the atmosphere builds up into what is absolutely the best in English football – the prawn sandwich brigade get short shrift at St James’ Park.

If they can untangle themselves from the financial knots they’re in at the moment, they might just be able to justify the bookies’ faith in them.

Author: Steve Yates
Source: ezinearticles.com