Nicky Butt says Hughton deserves chance

Nov 1 2009 by Steve Brown, Sunday Sun

Even with the shadow of Shearer looming large, or otherwise? “To be fair to Chris, he has never known what is around the corner,” Butt said.

“That is always going to happen with the Alan (Shearer) side of it. You will hear his name sung a few times from the fans if you are not playing too good.

“When you have someone who is that well loved in Newcastle and at the club, it is inevitable. I am sure it is only a matter of time that he will be manager. I’m sure it will be in the next five or six years.

“But people have to put up with that. You have to deal with that. Chris will have times when the Press, the fans, the players will question him and with Alan in the background his name is always going to pop up. It is something he has to deal with.

“In my eyes no matter who takes the job, Alan is always going to be in the background. He (Hughton) has always been thinking ‘Anytime now I could be out of a job if someone else comes in’.

“But he has worked that way and done that well under those circumstances. He now has a contract for 18 months and he has stability and security.”

Turning all attention now, Butt accepts, on the players – and their bid to escape the Championship.

“From my point of view we should be here to try and get the club back to the Premier League because we were a major factor in why we are where we are, because we didn’t perform,” he said.

“I have always maintained that last season, as players, we escaped criticism because things were blamed on what happened upstairs and in the background. I think if you speak to players honestly, we should have stayed up with the squad we had.”

On the major difference between Championship and Premier League, he added: “It’s shocks! In the Premier League you can guess that eight times out of ten Manchester United are going to win or Liverpool are going to win. But in the Championship there are all sorts of upsets.

“Going away from home is really difficult. Blackpool was a massively difficult game for me – the grass was long, the wind was swirling.

“But they are not going to put a nice pitch down for us to pass the ball about on. They are going to make it difficult and we have to deal with it.

“We have to get out of this league by any means, whether it is a horrible 0-0 or a horrible 1-0. We need to get out and start afresh next season.

“We have a lot of players like Alan Smith and Kevin Nolan who will dig deep and hopefully get us out of this mess we are in.”