Newcastle United 0 Fulham 1

May 17 2009 by Neil Farrington, Sunday Sun

AFTER nine months of unkept promises, intrigue and downright deceit, it’s only fitting that Newcastle’s season should end up tangled in a Webb.

It only took the country’s top referee a split second to deny United renewed hope of survival.

In deciding that Kevin Nolan impeded Fulham goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer as Mark Viduka headed home a 50th-minute corner, Howard Webb ensured himself Trelford Mills-style infamy on Tyneside.

Sending off Sebastien Bassong on the hour – correctly, as it happens – merely hammered that fact home.

But woe betide anyone who comes to depict Webb as the man who sent them down, no matter the finger-wagging rebuke he received from Alan Shearer at full-time.

And, yes, Schwarzer denied United an equaliser at the last, when Nicky Butt’s lung-busting burst into the six-yard box was foiled by an agonisingly agile save.

But don’t anyone ever try to suggest that the second Wizard of Oz to grace St James’s Park within a week was the difference between rescue and disaster.

For the truth – though a rare currency around these parts these days – is that the other 90-odd minutes of this game delivered damning proof of why Newcastle are now flies to wanton boys. Or to Manchester United’s youthful reserves, in fact.

Complacent at the outset, clueless when challenged to create, then reduced to a state of near-chaos when down to 10 men, United’s performance was their season in pitiful microcosm.

Webb? What about a ponderous, portly midfield which has failed to weave pretty patterns, let alone plot a path to goal, week after week after week.

It was in that disastrously one-paced engine room where this game, like so many others before, was lost.

In messrs Guthrie, Nolan and the hapless Jonas Gutierrez, Newcastle have a trio made for the Championship.

And would that Butt had tracked back as well in the run-up to Fulham’s goal – Diomansy Kamara rounding off a 41st-minute breakaway – as he did in the dying seconds.

Even the linesman who correctly adjudged Kamara onside took on the mantle of scapegoat for a while.

But the fact is that United, regardless of one stirring but misleading victory over a woeful Middlesbrough, are where they deserve to be . . .

Begging on bended knee to Sir Alex Ferguson to put out a familiar team at Hull and to Martin O’Neill to field rookies at Villa Park a week today.

Oh, and what odds on Newcastle’s skipper making it to Birmingham? The blinkered optimists may point to the contrast between this game and Monday’s beating of Boro as proof of what difference a week can make in football.

But to call this a simple case of after the lord mayor’s show is to ignore the blinding deficiencies of the “men” Shearer seeks to save.

Despite his pre-match protestations, the natives’ mood on and off the field yesterday was flat from the off.

So much so that the opening exchanges resembled a feeble end-of-season kickabout between mid-table mediocrities.

There was the promise of improvement on the quarter-hour mark, when Martins, courtesy of a nice one-two with Nolan, went through on goal.

And although the Nigerian allowed the ball to run slightly wide, Schwarzer was mightily relieved to see his right-foot shot find his near post rather than the gap inside it.

But no sooner had news of a Middlesbrough goal filtered through than Zoltan Gera had Geordie hearts in mouths with a shot which Steve Harper smothered gratefully low to his right.