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Kevin Keegan

pinkeye

by pinkeye
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Shearergol

Shearergol

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I'll also say that Keegan suffered from the rule change re: the Champions League. His Newcastle team would have given some of the best teams in Europe a bloody good game if given the opportunity.

 

We were mullered by Monaco in the UEFA Cup. Doesnt disprove what youve just said, because iirc we had no strikers fit for the game and Lee/Beardo had to play up front whilst this was at a time when Gillespie was still out and hence the team was struggling due to an imbalance and a lack of depth. Im only mentioning it because its an example of how average our backline was, which is supposedly a myth.

 

Keegan had gone by the time we played them.

 

Left 3 months before didn't he?

 

Henry was brilliant in that game.

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Dave

Dave

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The Keegan appointment had taken me through the full range of emotions. Initial and genuine shock was soon followed by despair, denial and then indifference. And that was just the first 30 seconds.

 

The subsequent media hyperbole was genuinely nauseating with radio and TV mikes shoved in the faces of the usual suspects and members of the general public telling the world "it's what the Geordies wanted". I'm sure there were even folk claiming that it didn't matter if we lost every game 5-4, King Kev would win us summat....

 

Well, to be brutally honest, it wasn't what this Geordie wanted.

 

Supporting this club has turned me bitter and cynical. I don't think I was born that way, it's just been a natural consequence of years of disappointment and despair. The rest of my life has turned out pretty well so it has to be Newcastle United's fault.

 

My relationship with NUFC was in danger of turning stale after the Souness/Roeder/Allardyce years and recent fiascos threatened to have me turning to marriage guidance counsellors. We've said it many times before but indifference really is the biggest worry for football fans (and marriages).

 

But as the days wore on and the Bolton match approached something deep down in my core started to reignite. The return of Keegan had relit the pilot light and gradually the old bolier was starting to fire up again.

 

It was a plainly ridiculous appointment and once again left us open to national ridicule which seems to be our perpetual place in the football world and I thought I'd had enough of that. But as the outside media started to snipe and sneer it all started to make perfect sense.

 

We clearly have an owner who is as bonkers as we are and who seems to have got into our psyche incredibly quickly. The media gurus couldn't cope with Ashley wearing his shirt and sitting (standing) with the fans. Why not? It might not be what a Chairman should do but he's the owner.

 

People like Allardyce and Souness had no place here - they should never have been appointed. They weren't good enough to completely change the make-up of the club. Souness had found that out at Liverpool. But the appointment of Keegan - whether it works or not - was probably perfect. A crazy manager, for a crazy club with a crazy owner and crazy fans.

 

If we can't get Wenger or Mourinho to this club (both big enough and good enough to transform us) then the last thing we want is another Allardyce or Souness (e.g. Mark Hughes). What's the point in that?

 

The national phone-ins have loved it, loved it. People from all over the country, desperate to point out that it's ridiculous. Desperate to tell us we'll never win anything and that it'll all end in tears. We know! But we'll have some great memories along the way.

 

And what if it did work? What if he just went and bloody won something? Can you imagine...? As KK said himself, it's not impossible.

 

Newcastle fans have huge expectations apparently. Do we? Do we really? I expect us to win bugger all in my lifetime but I want to get that anticipation, that raw emotion of going to see a side in black and white give their all and try and entertain. And in doing that I want us to have the same chance as Spurs, Everton, Man City, Villa or even 2004 Carling Cup winners, Boro, of winning a trophy. That's not being unrealistic.

 

The top four will take a little longer but they're not invincible. Fergie can't go on forever, Liverpool seem intent on imploding, Grant may hit tough times at Stamford Bridge and even Wenger has had transitional seasons.

 

What I don't want is a team that will bore the pants off us and struggle in the short term with the promise of boring the pants off us and struggling a bit less in the long term. Why would any fan put up with that?

 

So, having gone through the full gamut of emotions in the days leading up to the Bolton match, I was right behind the appointment, striding to the game, genuinely expectant and full of hopes and dreams. Not quite as I'd been as a youngster on my way to Keegan's debut for Newcastle but not far off. The boiler was fired up and the hot water was pumping through the pipes....

 

I'm sure most of us felt like that but how many fans of the "big four" have gone to a televised match against Bolton feeling the same? None, I'd suggest. And that's what they resent. They can't cope with the love we have for our club because they simply don't understand it.

 

Football is not about winning trophies, it's about winning battles and you decide what the battles are. I'd rather be Alan Shearer than Gary Neville. Who's got the most medals? Who's the legend...?

 

Sums up my feelings perfectly. :clap:

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Mr Logic

Mr Logic

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i'm the opposite, started out with all the excitement and now the doubts have begun to creep in.

 

Snap. Looks like a short-term solution the more I think about it. Will generate excitement and cash then fizzle out, I give it less than 2 full seasons, (from Aug 2008), before there are serious questions being asked.

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EthiGeordie

EthiGeordie

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Why no one comes up short when Keegan marches in

Kevin Keegan has his own unique method of making players feel 10 feet tall

 

Harry Pearson

January 24, 2008 11:58 PM

Last week the former Newcastle midfielder Rob Lee attested to Kevin Keegan's matchless ability to come into a dressing room and instantly make the players "feel 10 feet tall". On Saturday Robbie Keane commented that when Jermain Defoe was handed the Spurs captaincy before the game with Sunderland the forward suffered a similarly amazing growth spurt. "Jermain is only 5ft but he was 8ft before the game," the Irishman told reporters.

 

We can see from this that, when it comes to increasing a player's sense of his own height, Keegan is 25% more effective that the White Hart Lane captain's armband.

 

It helps, of course, that the Newcastle boss himself is diminutive. It was his stature after all that led Germans to nickname the Hamburg forward Mighty Mouse, though the bacon rind addiction played a part too, obviously.

 

Many readers are probably under the impression that Keegan affects this transformation in his players by charisma and brilliant man management alone. In fact, Special K is far more practical and cunning than he is often given credit for.

 

It is well known that when he fi rst took over at Newcastle in February 1992 one of the first things the bubbling Messiah did was tackle the training ground changing rooms. However, not only did he have them cleaned and fumigated; he had all the fixtures and fittings replaced with smaller replicas and the heights of the door frames lowered. The effect was completed by always serving the players their tea in doll's house cups and saucers and ensuring that when they served lunch the catering staff made full use of Marks and Spencer's range of mini party snacks. In a nutshell: Keegan makes players feel bigger by reducing the size of everything around them. "What we didn't realise at the time was that all the security staff at St James' Park were retired jockeys hired by Kev," the Newcastle goalkeeper of that and several other eras, Pavel Srnicek, would later recall in his autobiography, Pavs of Glory . "You'd see the bouncers in their black jackets and you just towered over them. It felt fantastic. And, of course, Terry McDermott did an absolutely brilliant job too. I remember one lunchtime he cut a midget pork pie into 12 slices and served it to the first team squad with fried quails eggs, tiny wee jersey royals and some shredded Brussels sprout that he told everyone was cabbage. Eating that off one-third scale plates with kids' cutlery made your hands look absolutely massive. Terry had literally made us feel like giants."

 

Team bonding weekends at Bekonscot model village and Legoland helped further to increase the Newcastle team's sense of its own enormousness.

 

The whole elaborate scheme began to unravel during the pulsating 1995-96 season. With Keegan's team 10 points clear of their rivals at the top of the Premiership, their Belgian centre-back Philippe Albert wandered into a supermarket one day after mistaking it for a pigeon loft. What he saw in the fruit and veg section would have a dramatic effect on morale at St James' Park and alter the course of the people's game.

 

"It was half-time of the crucial clash with Man United at St James' Park," Srnicek wrote. "The match was still in the balance at 0-0. We knew that, if we won this game the title would practically be ours. Then Arthur Cox brought in our traditional interval orange slices. When Philippe took his he studied it for a moment and then - and I'll never forget this moment for as long as I wear tracksuit bottoms - he said in a loud and authoritative voice: 'This is not an orange. This is a kumquat.'

 

"Kevin tried to save the situation by arguing that it wasn't a kumquat, it was just a very small satsuma, but the damage was done. Our minds were totally messed up. We weren't huge at all. We were just men of average height. We had been conned. Eric Cantona scored the winner and the rest, as they say, is hysteria .

 

"To be fair Kevin is a nice guy, the sort of manager who likes to put his arm around a players shoulder. But he couldn't do that with us without giving up the pretence that we were 90cm taller than him. In the end he lost the dressing room, which was not surprising since it was actually really, really little."

 

The sports psychologist professor Phil Singlet also warns that making the players feel 10-feet tall may have dramatic short-term effects, but fail in the longer term. "The trouble," he explains, "is the players' excitement at suddenly being able to look a giraffe straight in the eye quickly pales once the cruel reality of always having to wear your trousers low down on your hips to avoid showing everyone the tops of your socks hits home. And then, of course, there is the other major concern. If you make a player feel 10, 12, 15 feet tall, then inevitably there is going to come a time when he starts to believe he is bigger than the club. And, who knows, he could be correct."

 

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/01/24/why_no_one_comes_up_short_when.html

 

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Dokko

Dokko

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_article_id=510473&in_page_id=1951&ct=5

 

Was reading a shocking piece on DR being axed by ITV, then saw this:  :laugh:

 

WHO SILENCED SETANTA?

 

An investigation is going on at Newcastle into who might have pulled the Setanta Sports plug at the press conference to unveil Kevin Keegan, which resulted in the subscription station losing sound during a critical part of the event.

 

Such is competition among broadcasters that dirty tricks have not been ruled out, especially as Setanta had rigorously tested their audio connections before the start of the Keegan conference.

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