F365 Opinion

Alan Shearer was one of the most successful strikers of the 1990s: England captain, multiple player of the year, Euro 96 golden boot winner. But he earned just one major medal, the 1995 league title with Blackburn, and the only other trophy he collected was the head of the Newcastle manager who tried to drop him.

Now, the Geordie local hero is back at St James' Park. Unlike Ruud Gullit, who arrived promising sexy football and left a year later after relegating Shearer to the bench and losing a derby to Sunderland, the striker knows he has no time for showy statements. The crisis is now. The crisis is not, as so often at the Toon, one of dashed expectations, but one of a club in danger of crashing into the rocks.

Mike Ashley appeared to have reached rock bottom with the club's fans in the autumn. The departure of Kevin Keegan left the beer-guzzling owner looking for a way out, with Joe Kinnear installed as temporary manager not least because the position looked impermanent with a sale on the cards. Kinnear's illness and the catastrophic caretakership of Chris Hughton has shown that there is, in fact, a way down for Ashley's stock. Into the Championship - into collapse?

Newcastle have financial commitments designed for top-half football. They do not look like another Leeds, but the Yorkshire club did not go down in the teeth of an international crisis that has already made Ashley's bid to fund a buyer elusive. Yet the man who brought back Keegan has pulled off another astonishing coup.

Shearer has been criticised for everything from his parroting of the views of other pundits to his choice in trousers, and one regular charge as he has flirted with involvement at St James' Park in recent years has been that he is happy in his Match of the Day comfort zone. Well, he has taken a massive step away from the studio and you have to admire that willingness.

The assumption was that when he moved into management, if at all, it would be in favourable circumstances. Alan Hansen and Andy Gray have resisted the temptation (aside from Gray's pre-Sky spell with Ron Atkinson at Aston Villa) and the longer Shearer held out the less likely it seemed he would put his reputation on the line, even though he has collected some (though not the UEFA Pro Licence) of the coaching badges the job now requires.

He is risking his status as a secular Tyneside saint now. In 1992 Sir John Hall plucked Kevin Keegan from nowhere when Division Three threatened. With 16 matches left, Newcastle were four points from a safe spot; Shearer has half that number of games in which to make up half the deficit. But the stakes are surely higher.

The appointment of a manager with no serious recommendation beyond local reputation is a massive gamble, but doing nothing was not an option. In the autumn Ashley's treatment of Keegan forced him to turn to the golf course to find a replacement, someone widely assumed to be in retirement. The owner must have thought that he had made the last such appointment, but seven points from 12 games since Christmas have left him looking for another ace to play.

Ashley has surely made an appeal based on emotion - and succeeded. On Saturday, when Shearer picks a side to face Chelsea, we'll get a chance to see just what emotion can do for a football club. I fear it will not be enough against opposition of that calibre, but with time running out a side in the bottom three cannot afford to pick and choose its matches.

I am surprised to say these words, but Alan Shearer, I salute you. And Mike Ashley, I at least salute your capacity to surprise.

Philip Cornwall