HOWAY THE LADS

“How big is the Newcastle job?” “Massive?” “About the size of Wales?” “Alan Green’s ego?” These days, all you can be sure of is that it is too big for Kevin Keegan.

They say you should never go back, of course. But if Newcastle United had been like…THIS in 1982 and 1992, he’d never have gone there in the first place. Newcastle has always been enough to straighten anyone’s perm. Now…well…Keegan won’t fail just because “you should never go back.”

“Keegan out” was the half-joking cry in the bar where I watched Newcastle’s second-half capitulation at Villa Park. “He’ll have walked out already” followed Villa’s fourth goal, the expectancy being an empty seat when TV cameras inevitably turned to Newcastle’s dug-out in search of a white-haired, European Cup winner with Liverpool who wasn’t Terry McDermott.

Someone else said that Keegan would still be there because he needed the money. As well as providing oodles of free publicity for Keegan’s Glasgow ‘Soccer Circus’ (an “interactive football attraction” apparently) earlier this season, the BBC’s anodyne ‘Inside Sport’ provided almost its first publicity. Until then, “What’s Keegan been doing since he left Man City?” would have silenced any conversation.

And vital publicity it was. Start-up costs put a seven-figure dent in the Keegan finances, around the time of the Circus’s opening in West Glasgow’s Braehill district in September 2006. And latest accounts, both financial and spoken, suggest the venture is still costing.

Keegan isn’t exactly poor. Martin Peters may have been ten years ahead of his time on the field. But Keegan was twenty years ahead off it, never short of a product endorsement or the fee to go with it. However, facts rarely clog up the works of football’s rumour mill. So once his Newcastle signing-on fee and portion of his £2.85m annual salary had paid for the Circus, “Kevin Keegan” would suddenly be not “good enough for the job” again, Wembley October 8^th 2000, revisited.

His effectiveness thus far has been as smokescreen for the madness enveloping the club under sportswear billionaire owner Michael Ashley, alongside time-tellingly regular statements from chairman Chris Mort emphasising the “need for stability.” For instance, how many top clubs in this fiercely, globally capitalist football era find their shirt sponsors nationalised? In Venezuela, maybe..

Ashley has appointed directors of everything but traffic. Had Nigel Pearson stuck around, he’d probably have been appointed executive director (BBC post-match interviews), until Newcastle replaced ‘Big’ Sam Allardyce with someone actually talking to (actually never stopping talking to) the Beeb. Probably why Pearson left.

So while Newcastle’s dug-out was all-ticket under Allardyce, the boardroom is now. Everyone from football’s greatest misnomer, ex-Chelsea captain Dennis Wise to ex-Chelsea…er… steward Tony Jimenez. Through it all, though, Terry McDermott keeps rolling along. A “coach” (which really needs those speech marks) who converted Keegan’s pass for Liverpool’s opening goal in the 1977 European Cup Final and has been in his debt/employment almost ever since. It’s a mess. And the team is acclimatising nicely.

Ashley’s now well-documented business past would have warned anybody who’d looked. He was famous in football for grassing on a replica shirts price-fixing cartel in 2000, significant given ex-chairman Freddie Shepherd’s infamous disparaging of fans for overspending wildly on cheaply-manufactured Newcastle merchandise.

And much of what he’s done at Newcastle, he’s always done – not least the cavalier attitude to money. Legend has it that a £200,000 legal bill with bankers Merrill Lynch was settled by a game of spoof, which he “lost but settled up and appeared to laugh off.” (Now, I don’t know about you, but I ask which banker, when challenged to a game of spoof over £200,000, felt able to say: “Alright, then”? Must be what comes of having too much money in the first place).

Ashley made profits buying once-famous sporting brands fallen on hard times…like…um…Newcastle. Ultra-successfully though. City analysts forecast a couple of years back that the Sports Direct firm constructed from such purchases would make him “sportswear’s first billionaire” through stock market flotation. They weren’t far wrong. Its February 2007 flotation yielded him £930m, £133m of which went north-east, while the share price went south, prompting Ashley’s first recorded unpopularity.

Newspaper profiles had been full of anonymous friends’ variants on “diamond geezer” – if he’d appointed Redknapp there’d have been some contest as to which geezer was more diamond. Calling investors “cry babies”, after shares lost a third of their value in a third of a year, didn’t extend his Christmas-card list. But Ashley was now focussed on Newcastle.

With short-cropped hair and ‘big bones’ (even a friend-laden Sunday Times profile called him “slightly tubby”) he looks every inch Newcastle fan, except for keeping his shirt ON in winter. But his fan-like behaviour hasn’t always been business-like. His aversion to ‘due diligence’ saw him buy Dunlop/Slazenger in 2004 sight – and proper accounts – unseen, never a boost to company profile. And he overlooked much (most?) of Newcastle’s debt for the same reason.

The ‘strategic review’ required by this carelessness and questions over transfer-dealings other than “£8.2m for Boumsong??” were never going to allow Allardyce to…ahem… “manage as he would like.” And plans to make a K. Keegan director of football were shelved – Allardyce would hardly have lasted so long otherwise.

New deputy-chairman Chris Mort undertook the review, answering directly to Ashley, thereby rendering Shepherd’s chairman status redundant, as he soon was himself. Mort headed law firm Freshfield Bruckhaus Deringer’s ‘leisure section’ – Newcastle a radical change of career, then. He was initially popular for not being Shepherd. He’s still popular, apparently, through being good at his job – maintaining a charm offensive among supporters, the boardroom equivalent of piling into the away end.

Below Mort, though, you fear for Newcastle, as Keegan must, despite his public protestations. Scratch the surface of Wise’s career and his reputation plummets quicker than Leeds’ form since Gus Poyet resigned as his assistant. “If Wise can play for England, so can I” we sang when Graham Taylor was manager, Taylor only picking Carlton Palmer to make Wise look good. Surely. Bates received similar compensation for Poyet and Wise (millions to remember when Bates pleads Leeds’ poverty this summer…and he will). Which is ridiculous.

Then there’s the simultaneous emergence of Jimenez and Jeff Vetere. Jimenez is ‘vice-president’ (player recruitment) using his “vast network of contacts.” Vetere, his CV containing Rushden and Real Madrid, is ‘technical co-ordinator’ – technique and co-ordination missing from Newcastle since before Mark Lawrenson was ‘defensive coach’ (hence his welcome silence on them now).

‘Google’ Jimenez and you get wall-to-wall US newspaper golf articles – I first saw the name on Reuters dispatches from the African Cup of Nations. Of ex-steward-turned-vice-president, nothing, until now. His job credentials, bar ‘going back a long way’ with Ashley,’ are sketchy-and-a-half. Photographed alongside Juande Ramos when Spurs first pursued him. Spanish-speaking. One of his companies represented Celestine Babayaro and…er…that’s it. He’ll work part-time, transfer windows only, identifying talented young European players. Knowing Ashley is his best credential.

Vetere had spells with Alan Curbishley at Charlton and West Ham, following years at Rushden’s youth academy and followed by impressing contemporaries at Real. Photographed alongside Curbishley last summer, Charlton fans didn’t recognise him. Spanish-speaking. He’ll work part-time identifying talented young European players…and I’d like to see them in the same room together, in case there’d be just the one person stood there.

Little wonder my friend from Co. Durham fancied her chances of a role because she once knew some Chelsea players. If she’d known Ashley too, the job, whatever job, would have been hers.

However, Ashley’s been selling Newcastle almost since buying it - that Liverpool-suitors DIC were the most “concrete” rumour speaks volumes. “Cobblers” was the politest summary of a Tyneside alleged-consortium after Alan Shearer’s “blessing…but not his money.”

Ashley was also off to Spurs. “He’s a big fan…the sort of thing he’d do…he’s extremely close to Paul Kemsley, (Spurs) influential vice-chairman.” All true – Ashley and Kemsley ‘go way back.’ But irrelevant.

And the Icelandic owners of supermarket chain…Iceland, were buying Newcastle for £135m, a month after Ashley’s £30m injection – on top of his original £133m outlay – to cover unravelling debts left by Fat Freddie and friends. A story made for the headline: “Two and two makes five.”

But Ashley “didn’t buy Newcastle to sell it.” And, thankfully, he’s shunned the “current fashion for leverage’ a 2005 profile noted. Newcastle don’t need Glazer-esque debts too?

Thus Keegan’s natural pose is elbows-on-knees, head-in-hands. An easy sculpture, come the time. There are obvious ‘Soccer Circus’ analogies. And usually about now, pundits identify one team making a late dash for the drop. Stats don’t back-up the assertion. But with Spurs bridging an inordinate gap between 10^th and 12^th and Newcastle’s recent form matching Hillary Clinton’s…Newcastle/Hartlepool derby, anyone?

Keegan would have been a better advert for ‘Impulse’ than he was for Brut in the 70s (remember…Henry Cooper…”splash it all over”…aaaaaaaagh!!). But if he was to bail on Newcastle now like he did before, it would seem the most considered decision he’s ever made.

‘MotorMurph’ is written by Mark Murphy

Entry Filed under: MotorMurph Column

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