The phrase ‘one step forward, two steps back’ is all too familiar for us Newcastle United fans.
How many seasons have begun with great hope and genuine cause for optimism, only to have gone off the rails by Christmas?
How many times have we found ourselves wanting the season to end so that we can ‘regroup’ and ‘rebuild’?
How many campaigns have witnessed considerable success, only for it to be back to business as usual the following term?
Arguably, by far the strangest season in the club’s recent history was the 2006/07 campaign.
The way we managed to breeze through a very tough UEFA Cup group while struggling in the Premier League, losing at home to the likes of Fulham, Bolton Wanderers and Sheffield United early on that season, was baffling enough. But what made our domestic woes, ultimately finishing 13th (shortly before the takeover by a certain Mike Ashley), most painful was the fact that manager Glenn Roeder, after initially stepping up as caretaker following the sacking of Graeme Souness, had seemingly waved a magic wand and transformed us from relegation fodder to European qualifiers inside the last 15 games of the previous campaign. W10, D2, L3: if replicated across an entire season, that form would make us Title contenders.
What’s more, Roeder had achieved this without the services of star striker and record signing Michael Owen, whose metatarsal injury at Tottenham on the last day of 2005 was followed by a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament playing for England at the 2006 World Cup, ruling him out for nearly all the following season. The timing was particularly cruel since the legendary Alan Shearer had just hung up his boots. But with Obafemi Martins arriving from Inter Milan to take over the Number 9 shirt, and with Roeder given a permanent contract, there was still good reason to be hopeful.
How, then, did it all go so badly wrong?
In fairness to Roeder, he did soon find himself grappling with an unprecedented injury crisis, resulting in the early elevation of academy players to the first team. It is also true that new managers tend to enjoy a ‘honeymoon period’ in which a change of direction, atmosphere and tactics leads to a temporary upsurge in form. But it is almost unheard of for such a surge to last nearly half a season, and it would be even more unusual considering that Roeder was only caretaker throughout that period. The real answer could instead lie in the particular circumstances of the final Alan Shearer season at the club, and the widely overlooked possibility that the biggest loss when he retired was not that of his predatory goalscoring prowess, but rather that of his coaching ability.
It is probably easy for neutrals to forget that, when Shearer agreed to postpone his retirement and stay on to play for the 2005/06 season, he was given the position of player-coach. As a result of this, when Souness was sacked, Shearer became assistant manager under Roeder for the rest of the season. Consequently, our struggles after he left gain a different complexion. Your present correspondent started to wonder by about midway through the 2007/08 campaign, shortly before Shearer turned down the opportunity to resume the assistant role under the returning Kevin Keegan (of blessed memory), if he could in fact have been the real driving force behind that sensational turnaround two seasons previously.
Alas, as we all know, after Shearer finally returned to the dugout as manager, in answer to the club’s SOS with eight games of the 2008/09 season remaining, he was unable to prevent relegation. His only win came in the Tyne-Tees Derby (ensuring Middlesbrough went down with us), and the team gained a total of five points out of twenty-four on offer.
Obviously, even a more experienced manager might have struggled to keep us up under those circumstances; but if the returning local hero had pulled a rabbit out of the hat three-and-a-half years earlier, the magic touch seemed to have deserted him now. I therefore concluded that I had been mistaken in my assessment of the sensational run to Europe with Roeder in charge, and that this would remain the great unsolved mystery in the never-ending saga of Newcastle United.
Many years later, however, when I was reminiscing on all this with a couple of Chelsea-supporting friends, one of them suggested an intriguing alternate possibility. What if Roeder and Shearer, by extraordinary coincidence, just happened to be an extremely effective coaching partnership in the mould of Brian Clough and Peter Taylor (in the symbiotic nature of their relationship if not necessarily in terms of ability to win multiple trophies)? Could this explain why neither of the two men succeeded as manager without the other alongside him in the dugout? Did we inadvertently put together the best management duo of the noughties, only to break it up again almost immediately?
Regrettably, we can never know. Glenn Roeder, who of course resigned under intense pressure from the Newcastle board at the end of that 2006/07 season, sadly died in 2021 aged only 65; and Alan Shearer has never coached professionally since the day Newcastle went down with him at the helm. So, the great mystery remains unsolved. But if the combination of their personalities, tactical nous and man-management skills really was enough to revive a foundering campaign and transform a team of strugglers into potential Title contenders, then it must be a matter of profound regret that the club hierarchy failed to identify this and thereby make a concerted effort to persuade Shearer to continue in the dugout after calling time on his playing career.
Issue 208 – 15 October 2006
That may indeed represent the biggest missed opportunity for the club so far this century. Especially considering how the short-lived duo managed to rise above the turmoil of toxic boardroom politics and put smiles back on the faces of fans long dismayed at the board under Freddy Shepherd (which would give way to even greater discontent amid the gloom of the Ashley era). 20 years on, with two relegations and countless disappointments having followed before the Saudi takeover made us dare to dream, only for spending restrictions to bring the project to a juddering halt once that elusive major trophy had finally been delivered, this is more poignant than ever to contemplate.
Whatever our particular memories of that very strange 2006/07 season, and regardless of whether we believe Alan Shearer could have become a successful manager in his own right, we should always remember Glenn Roeder as a devoted servant of Newcastle United, who gave his all for the club in one of the most turbulent periods of its history.