Why Keegan’s return could be a welcome relief

Jan 20 2008 by Neil Farrington, Sunday Sun

IN years to come, I hope my grandchildren – if I’m so blessed – ask me where I was when I heard of the Third Coming of King Kev.

For their curiosity will mean that the Messiah has worked miracles yet again at a club synonymous with failure on a biblical scale.

Sorry, make that magic instead of miracles.

But I will lie to those grandchildren.

For the painful truth is I was researching pile creams on t’internet when Kevin Keegan agreed to drag Newcastle back out of the s**t.

Toon balmy, if you will.

No wonder really, considering the football on offer at St James’s Park has kept my bum rooted to my seat for three years or more.

Yet even if I hadn’t promptly abandoned my trip to the chemist’s for a tube of Preparation H on Wednesday afternoon, it was Special K that kept me awake that night, not my Emma Freuds.

And Newcastle United have been sending me to sleep for so long that a lack of shut-eye came as a pleasure.

Recent weeks had given rise to the suspicion that Tyneside remains a foreign place to the rest of the country.

You know what I mean, all that bilious guff spewing forth from south of the Watford Gap about fans treating Sam Allardyce badly and running him out of Toon.

Well, the reaction to Keegan’s return has confirmed that the Geordie Nation (© Sir John Hall) is, indeed, a land apart.

While Newcastle is all smiles again, outsiders – almost to a man – regard the city with an all-knowing sneer; a “look at those northern numpties” smirk.

With football now a business; its sense of romance all but dead, love affairs like that rekindled at St James’s Park invite scorn.

And it would be easy to take the cynical view.

In coaxing Keegan back, Mike “Mr Lonsdale” Ashley is doing what he does best – appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Or rather, appeasing the lowest common denominator.

But does Keegan Mk III guarantee Newcastle’s return to English football’s top table, let alone guarantee them silverware?

Does it even guarantee the type of near-miss so synonymous with KK Mk II?

Of course not. The Premier League has changed. The big boys are bigger, stronger (last time around, Roy Evans was manager of Liverpool, Chelsea were in mid-table under Glenn Hoddle, Bruce Rioch, for pity’s sake, was boss of Arsenal) and, perhaps most notably, meaner. So too those chasing them.

Newcastle are well back in that pursuing pack, and relatively (relative to the side which won hearts and, so poignantly, nothing else back in ‘96) short of flair.

What price too of King Kev rising to the challenge, set by chairman Chris Mort less than 24 hours before his arrival, of rebuilding the Magpies’ youth policy?

That’s the youth policy he left to rot. A youth policy which, a look at United’s current first team suggests, has never really recovered.

Oh, and as if we would be allowed to forget it, Kev’s a quitter, isn’t he?

No, to those who see the world in colour rather than monochrome, the idea that a KK-led black and white army will swiftly sweep all before it is absurd.

So it’s a good job that most Newcastle fans agree.

Indeed, if anyone is guilty of Keeganmania, it’s those same sneering, oh-so-superior members of the national media.

Who claimed Wednesday night’s cup replay against Stoke was a King Kev- inspired sell-out even as 17,000 seats lay empty?

Who is talking of Ronaldinho, Drogba and, most preposterously, Kaka coming to St James’s?

No supporter I know.

No, they may be sporting smiles wider than the mouth of the Tyne, but the sane majority of Magpie fans – ie not the care in the community cases wheeled out by Sky – are not bearing false expectations.

Tyneside is in tumult not because it anticipates imminent silverware, but simply because life is about to get better.

Where supporting Newcastle has for too long been a chore, it’s soon to be a pleasure.

The fans may now expect the best from their team, but they don’t expect to be the best.

This, lest we forget, was a club so down on its uppers that Graeme Souness – I’ll have some of whatever he’s on, by the way – saw fit to talk of making his own Magpie comeback.

At rock bottom to my sore bottom.

Good job Keegan is here to get the club, yours truly and Tyneside up on our feet.