longer.blue

I've written lots about Kevin Keegan over the years. This is a bit from my first book, Black and White Army: A Season Supporting Newcastle United, published in 2003: Kevin Keegan was loved on Tyneside. Here he scored goals, got us promoted, left in a helicopter, came back, saved us from relegation, got us promoted again, beat Manchester United 5-0, built the best Newcastle side most of us have ever seen, and oh-so-nearly brought back the glory days. Before Keegan took the managerial job at Newcastle, the club were teetering on the very cusp of non-existence. In the run-up to the 1991-92 season, Ossie Ardiles’ side were favourites to win the second division. But, like the design for the team’s awful thin stripe/thick stripe ‘barcode’ home shirts, and as a result of having virtually no good players, everything sharply went pear-shaped. Having lost league games to the likes of Southend, Brighton and Oxford, Newcastle sat on the very brink of third division mediocrity. It is not beyond the realms of possibility to suppose that relegation to the third division could have been the beginning of the end for Newcastle United. And it is an absolute certainty that, if United had gone down, the club would not currently be troubling the upper echelons of the Premier League. So a change was made. I remember sitting at the back of a bus gazing incredulously at the front page of the Evening Chronicle, waiting for it to sink in: Keegan was back. And how many neutral observers must have stifled giggles when one of the first things Keegan said was, ‘Potentially we’re sat on the biggest club in Great Britain’? We knew he was right, but then Keegan and the supporters always understood each other. The bubble perm had gone, replaced by a greying feather cut, but it was the same old Keegan. Thirteen games later, after David Kelly’s great volley against Portsmouth, and Gavin Peacock’s chip and an own goal amid mayhem at Leicester City, United were saved. And that should have been it. Keegan had only signed on for 13 weeks. Job done, he could have walked away. But he didn’t. And the following season, with Rob Lee and Andy Cole notable additions to the squad, Newcastle decimated the opposition, including a double over Sunderland, in their total domination of the First Division. They were First Division champions – and Keegan had changed the club forever in his first full season in charge. Then began the rollercoaster ride that has been the Premier League. Despite his saving the club, the ‘Keegan season’ everyone always remembers is 1995-96 – the season where Newcastle supposedly ‘blew it’. (In fact, Manchester United put together a devastating run, and it was they who won the league rather than Newcastle losing it.) So the club won nothing. They also played the best football I had ever seen. I was walking into work on Monday mornings with a smile on my face – practically unheard of before then or since. United were ‘The Entertainers’, and everyone loved them. Every football TV show showed slow-motion montages of Toon goals, dubbed to That’s Entertainment by The Jam, even though the lyrics were totally inappropriate. Ferdinand, Ginola, and Asprilla lit up our lives. But Newcastle couldn’t keep it going, and after defeat at Blackburn (courtesy of two goals famously scored by Geordie Graham Fenton, and less famously set up by Geordie Alan Shearer), we knew it was all but over. Keegan never gave up, and his ‘I will love it if we beat them’ Sky TV outburst was a typically passionate display from the man, and not, as the media insisted, a sign of him cracking under pressure. He had to wait until the following season to fulfil his wish of beating Man United, with Shearer on board, and that legendary victory, ‘the five-nil’, was probably the best performance by any Newcastle team in living memory. And then it was over. Keegan walked. No one really understood why. But he had taken the club from the brink of obscurity to the dizzying heights of the Premier League, and showed us the best football we had ever seen into the bargain. To judge his reign as a failure would be to ignore where we came from and where we ended up.