Newcastle United 95/96: From the Jaws of Victory
This is a brilliant extract from the excellent From the Jaws of Victory: A History of Football’s Nearly Men.
Snow shrouded the north-east copiously and as if trying to disguise it as somewhere else. It would not have been a surprise to spot penguins advancing on Hartlepool or a polar bear warming his paws on the radiators inside Chester-le-Street Asda. For the Colombian gazing down from an aeroplane window, it must have been a surreal sight. Had The Snowman ever been screened in Bogotá, he may have wondered if he were now observing its filming location and ripping loose his in-flight earphones for fear of experiencing We’re Walking in the Air.
It was February 1996, and as his private jet swooped low over County Durham, perhaps Faustino Asprilla ruminated on how the relatively recent loss of heavy industry had altered this region’s landscape. Or, perhaps he was asking his interpreter how to translate ‘Warren Barton’ into Spanish. Asprilla had signed for Newcastle United on Thursday February 8. His work permit was granted the following day, and now, at 11am on Saturday February 10, ‘Tino’ was about to touch down on the tarmac of Teesside Airport. For a fee of £7.5m, he had exchanged the north-eastern region of Emilia-Romagna for Tyneside, and Parma for Ponteland. It was that kind of era. The money of John Hall at St James’ Park and Steve Gibson at the Riverside Stadium talked, and usually it said: “It’s not that cold here, and we’ll get you some of those fancy beans you like.”
Asprilla stepped down from the plane and a gust of snow whipped across the tarmac and into his face. It was a bit like being egged by an entire country. Bienvenido a Inglaterra, Tino. The first thing to engulf him was the seal-grey fur coat he wore, which could be filed under the fashion category ‘stowaway chic’. The second was a smattering of press photographers and keen Magpies supporters, many of the latter notably and stereotypically coatless. The only fever they had contracted, though, was for Kevin Keegan’s new signing, a dynamic and dexterous forward first encountered here in the UK on Channel 4’s Gazzetta Football Italia. Tino was rock ‘n’ roll. Tino was impossibly exotic. Tino was going to win them the league.
Kevin Keegan met his new acquisition for lunch at the Newcastle team hotel. That afternoon they would face Middlesbrough on Teesside, snow or not. The Colombian drank a glass of wine and agreed to be named as a substitute. ‘I explained it was purely so he could get a feel for it,’ Keegan wrote in his most recent autobiography. ‘It was never my intention to bring him on.’
Ahead of this first ever Tees-Tyne derby at the Riverside, Boro had lost six matches in succession. Heady autumn days of sitting fourth in the table felt more remote than Colombian sunshine. Manager Bryan Robson wore the worried look of a man who had received the wrong kind of advice from a cash machine. Hope rested with his own South American, the Brazilian Juninho, for whom contemporary journalists had dusted off the underused epithet ‘mercurial’. On some afternoons, his feet seemed to twinkle in the low winter sun. Today, the weather had calmed and the sky consisted of that murky silver colour which makes men look up, pause and claim: “It feels too cold to snow.” It was Baltic down by the Tees and yet Juninho thrived and buzzed in a hectic, restless first-half. Early on, the 5’5” man from São Paolo beat Darren Peacock to a header. Then, he forced Newcastle’s John Beresford to score an own goal. 1-0 Boro. Tino who?
In one of those combinations that could only happen during the Premier League’s mid-1990s sweet spot of homespun heart and continental innovation, Paul Wilkinson, Nick Barmby and Juninho had Newcastle pinned back. Then Tino rose from the dugout and sauntered up and down the touchline a few times, in a bench coat the size of a factory chimney. The black and white thousands in the away end roared once as he ran, and again when Keegan invited him to remove his abundant jacket. In the 67th minute, Asprilla made the sign of the cross with a gloved hand and entered the bitter fray. Geordies hollered their delight. Teessiders jeered nervously and sang for Juninho. It was an unlikely setting for such Latin American rivalry.
Asprilla’s arrival caused spectacular, beguiling chaos. His trickery and lightness, his ability to appear gangly yet deft, languid yet urgent, baffled Middlesbrough. He turned through the home midfield as if on a conjuring spree, his nifty beating of players resembling more a sleight of hand than a footballing manoeuvre. Six minutes after entering the scene, Tino seemed to entwine centre-half Steve Vickers in the manner of a child tying up a sibling during a game of Cowboys and Indians. Vickers must have felt hungover by the time he had looked up and seen Steve Watson plunging the ball into the net. The winning goal appeared shortly afterwards, a trickling effort from Les Ferdinand that somehow beat Gary Walsh, who resembled a clumsy man up a ladder unable to stop its slow descent to earth. Boro had been looking at the stars and feeling ready to notch a rare win. Now, they were in the gutter, and seeking inspiration from Jamie Pollock.
“Tinooooo, Tinooooo”, cried the bawling zebras of Newcastle and then, when the final whistle blew: “We shall not/We shall not be moved…” Their team had escaped thanks to the bewitching powers of a man who had drunk Rioja for lunch. They remained top of the Premier League. To play badly and emerge victorious was a mark of champions. To do it by virtue of a scintillating new signing was poetic. To watch the Magpies was to witness fate unfolding. What could possibly go wrong?
Newcastle upon Tyne cannot help but look pretty. It just has one of those faces. It ‘is a magnificent city for sheer excitement’, offered the great Ian Nairn, ‘the view that stops you dead halfway along a street, or the flight of steps that sucks you in like a vortex. Too few people know about it; fewer still understand just why the Newcastle pattern is so marvellous.’ Nairn, a revered architectural critic, was writing on that occasion of the place in the 1960s, though his words still apply today, and did as well to the mid-’90s city that Faustino Asprilla moved among. Back in the ‘60s, St James’ Park was a cosy, if raw, environment; Nairn could never have guessed that it would become one of Newcastle’s great architectural diversions, a charismatic temple brooding over its place yet belonging, in their eyes, to its people; the closing bracket to the Tyne Bridge’s opener.
It more resembled its ‘60s self than its modern, colossal state when Kevin Keegan became club manager in February 1992. Though that natural beauty bestowed of being built in a valley was permanent and unflinching, in truth, much of Newcastle now wore a tired, dreary look and was a place of shrugged shoulders and sighs; sighs as the last shipyards fell, sighs as those surrounding coal towns that fed the Tyne were slayed, sighs as the dole line grew longer than the queue for the Gallowgate End at St James’.
“But what do they do all day?/And what are they supposed to say?/ What does a father tell his son?” sings Jimmy Nail in the permanently moving record Big River. It felt like all had been lost. And then, in April, the bloody Tories (for it might as well have said that on ballot papers) were elected again.
The epic time-sweep television series Our Friends in the North’s final episode is set in 1995 and it is as close to a documentary as exists about the Big River city in that era. Occasional flutters of hope and signs that regeneration might just benefit more than a few people are littered among the more familiar, hopeless landscapes. The sheer grinding grey of everything from pavement to sky is a heavy, cloying presence, as if the viewer’s television has chosen its own settings. Everywhere people are loitering, hanging around by the Swing Bridge with nothing to do, looking at impossible holidays in the windows of Lunn Poly, sitting on the steps by Grey’s Monument with no-one to meet and no Metro to catch. To see sadness among such glorious beauty is oddly compelling. There is, too, petty crime — joy riding, shoplifting, car radios prised free with a screwdriver — in this epoch of delinquents and moral panics, of John Major and chips in newspaper wrappers, of chasms where shipyards once hummed and retail parks had yet to fill the land. Often, Newcastle looked like the 1980s had yet to arrive, never mind the 1990s.
This context meant that the arrival of Kevin Keegan and the success of his team were vital. It was not just a happy sideshow in some prosperous multi-club city where football was merely another pastime option; Newcastle United were hope, colour, noise, the future. In many senses, they were this city. A winning team invigorated the disenfranchised. It had the stall men of the Grainger Market rolling brown paper bags of pears beneath toothy grins. It gave young lads something to gather for, away towns to visit on dark blue and egg yolk yellow InterCity 125 trains. It even returned to those with not a hope of affording access to St James’ some pride and identity, a phenomenon so wonderfully, if bleakly, portrayed in Jonathan Tulloch’s novel The Season Ticket, and its film adaptation, Purely Belter. Government would never do that for the Geordies. Commerce neither. Football could and did.
Shortly after, somehow, John Major was returned to power in April, Keegan cast his first spell and kept the sinking Magpies from relegation to England’s third tier. The following season, 1992/93, they won the league playing snappy, magnetic football. When Ian Nairn referred to a ‘Newcastle pattern’, he was, of course, referring to the topography of the city. Yet the term could be applied to Keegan’s outfit, with their template of lulling in teams and blinding them on the break, and then relentlessly pursuing kill after kill.
It served them well in their first Premier League season, 1993/94. Newcastle finished in third place, their highest ranking since just after the General Strike. Andrew Cole scored 41 times. Keegan’s reign invited terms like ‘Messiah’ and ‘Saviour’, and there was something religious about the way in which he then proceeded to sell Cole halfway through the 1994/95 season, as if he had received a message from on high. His disciples missed their main goalscorer, and the team finished sixth. There was hunger for more, and Newcastle United had behind them a whole city whose fortune seemed to hang on theirs. The club determined the mood of this entire, dramatic place.
By the summer of 1995, top-flight football had just about completed its journey from societal pariah to celebrated and glamourous darling, though it didn’t always feel that way for those of us watching Phil Whelan slice another clearance into the disabled enclosure. Blackburn Rovers’ moneyed route to the 1994-95 Premier League title prompted many other clubs to throw around cash with all the abandon of a drunk dad at his daughter’s wedding. In came Dennis Bergkamp and David Platt at Arsenal, Ruud Gullit (free, but most emphatically waged) at Chelsea, Savo Milošević at Aston Villa and Georgi Kinkladze at Manchester City.
Liverpool paid £8.5 million for Stan Collymore, and Newcastle £6 million for Les Ferdinand. One scored a hatful of goals and achieved legendary status, while the other has lots of opinions.
As witnessed in the Tees-Tyne derby that February, it was, too, a time when the old worlds and the new collided – Duncan Ferguson earning £6.50 a week sweeping prison floors and Bruce Grobelaar on match-fixing charges on the one hand, those foreign stars with their pasta and exotic boot makes on the other. Nothing summed up this blend of shepherd’s pie and sun-dried tomatoes more than watching the buccaneering Serbian Saša Ćurčić play at Bolton’s charming but dated Burnden Park.
Early in the term, Manchester United’s young team were beaten and condemned and Leeds United’s Tony Yeboah scored the kind of goals that even Roy Race would have thought far-fetched. Les Ferdinand, backed by wily Robert Lee and the ever-ingenious Peter Beardsley, steamed through Coventry City and Everton. As the season progressed, many other teams would fall victim to the alleged tyrant of the Blue Peter garden. Powered by Ferdinand, Lee, Beardsley and the almost-sarcastically handsome David Ginola, the Magpies won their first four games. By the end of November, they were five points clear at the top. The sight of Keegan and his assistant, Terry McDermott, springing from the bench after a goal, seemingly in competition, like two drunks vying to pay for the last round at closing time, became a terrific, rousing sideshow.
There were shadows and worries, moments of doubt for those many Tynesiders who attached so much to their club. Eric Cantona’s return from his kung-fu ban spurred the Magpies’ title rivals, for whom Andrew Cole was now scoring with alarming and familiar regularity. And Newcastle themselves were prone to sporadic, unexpected defeats, often in the capital. A reverse at Stamford Bridge in December left Keegan with time to reflect: “When I get on the bus and I’m taking this team around the country, I look back at the players and I think ‘Yeah, I’m proud to take this group of lads down there.’ We won’t always win, but we’re very much on par to win something this year. And we’ve tried to do it in style.” Travelling back north on those occasions, the team coach would stop and the players eat fish and chips at the Wetherby Whaler. Phillipe Albert on the scrap butties and Tizer? These were truly in-between times.
On December 27, Manchester United defeated Newcastle 2-0 at Old Trafford. “It pegs Newcastle back from ten points’ lead to seven, which is vital,” said Alex Ferguson with a steely glint in his eye afterwards. The Mancunians were tracking and poking the Novocastrians during games and after them. Ferguson looked around the corner and saw a gift waiting. Keegan saw only a dark stranger. Yet he rallied the Geordies, and they him. By early January, Newcastle had extended their lead over the Red Devils to 12 points. “We’re in a great position,” said Keegan.
If Faustino Asprilla had a newspaper with him on that snowy flight, he may have checked the league table and wondered why Newcastle were sufficiently worried to summon him. Surely such a useful late winter lead at the top would be enough? “It really depends on how Newcastle handle it,” Alex Ferguson had said after his team’s victory at Upton Park on January 22. “They’ve some tough away fixtures. We’ve had a lot of tough away fixtures. Once it comes to March … Who knows?” Fergie’s team won their next four matches.
After the Asprilla cameo at Boro, Newcastle lost to West Ham United (bloody London …) and drew 3-3 at Maine Road. On March 4, Ferguson’s team travelled to play Keegan’s on Tyneside. Newcastle battered and peppered Peter Schmeichel’s goal. Eric Cantona scored and the Reds won 1-0. “We’re still top of the league,” said Keegan afterwards, “if we win our game in hand, we’re four points clear.” Ifs and buts had infiltrated the usual Keegan positivity. It was as if a dad had started to hint that there would not be enough money for Christmas this year.
In the final week of March, Manchester United climbed to the top of the Premier League. Just before Easter, the Messiah took his team to Anfield. After two minutes, the Magpies were a goal down. After quarter of an hour they led. So seesawed this delirious match until the 92nd minute and Martin Tyler’s cry of “Collymore closing in … ” and 4-3 to Liverpool and Keegan flopped on the dugout hoardings like a sailor vomiting over the side of a ship. “Lady Luck’s probably not quite with us like she was early in the season, and that might make a massive difference,” he reflected afterwards.
On Easter Monday, Newcastle were defeated 2-1 at Ewood Park. A Geordie, Graham Fenton, scored both Blackburn Rovers goals. Lady Luck, it seemed, had not only absconded, she had bought a season ticket at Old Trafford. “I would like us to finish runners-up if we can’t win it. This club has never done that,” said Keegan this time. Ambition was fading. He had promised to lasso the moon, but his rope had become entangled on a telegraph wire.
Then, a lifeline: Manchester United lost at The Dell. Newcastle were now three points behind with a game in hand, that magical phrase that bears more hope than four words should be made to withstand. After a narrow Red Devils victory at Elland Road, Alex Ferguson accused the Leeds players of raising their game against his team. “For some of them,” said Ferguson, “it’s more important to get a result against Manchester United to stop them winning the league than anything else. They’re cheating their manager … when they play Newcastle, you wait and see the difference.”
At the end of April, the Magpies contested that very fixture. Keith Gillespie, a lesser-heralded craftsman of the wing, scored the game’s only goal. Keegan took the Sky television headphones and microphone and combusted, finger-jabbing towards the camera as if its lens were Ferguson’s chest. “A lot of things have been said over the last few days, some of them almost slanderous…when you do that with footballers, like he said about Leeds…I’ve kept really quiet, but I’ll tell you something, he went down in my estimation when he said that. We haven’t resorted to that, but I tell you, you can tell him now, he’ll be watching it: we’re still fighting for this title and he’s gotta go to Middlesbrough and get something and I’ll tell you, honestly, I will love it if we beat them. Love it.”
At that point, it was possible to imagine a Glaswegian in a plush Cheshire front room pouring another single malt.
The snatching of three points at Leeds occurred on a Monday night, April 29. Though conventional wisdom now cites Keegan’s broadcast eruption as the moment Newcastle lost the title, a draw at the City Ground three days later was the true catastrophe. “You’re gonna win fuck all,” sang the Forest fans, and even the most bullish away-end Geordie struggled to disagree. On the final day, Manchester United did go to Middlesbrough and get something, a 3-0 victory against a Boro side who gave all the effort and enthusiasm of teenagers at a barn dance. Steve Bruce lifted the Premier League trophy and fans of both clubs sang “Let’s all laugh at Keegan.”
Forty miles north, men cried into the River Tyne and drowned their sorrows on the Bigg Market. With the reflection that half a dozen pints can bring, they could salute the odyssey that Keegan had taken them on. One man’s charisma and his squad’s fizzing, irrepressible football had given them back their faith in a club and its city. That city seemed, somehow, like it had a future for the first time in years. Surely this was just the beginning of the story.
This extract appears in From the Jaws of Victory: A History of Football’s Nearly Men.
Publisher – Halcyon Publishing
Price – £10.99 (£8.99 during pre-orders, Nov 2-11).
