As Newcastle United prepared for their first match of the Premier League season, which the fates decreed would be known as the Kevin Keegan derby, a couple of memorable lines were bouncing around my empty head.
“Woe, woe and thrice woe” seemed to summarise perfectly a transfer window in which the departure of Anthony Gordon was followed by the losses of Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimaraes. The phrase became wildly popular thanks to the success of Up Pompeii, a classic BBC sitcom that ran in the early 1970s. Its origins might be considerably older, however. The Book of Revelation includes “woe, woe, woe” in Chapter 8, verse 13.
When Eddie Howe also decided to end his tenure at St James’ Park, perhaps partly because of the thrice-woe low blows, Private James Frazer from Dad’s Army would have been forgiven for declaring: “We’re doomed, doomed, I tell you.” He rarely needed much of an excuse and he would have found a ready audience among some of Newcastle’s followers. Not that the lugubrious undertaker in Dad’s Army, a sitcom of a similar vintage to Up Pompeii, was the first to utter that phrase. It seems to date from 1938 and a relatively obscure publication, Vesper Dramas.
The widely forecast decline of the Magpies was, to pluck another idiom from ancient literature, something of a double-edged sword to supporters desperately seeking tickets to home matches.
A return to the bad old days of the new millennium, before the PIF and the Reubens bought the club, would offer faint hopes of greater access to the cathedral on the hill for those fans not holding season tickets. Call it a mixed blessing, even a pyrrhic victory or a silver lining amid stormy clouds.
Every big club has a number of fair-weather followers. The phenomenon of jumping ship from one team to another has been familiar in London for generations. Those fans are football’s equivalent of floating voters. In the splendid isolation of Newcastle upon Tyne, they are uncommon.
Let’s not kid ourselves, though. A sustained spell of boring, ambition-free football on Tyneside caused thousands of long-time supporters to say “enough is enough” less than 10 years ago.
Whether that would happen again is a moot point . . . but when success in the box office ballots and resales is as unexpected as trophies in our display cabinet, any straw is worth clutching.
Photo via The Mag
Thus far, 2026/27 has extended the pattern of recent seasons: buy a Mags membership, enter the ballot, receive in reply the “unfortunately” email, wait for the members’ resale, then find 20,000+ applicants ahead of you in the queue for a ticket to the Hull City match next month.
If Liverpool had stuffed us by a few goals on Sunday, rather than trailing for all but eight minutes, would demand have been that high? Perhaps not, though any fixture at St James’ Park, even one against a team widely tipped to drop back down to the second tier after only nine months at the top table, still seems to be the hottest ticket in Toon.
A team struggling to perform will normally struggle to fill their stadium. Not Newcastle United under the current regime, however, even though admission prices have steadily increased, both for season-ticket holders and for occasional visitors.
The ballot and resale scramble is bad enough for supporters who live only a short distance from the stadium. It’s far worse for the long-distance diaspora trying to book public transport a few weeks in advance, without knowing the kick-off day/time or whether they will acquire a match seat.
That’s why I chose the Hull game once it was confirmed as one ignored by the TV paymasters. Saturday 3pm, September 19. Let’s book a train, because fares have been frozen this year, haven’t they? Well, some have. Others haven’t. Even with a senior rail card and a prolonged trawl of the net, there was nothing available for less than £100 for a fan starting on the Sussex coast. That’s a bit of a stretch, especially when I was looking a week before the Hull ballot, knowing I had only two chances of a ticket: slim and no.
Time for some lateral thinking. My old friends at Flixbus, who took me on a memorable trip to Dortmund three years ago, were offering return journeys from London to Newcastle for little more than £30. The coach up leaves around midnight on Friday and the coach back leaves roughly 24 hours later. It’s a good job old codgers need less sleep than teenagers.
Now all I have to do is buy a ticket for the game. And if I can’t, there are still the pre-match and post-match catch-ups with my mates to enjoy. By then, we will have more clues to how a team shorn of Gordon, Tonali and Bruno G, a team managed by a Premier League newbie, might do this season.