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Notes from the Inside of a Waste Compactor
It’s the morning after the night before and sleep hasn’t helped the feeling. Prior to yesterday’s match at Norwich, the consensus seemed to be that the game was make or break, that defeat would leave Newcastle to be inevitably relegated. That holds true in the light of the new day, Newcastle probably have too much to do, 6 points adrift with 7 fixtures remaining. We can’t allow that to affect how we approach the rest of the season however. The drop is not yet a certainty. There are points to play for, and anything could happen between now and May; a dramatic turnaround in our form, natural disaster or illness striking our rivals. We have to keep plugging away for wins and hope results go our way elsewhere. The balance of probabilities is that we are going down though.
I like Rafa Benitez. Performances have improved in the 3 games he’s been in charge, just not enough for us to pick up the wins we needed. If he’d taken over in January I think we’d have been alright, though that is a hypothetical situation. He had only just been relieved of his post at Real Madrid so even if he’d been approached then he’d probably still have been gathering his thoughts and unlikely to take another job. He has a fine record and given time I think he would make this club successful. He’s certainly the best appointment we’ve made in over 15 years, since Bobby Robson took over. In fact our impending relegation is less of an issue than persuading him to stay. If he does then going down just means starting his long term project from a lower baseline. If not we are cast adrift once more on the stormy seas of Mike Ashley’s whims.
The trouble Benitez is currently finding in kick starting his under-achieving charges into a unit that can win matches casts interesting light on the short time in charge of another panic appointment, Alan Shearer. Viewed as a failure by the wider footballing public after failing to save us in his 8 games in post, Shearers time here should perhaps be reevaluated. Like Benitez, he was saddled with a non-performing squad he couldn’t change. Also like Rafa so far, there were improved performances without that being enough to drag us away from trouble. The point being that both men were on a hiding to nothing and shouldn’t be viewed too harshly for failing to achieve what they set out to do though Benitez still has time to make a difference against the odds of course.
The squad isn’t just not performing at Newcastle though, it’s unbalanced to the point it’s virtually incapable of performing as required. In hindsight, the early successes of Graham Carr were a disaster for the club in the long term as he gained more and more influence and his successful signings became more and more infrequent. Perhaps without Cabaye, Ba, and the early form of Tiote and Cisse the “model” would have been ditched a long time ago.
This season would be the 4th relegation of my lifetime supporting Newcastle. We’ve always come back before and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t again, should it happen. Benitez and the promise of doing things right that comes with him is a rare chance of positive change for us and in contrast to bouncing back we don’t often take those chances. Maybe we can look back in years to come and say this is when we started to get things right.
Asleep at the Wheel
Those in charge at Newcastle United have displayed breathtaking complacency in their attitude towards the team’s ongoing and ever-worsening slump. Was it a refusal to face facts or a naive hope that a lucky break would smash the cycle of poor performances and defeats that led them to allow Steve McClaren to continue to lead the club? It became clear weeks or even months ago that he wasn’t achieving any kind of positive progress. Yet they have allowed the situation to deteriorate until it is almost too late to escape the drop. Twice in recent seasons the club have assumed they would be ok in the end without anything concrete to base their confidence upon, and the easy option of doing nothing came off. They were right and Newcastle survived a relegation scare. This time however, when they tried the same trick there was no cushion of a points gap to the bottom three built up earlier in the season. A mid-season spending spree didn’t provoke any upturn in results or performances. This time it’s been obvious we are going down without something changing, but the hierarchy chose to follow their tried and trusted path and hope for the best. They’ve been asleep at the wheel as a great big brick wall approached at speed.
It’s not just their inaction towards a failing manager that’s displayed their complacency however, the club’s recruitment too has been the result of sticking their fingers in their ears and ignoring stark realities. They’ve been totally open for some years now that the driving factor in recruitment has been resale value. Players aren’t bought over the age of 26. They have searched obsessively for value, targeting leagues of a lower standard, unproven youngsters, and players with talent but who carry baggage with them, either in the form of their injury record or their reputation for attitude problems. The idea was these players may be better on the pitch than the price paid for them warrants. Unfortunately we’ve ended up with an injury-prone squad lacking in motivation and character. The point here is we’ve concentrated for a number of years on boosting the balance sheet in this way and completely neglected the idea of building a team. The last two transfer windows, two of the three in McClaren’s and the board’s much-vaunted grand transfer strategy, have been a depressingly characteristic illustration of this. Struggling for numbers of the correct standard at the back, we signed only one centre-back. Needing a proven goalscorer we could rely on we signed a promising youngster from the Belgian league and took a gamble on someone rotting in a Serie A reserve roster. All the while midfielder after midfielder kept arriving, to the point where we could probably field a complete eleven made up only of Number 10s. No attempt was made to address the deficiencies of the first team or the squad. We bought the players we might make the most profit on. In our chase of Saido Berahino we pursued for far too long someone who was never going to meet our criteria because West Brom were insistent from the off he wouldn’t be leaving unless we paid top dollar for him. We were never going to do that because it would make it doubtful we’d turn a profit on him so the entire episode was an utter waste of time for all concerned.
On the pitch too, there’s been an acceptance of things going wrong, a lack of urgency. The manager and coaches have assumed things would get better if we kept plugging away but they have not. We haven’t changed a team setup which has been failing for 4 years now. We have a number of players who lack commitment either because they assume they are destined for bigger and better things or because they’ve had enough of banging their heads against that brick wall. No-one has assessed our weaknesses and addressed them. This is what we do and we’ve had to hope it’d be good enough. Our downward spiral has ended with it being not good enough and even when it couldn’t be clearer still we persevere.
The fallout from the uncertainty over Steve McClaren’s position since the catastrophic defeat in the must-win home game against Bournemouth at the weekend has been perhaps the clearest example of the theme. If the board were of the opinion that they’d need to replace McClaren in the event of defeat, and they must have known that was the case, you’d think they’d have sounded out a few people beforehand about their availability and enthusiasm for taking on the job. As it is, it appears McClaren has just kept on turning up for work for day after day as the board attempt to line up a successor. Once again urgency has been in short supply. The board didn’t even meet until Monday. Lee Charnley has supposedly not spoken to McClaren since Saturday. It would be bad enough if it was just a case of not having had a contingency plan in operation, of being caught on the hop yet again and not moving as fast as most of us would like to enable a new appointment to have time before our next match at Leicester on Monday to find their bearings. If as is rumoured they are about to appoint Rafa Benitez then they should be congratulated, he would be a fantastic appointment. It doesn’t alter the fact that their dithering has cost the new man vital days on the training pitch, or even weeks if they’d bit the bullet on McClaren when they should have. If Benitez turns out to be the managerial equivalent of Berahino however, someone who would never accept restrictions to his role the club weren’t prepared to relax, then it would be even more of a waste of scarce, previous time, something we can afford even less now than we could in January.
It could yet be that our board plan to stick with McClaren, even if it’s just to give him another game or two to turn things around. Call that complacency, call it a dereliction of duty if you like but it would be a disaster for our chances of still being in this league next season. With only 10 games left every point counts and passing up an opportunity to increase our chances of gaining some at this stage wouldn’t just be sticking their heads in the sand, it’d be wilfully neglecting their duties. Whatever happens between now and May, McClaren cannot be allowed to be a scapegoat for the failings of others.
Go For Broke
This weekend’s match against WBA has assumed make or break status for both Newcastle and Steve McClaren as the season’s finish line starts to accelerate towards us with no sign of improvement in the club’s fortunes. Poor away form means salvation lies in the 7 remaining home games if there’s to be any. There just aren’t enough left for any of those home fixtures to be wasted.
Previously I’d thought McClaren’s position was unassailable, that Ashley wouldn’t sack him under any circumstances. That’s based on his record of dealing with previous permanent managers, who were each given several lengths of rope and hung themselves with all of them without the owner losing patience. The closest Alan Pardew came to this situation was in 2012/13. With an almost identical record by mid- January of 21pts from 23 matches, Ashley reacted then in exactly the same way as he did this season; he panicked. On both occasions he splashed out and brought in a host of players in the January window to try to stave off the threat of the drop. The difference between 2013 and now is that Pardew’s side gave an immediate positive reaction and went on a run of 4 wins from 6 games. The pressure was off. Without such a reaction, starting this Saturday, Ashley may well not feel so lenient towards McClaren as he did to Pardew. The only time we’ve really stared down the barrel of the gun under Ashley before, he jettisoned caretaker manager Chris Hughton with 8 games to go of our last relegation season. If things go on as they are, there’s every chance Ashley will gamble again rather than let us go down with barely a whimper.
It might seem a strange idea to sack a manager mere days after rubber-stamping his spending £30m on new players but the whole point of our management structure is to avoid the need to clear out players should the manager be changed. Having said that, it may need a few games more to determine if the new players will turn things around. McClaren won’t get another chance at a Premier League job after this so he needs to rack up some wins and fast.
When McClaren was given the job in the summer the sense of us being underwhelmed was palpable. That said, he was an upgrade on the previous two managers then, and that still holds true. However he’s proven unable to change much of what was wrong with the team’s performances before. Newcastle are still unable to take games to the opposition, to dominate teams. They still tend too much towards caution and don’t apply enough pressure without the ball to provoke mistakes from opponents. What passing there is, is too slow, too clumsy and too safe. McClaren also recognised an air of negativity in the dressing room when he arrived which contributes to all this and he attempted to change that by psychology. It hasn’t been a roaring success obviously but perhaps it explains his refusal to spurn a positive spin on any depressing defeat. He knows what’s wrong though, without being able to solve the problem of how to change it. He spoke early in the season of the need to pass it better and pass it more. Possession is the key to domination of games and we do have more possession now, but it’s of the sterile kind that never leads anywhere. It’s killing time rather than killing off the opposition. He also spoke of the need to get the whole team 20 or 30 yards up the pitch as a unit. We don’t sit back quite as much as we habitually did under Pardew but neither have the players embraced the pressing game. Coloccini’s fear of being outpaced means he’s inclined to sit deep no matter what and that has a knock-on effect on everyone else.
Perhaps this lies behind the strange recent misuse of Rolando Aarons. Pressed into service as an emergency left back, perhaps the idea is to drag that whole flank of the team up the pitch by playing a classic winger in a deeper position. Whatever the theory it hasn’t worked, Aarons has looked all at sea while actual experienced defenders like Steven Taylor sit on the bench. Last season every single sub appearance Aarons made was electric. His presence changed our team’s outlook each time. The staid plodding grind of Pardew’s eleven became miraculously transformed into a forward-flowing wave. That boy has got something but we won’t find out what it is while he’s running towards our own goal line.
The team’s impotence isn’t helped by the insistence on playing with a lone front man. None of our strikers are capable of fulfilling the role, either not strong enough, not a good enough finisher, or they don’t hold up play well enough. But play two together as a unit and their strengths could complement each other and improve our results. With Aarons attacking down one wing and Townsend the other, Shelvey pulling the strings and Wijnaldum arriving in the box, there are goals in that team and getting goals is currently our biggest problem. It’s closely followed in the problem stakes by our inability to defend of course but now isn’t the time for timidity. On the few occasions we’ve looked potent this season we’ve also offered teams plenty of opportunities to score themselves. So be it. We do that whether we attack or not so we might as well go for it. Whether McClaren is the man to throw off our shackles I don’t know, but I do know that he’s capable of it. Despite being generally cagey as Boro manager, numerous times when left without a choice after falling behind in their run to the UEFA Cup final in 2006, he repeatedly threw caution to the wind, brought on as many strikers as he could, and it kept on paying off. We’ll know soon enough if he can get the team moving forward. If not he can’t last long.
WBA (A) Special 28/12/2015
Plus Ca Change
It’s a year tomorrow since Alan Pardew was given permission to talk to Crystal Palace about their vacant managerial post, effectively ending his time in charge here at Newcastle United. It’s been a year of turmoil and talk, protest and pledges. When he left Newcastle had lost 3 of their last 4 following on from a 5-game winning streak which had propelled them to the temporary heights of 5th in late November, and which it was evidently considered was enough to keep them up for another year. Following his departure they appointed a placeholder, someone to keep things ticking over to the summer in the understanding their safety had already been achieved. That decision came very close to being catastrophic but in the end they did indeed stay up, albeit after some desperate panicked scrabbling for points and unrest in the stands. Mike Ashley went on TV before the last game of the season to tell us all everything had changed; he had, the club had, their direction and ambitions had.
Now we stand roughly at the half-way point of this brave new dawn, and not so much has actually changed. Yes, money was spent in the summer. But it was an attempt to head off a credible possibility of large-scale season-ticket cancellations by the disaffected masses rather than evidence of new priorities. It also followed to the letter the previous transfer blueprint, of buying young potential which can be sold on at a profit. The experience and character the team so desperately needed were nowhere to be seen. Our new manager talked of playing an expansive possession-based game then influenced by awful results decided our roster left us with no option but to sit back and try to hit teams on the break. If this is an attempt to change how the club operates it’s an attempt to do it by acting in exactly the same way as we always have.
Kick in the Teeth
Losing to Everton on Boxing Day with virtually the last unintentional effort at goal of the game was a disappointment, and a tad unlucky after weathering the storm of their attacking superiority. Newcastle missed a fair few chances which if any had been converted could well have resulted in them winning the game. Should we take the close nature of our defeat as reason for optimism, a sign of improvement? Unfortunately it’s on the finest of lines that success and failure are decided and right now we are on the wrong side of it. Improved performances if that is what they are will lead us only one way if dropped points continue as their consequence. If we have improved, then it’s not by enough.
2/10 See Me
An end-of-term report on Steve McClaren would be harsh without question right now. He’s failed in changing the team’s style. He’s failed to change the team’s losing mentality. He’s failed to integrate new signings effectively. Most importantly he’s failed to alter our results or league position. He’s stated that the plan he’s working to involves 3 transfer windows, each with similar spending. His problem after the start he’s had will be getting Mike Ashley to give him another half-yearly £50m to blow in the transfer market.
Leicester (H) Special 21/11/2015
If the Kids are United
In the January 2015 transfer window Dele Alli signed for Spurs from MK Dons
after being widely tipped to join us. At the time I questioned his choice
and the advice of his agent, referring to Spurs as a ” midfielders
graveyard” where he’d rot in the reserves without ever getting a chance.
That was in contrast to us who were so poor and in such need of some spark
that there was a chance he’d have walked into the first team.
Fast forward less than a year and the positions have turned out to be the
exact opposite to my thoughts then. Alli has broken into Spurs first team
and made a goalscoring first start for England in midweek. Meanwhile, our
own youngsters appear little closer to our Premier League eleven. Adam
Armstrong’s made a splash this season but he’s playing in League 1. Kevin
Mbabu was briefly impressive but we’re yet to discover if he’s seriously in
contention or was just last man standing at the time. The creaking bones of
Rolando Aarons haven’t held together long enough to confirm last season’s
promise. The rest are nowhere near. Does anyone think if Alli had come here
we wouldn’t now be fast tracking him into becoming the next Haris Vuckic?
There’s a point in a youngster’s career where they need the opportunity to
show what they can do and they’re just not getting the chance.
Half Cut
Half season tickets went on sale this week, with the expressly stated
purpose of filling up empty seats in the stadium. They’ve noticed then.
What’s interesting is that they appear to have heeded the grumbling from
full season ticket holders in previous years. This time, the part-season
tickets appear to work out at exactly the same price per game as the
full-season ones, as opposed to the last few years when tickets became
available part way through the season which were appreciably cheaper than
those bought to cover all 19 home games.
It’s probably a wise move on the club’s part, as they may be slightly less
likely to fill up those empty seats, but full-season ticket holders are
also less likely to give their ticket up for next season and wait for a
cheap half-season of football from Christmas onwards. Of course it’s great if you’re getting to see a match on the cheap, not so great if you’ve paid top dollar for your ticket and your loyalty is rewarded by casual attendees turning up every week having paid less than you. I await an
announcement that the practice of offering batches of £20 tickets to large
NE employers will also now come to an end.
I Walk the Line
You may have missed a strange story where a Director of Carlisle ended up running the line after the ref was injured during their FA Youth Cup victory over Doncaster Rovers this week. You’ve guessed it, Carlisle’s director flagged for offside and disallowed an equaliser for Doncaster 2 minutes from the end of extra time.
I’m astonished this was allowed to happen at this level. My own experience some years ago of Sunday League where club officials usually take the flags, was that you had to start attacking runs a minimum of 5 yards onside to avoid activating the Lino’s hair-trigger flag arm.
The serious point here is that people cannot avoid being swayed by their loyalties when officiating. The Premier League rely on officials stating their own allegiances to decide which ones shouldn’t run matches involving particular clubs and that doesn’t seem enough to me.