That Damned United: A Requiem

And so, on March 31st, in the two thousandth and ninth year of Wor Lord, there came news of a man begrudgingly shaking hands with his destiny. And whilst I may have strayed into somewhat narcissistic waters here, opening an article by quoting myself, what else can you say? Newcastle United dally ceaselessly with self-parody. They love a challenge. And so, it seems, does Alan, who appears to be the only person in the North East who’s actually thought this whole business through.

Because like all great strikers, the bloke is clinically selfish. Self-regard seems a necessary instinct for centre-forwards, along with a Machiavellian appetite for getting the job done, and as a player, Alan had both of them in spades. I remember a callow teenager at Southampton, writhing dutifully at the feet of Carl Tiler, who was dismissed for an ‘elbow’ that would barely have registered on the richter-scale of Alan’s own murderous jumping shapes. Southampton won 1-0, and he was never welcome back at the City Ground. Then there was a game against Sheffield Wednesday in 1999, when he snatched the ball off an excited youth teamer who’d won – and was preparing to take – a penalty. Shearer scored from the spot, his fifth goal in a game that ended 8-0.

Like all professional skills, greed is highly transferable. Newcastle United and the Shearer brand are today intractably interwoven; in the midst of the Toon renaissance, that bludgeoning reinvention of the club in the 1990s, one seemed intrinsically to begat the other. Whole teams were built to supply him. Ruud Gullit called him “the most overrated player I’ve ever seen”, and lost his job within the week. Thus, Shearer is now one of the city’s dominant cultural forces, having carved out an admirably lucrative niche on Tyneside as one of the Geordie nation’s true untouchables, venerated in the Ale houses of Bigg Market alongside Milburn, McDonald, and Xisco.

Much is made of the paucity of his achievements at Newcastle. What he can point to – not unreasonably – is the dazzling array of incompetents who’ve encumbered football’s very own Police Academy ever since he arrived at the club. Shearer was supposed to be the jewel in the crown, but hindsight shows that Newcastle, even at their dubious heights, were ill-equipped for success; that almost magnetic tendency to bottle big games, the ropiest defence this side of Nuremberg, and the virulent persistence of Keegan’s philosophy that it’s ok to lose, just so long as you score a few goals in the process. Shearer has always seemed antithetical to all that; an amorphous personality, he was hard working, almost viciously methodical, and bloody good at his job. If it weren’t for the accent, he’d have been dunked in the Tyne as a heretic long ago. The man is, legitimately – and I’m loathe to use this word as an adjective – ‘legend’.

So if you’re a member of the Toon Army, you’d be inclined to disregard that peculiar gushing sound, as the logic sluices fail, and the last reservoirs of sound reason come haemorrhaging out of St. James Park. You’ll overlook the fact that Shearer’s tactical reflections on MOTD are so startlingly prosaic, they trump even the BBC’s own standards of inanity; that he’s unlicensed, utterly inexperienced, and yet entrusted with the most critical eight (seven, now) games of the club’s recent history. You might even ignore the fact that, until last Tuesday, Alan seemed as inclined to act as a Hollyoaks’ debutant. Why worry about his chances with a gaggle of morally undernourished waifs, crocks and cripples, when you can just lather yourself instead in the foaming, romantic possibility of it all? As we learned in The Shawshank Redemption, hope can set you free.

Yet I’m still to see anything in this whole desperate endeavour to convince me it’ll benefit anyone other than Shearer himself. If he succeeds – and there’s still a big chance he will, what with a tax bill hovering immovably over Fratton Park, Sunderland plummeting towards the Earth’s core, and that indefinable Premier League moirai that insulates Big Teams from Bad Things – Shearer’s hero status will be consolidated forever. If he fails, then who cares? There’s no conceivable way, after the catastrophic mismanagement of Newcastle this year, that he could possibly be blamed. It’s perhaps the most calculated attempt at resuscitation on record.

I don’t dislike Alan Shearer by any means; as I said last week, what I dislike is that maddening tendency amongst fans to venerate their ‘own’ beyond all practical reality. There is absolutely no altruism or good will operative here, and Geordies are mugging themselves off pretending otherwise. There be monsters in those disputed territories between fan and employee, and Shearer – I suspect – is fated to err far closer to one than the other, accent or no, soulful declarations or otherwise. That’s why there’ll be an indisputably karmic element to Newcastle’s failure, should it occur. Whilst it may perhaps have hurt the man, Shearer has observed their descent from the Match of the Day studios with all the compassion of a disaffected in-law.