Back in January 1997, Kevin Keegan said he thought he could not take the team any further. Maybe burnout from the previous “So close” season, the impact also possibly of the club’s owners wanting to float the club on the stock exchange.
Whatever the reason(s), the whole of Tyneside was gutted.
Then when Kenny Dalglish was appointed, I remember the feeling was of excitement mixed with cautious optimism.
Kenny was a legend at Liverpool, revered just as much and maybe even more so than King Kev. He had won titles both as a player and manager with Liverpool, then guided Blackburn to a Premier League title. For younger readers think Leicester City in 2016, but more significantly, a certain Alan Shearer was the main man of that team. Surely, Kenny was the man to finish the job that Keegan started.
In my previous article (‘Sometimes the journey is better than the destination’) I noted that as a kid back then, the beginning of the 1995-96 season was when I truly began my love affair with NUFC.
By 1997, a couple of more years of knowledge, in part from watching a collection of old VHS tapes, I thought the job Dalglish did at Blackburn was fantastic.
A more rigid and pragmatic style to what we were used to under Kevin Keegan, I became convinced Kenny Dalglish was the man for the job. A bit of fine tuning here and there in the squad was all that was needed.
After all, we still had Shearer, Ferdinand, Ginola, Asprilla, Albert, Batty, Lee et al and after a bit of a jittery start and to Dalglish’s credit he finished off that 1996-97 season taking NUFC to second place and Champions League qualification (for the first time in our history). Again, no title, as we finished (again) behind Manchester United, but we had something very tangible to build upon once again.
The summer of 1997 and I felt even more excited than usual, as my dad had told me he would be taking me to Tossa de Mar in Spain, which was to be my first trip abroad. But excitement over that upcoming holiday had to take a back seat to my anticipation business that Newcastle United were going to conduct.
We were a side constantly pushing Man U and we had just qualified for the Champions League (In my youthful innocence I didn’t realise at the time we had to firstly get through a two-leg qualifier against Croatia Zagreb).
Issue 100 – June 1997
I was eagerly awaiting the next superstars to walk onto the hallowed SJP turf. Players like Paolo Di Canio and Christian Ziege were tentatively linked, as was a certain Jon Dahl Tomasson.
The first two we didn’t get but we got Tomasson for I believe £3.5m. The reaction to his signing was one of optimism and he certainly looked the part in pre season and scored some great goals.
As the summer went on though, doubts started to creep in. They then reached levels of biblical concerns when, in one of those meaningless pre season tournaments at Goodison Park, our main man Alan Shearer suffered a freak injury which ruled him out for what turned out to be the entire first half of the season. This disaster was compounded by the fact that at the same time Les Ferdinand was inexplicably being sold to Tottenham for £6m. Our two main strikers who had scored a combined tally of 49 goals between them the previous season in all competitions.
You’d be hard pressed to find any club that would not suffer with losing mercurial, guaranteed goal getters such as those two. We needed replacements and fast. And we did. We got our superstar signings. A 33 year old John Barnes and 35 year old Ian Rush. No disrespect to either but they had their best days behind them. We also signed a 35 year old Stuart Pearce, who to be fair gave everything. Ketsbaia and Pistone also arrived, plus a certain Shay Given.
However, the season of 97-98 was, to put it mildly, rubbish. Apart from the 3-2 Asprilla hat-trick against Barcelona and the trip to Wembley, it was a complete antithesis of the previous season. From second to thirteenth and only 35 Premier League goals scored. Kenny Dalglish would only last two more games the following season.
He was replaced a day later by Ruud Gullit.
Claims of ‘Sexy Football’ and again a wave of hope and optimism swept through Tyneside. Of course history tells us that it was about as sexy as a packet of KP nuts.
Issue 123 – June 1999
Gullit lasted just over a year and whether he was driven temporarily insane or his massive ego got the better of him (of course it was a mixture of the two) but he left out both Duncan Ferguson AND Alan Shearer for a do or die against our red and white neighbours on a night that was monsoon conditions ( if ever a night was punctuated by symbolism it was this).
The next day, as the story goes, Big Al dropped his kids off early at school ready to go storming into Gullit’s office only to find Big Dunc had beat him to it. Gullit resigned. I don’t care what the papers said, he just wanted to get as far away as possible from Ferguson and Shearer. To be fair he did leave the next manager a talented if disjointed team of players that included Gary Speed, Shay Given, Nobby Solano, Robert Lee, Kieron Dyer, Didier Domi and of course Shearer and Ferguson. That next manager was of course the Geordie Grandfather Sir Bobby Robson.
I will do a piece on Sir Bobby and the galvanising impact he had on the club, the much loved adventure he took us all on.
I hope you all enjoyed this article (apologies for dredging up some bad memories) but to get to the Sir Bobby Robson part, I thought it would make sense to remind us all (sorry again!) of the two previous years of sorrow and discontent.
Please let me know in the comments if I have missed out any details which I’m sure I will have done.