Please, no tears for real culprits

May 24 2009 by Neil Farrington, Sunday Sun

NO trouble, no topless fat lads, and definitely, positively, absolutely NO tears.

Please.

The last thing we want today, other than victory for Aston Villa, Chelsea, West Ham or Hull, is for Sky’s cameras to catch fans from Tyne, Tees or Wear crying a river.

For, as football’s hotbed is confirmed as a deathbed, the real crying shame is that so many responsible for its demise won’t suffer for it. Or not suffer like the fans, at any rate.

First things first: Newcastle United, Sunderland and Middlesbrough deserve the worst to happen this afternoon.

Relegation for one or two of the three would not represent misfortune, but justice.

Justice for crimes committed in this and previous seasons.

The North East’s triple tale of woe is no hard-luck story, no matter that it may feature an anti-Alex Ferguson postscript.

No matter, even, that it may have a partly happy ending.

For whatever reprieve may await one or, at best, two of our trio, it won’t herald a bright new chapter in their history.

Not while many of those who cut our “Big Three” down to size are still at large. Not while the wounds they inflicted remain raw.

Fateful, possible fatal decisions – not fate – have brought us to this sorry pass.

And fans who, for weeks, have been asked to delay playing the blame game have the right to kick off as soon as the whistle is blown – in every sense – today.

Newcastle’s season having been the sum of the club’s spare parts, talk of suing Manchester United for using theirs at Hull is rich indeed.

Richer than any member of the Magpies’ Fairs Cup winnings side of 1969, that’s for sure. That team will attend a reunion this week. How its members deserve to meet in better circumstances.

There would have been no hiding place on Tyneside, never mind at St James’s Park, for failures and wasters 40 years ago.

The men who so famously lifted Newcastle’s last trophy lived in three-bed semis next door to the fans who feted their path to glory.

So too Sunderland’s legends of 1973.

Today’s players are also untouchables, but only in that they live behind security gates in mansions and drive behind tinted windows.

Their managers may retain the common touch, but how much would defeat – and demotion – really hurt the so-called stars of today?

I only ask because those players, even by current standards of pampered unaccountability, have got off mightily lightly for their part in North East football’s downfall.

Sure, they have plenty of company . . . just about the only people concerned who don’t deserve to be heading for a fall are those it will hurt most: the fans.

After all, Newcastle stand to be top of at least one league – for the biggest average gates ever boasted by a relegated club. On that score, Sunderland would rank fifth.

But in the rush of those fans to point the finger at individuals, the collective culpability of the men out on the pitch should not go overlooked.

Nor should it be underestimated.

Not since Margaret Thatcher and Ian McGregor has anyone taken so much out of the North East and put in so little.

From the oft-absent Michael Owen to the posturing Djibril Cisse and the frankly embarrassing Afonso Alves – and plenty in between – the guilt is widely and thickly spread.

That’s why it’s the players who head my list of the top 10 people to blame for our region’s pain as we head into what we fancifully describe as “Survival Sunday”.

May God bless us all.