‘Such is the complexity of [Dalglish] that he will not inspire the idolatry usually reserved for someone of his status.’
Ian Archer
‘I have no axe to grind with Dalglish over his part in [Newcastle’s] history. I know he wasn’t very popular with supporters . . .’
Lee Clark
Dalglish re-entered the circus of football’s top flight on 15 January 1997, for Newcastle’s third-round cup replay against Charlton – the most immediate bit of business left unfinished by Keegan. In a smart long coat as per his signature style at Blackburn, he was a vocal, gesturing presence from the dugout. Newcastle got in front, Beardsley flicking on for Lee Clark to finish; but Charlton levelled from a free kick. It was 10 minutes into extra time, under sheets of rain, when Shearer curled a free kick of his own to the top left, then raced for the touchline. Terry McDermott hugged a grinning Dalglish, to whom Shearer’s propensity for comic-book match-winning was such a familiar sight. ‘It’s nice to be back,’ he told reporters. ‘It’s better than working.’ It was a newly pawky public Dalglish, then, gesturing to his love of the game but sounding a notable change of tone from the fervid, Shankly-esque, 110-per-cent manners of his predecessor.
Not everyone at St James’ Park was pleased to meet the new gaffer. Come the weekend Newcastle were at Southampton, now managed by Graeme Souness. Dalglish put Ginola on the bench, possibly having come to a familiar judgement on the application levels of flair players. Ginola’s response was to look determinedly uninterested during the gaffer’s team talk. He had been dear to Keegan, and to a significant section of Newcastle fans (despite having fancied a glamour move in 1996 when Robson’s Barcelona had come knocking). In the game Newcastle looked home and dry at 2-0 with minutes remaining, then shipped two goals, the leveller a hair-tearing long-ranger from Matt Le Tissier. A week later Dalglish lined up notably defensively at home to Nottingham Forest in the cup: an offside trap was played, and effectively sprung. And yet, still, two goals from Ian Woan knocked Newcastle out, and Dalglish advised the press that his team just weren’t getting any luck.
A week later his team were 3-1 down at home to Leicester with 14 minutes left on the clock, when a foul on Ginola earned a free kick that Shearer blasted home through the wall. Within minutes Shearer had levelled and then completed his hat-trick, and the comeback, in front of the Gallowgate End. It had been a near-single-handed solution to what had looked a dire predicament for Dalglish.’ There’s nothing more you can say about Shearer,’ Dalglish offered. ‘Not with my education, anyway.’ Again, the pawky humour was conspicuous: ‘I have a better understanding now,’ he quipped, ‘why Kevin Keegan’s hair was going grey.’
But Newcastle were exhibiting worrying signs of a dependency on Shearer as pronounced as that of Dalglish’s Blackburn side. Bad news, then, when after a win at Middlesbrough it was apparent that a groin strain would sideline Shearer for a while. Dalglish then endured his first league loss at home – Southampton again, and Le Tissier, volleying in from 18 yards out. In Shearer’s absence, Asprilla’s mazy ways looked merely profligate. Upon the final whistle St James’ Park was raining boos. ‘It was a good time to be playing them,’ Souness offered, almost apologetically.
Worse, Ferdinand had twanged his hamstring and upon Newcastle’s return to UEFA Cup action, a quarter-final against Monaco, they were also minus a crocked Shearer, a suspended Asprilla, and Beardsley, concussed by a stray shot in training. Monaco won 1-0, so crushing the tie, which they would finish off with a 3-0 win a fortnight later at theirs.
Dalglish was not making friends widely outside the players he already knew and trusted. He had drafted in Blackburn’s former youth coach Alan Irvine, and was making the squad bust a gut in training – inimical to Asprilla for one, Ginola for another, the latter making public his well-telegraphed dissatisfactions via a written transfer request which Dalglish acknowleged to the press with remarkable laconicism. (‘The handwriting was beautiful.’) Dalglish also frowned on the preferred social round of the squad’s young Geordie stars, Lee Clark, Steve Watson and Robbie Elliott.
In this unsettled atmosphere Dalglish took Newcastle to Anfield, where he had yet to win as a visiting coach, and where Keegan and his team had cut such tragic figures a year before. Set up in a would-be smothering 4-5-1, Asprilla the lone attacker, Newcastle were murdered in the first half, quickly 3-0 down, their dense lines looking leaden and pierced at will by an effervescent Liverpool attack. Steve McManaman (wearing number seven) scored one and made one, whereupon the tracksuited Dalglish suffered the indignity of a disgusted fan flinging a replica shirt at him. Ginola and Ferdinand were pushed on only for the latter to hobble off again 10 minutes later. And yet Newcastle clawed back: first Gillespie getting lucky with a speculative shot, then Ginola setting up Asprilla for a consummate lob, then pure route one and Liverpool disarray allowing Barton to poke an equaliser. This being Newcastle, however, predictable as rain, Liverpool nicked the win in time added on, thanks to a Fowler header. All good sport for Sky TV, but by no means was it great football.
Newcastle still had the lineaments of Keegan’s side. As it became clearer that Dalglish had other ideas, the question arose: what sort of team did Dalglish care to build? No one was much the wiser when he sold Paul Kitson to West Ham and spent the takings on young Bradford right-winger Des Hamilton. What seemed clear was that Dalglish would be selling as much as he bought, pound for pound. Newcastle’s pre-flotation Keegan-era bounty was spent. When the club was at last quoted publicly in April 1997 the proceeds were earmarked for debt servicing, payments owed on players already bought, and a youth academy. (The need to bring players through had been sharpened since Keegan had disbanded Newcastle’s reserves side to preserve the St James’ playing surface, a decision Dalglish reversed.)
The flotation valued Newcastle at close to £180 million. Early trading in the 40 million shares was not fierce, but Sir John Hall and his wife, son and daughter emerged with a 57 per cent stake valued at £102 million. From here on Hall would no longer be personally in the hole for Newcastle’s finances, and he and his son and Freddy Shepherd would draw six-figure salaries. Newcastle United was fairly big business, yet still had no silverware to show, nor any immediate prospect of it. The flotation had been a wager made on Keegan-era exuberance, a bubble that had deflated somewhat. The worrisome thought for Newcastle was: what if, despite the hiring of proven winner Dalglish, the team no longer performed?
To the relief of everyone on and around the Barrack Road, Newcastle suddenly began to behave in the hard-to-beat manner of a Dalglish side and didn’t lose any of their last 10 league fixtures, the money game being a 1-0 win at Arsenal. Manchester United were champions again, but Newcastle held them to a goalless draw at Old Trafford, and on the final day they beat Forest 5-0 to jump into second place by a feat of goal difference. New UEFA rules allowed runners-up into the Champions League; and thus Newcastle – having at no point truly challenged for top spot – had a seat at Europe’s new top table. It had shades of the seat-of-the-pants manner by which Dalglish had managed Blackburn out of Division Two, and Newcastle had reason to hope they had found a lucky general with a knack for grinding out results at the pointed end of a season.
With a European challenge to stock up for, Dalglish paid £2 million for Dane Jon Dahl Tomasson, leading scorer at Heerenveen and a hotly pursued talent, whom he envisaged as an attacking midfield presence behind Shearer. More pell-mell close-season business followed. Keeper Shay Given appeared a good buy from Blackburn, and Alessandro Pistone, arriving for £4.3 million from Internazionale, appeared to be quality goods. The veteran Stuart Pearce came free from Forest, as did little-known forward Temuri Ketsbaia from AEK Athens.
It was the carefully matched set of outgoings, though, that raised hackles among Newcastle’s support. Ginola was on his way to Tottenham, and Les Ferdinand also opened talks with the north London side, a long forestalled collision with the reality of Newcastle’s debts. Beardsley also had permission to speak with Bolton, after Dalglish advised him that his first-team chances would be limited. Dalglish advised Lee Clark, too, that he was valued but could not expect to start ahead of Rob Lee and David Batty. The strong-willed Clark felt he was being rated as ‘the local lad who wouldn’t moan or sulk because I was just happy to be playing for my home-town club’. Kevin Keegan would not have settled for that, and Clark made a previously unthinkable move to Sunderland. Robbie Elliott, another proven local talent, could not be assured of first-team football either, and signed for Bolton.
Whatever the rationales, Newcastle fans could smell plc-oriented decisions, Dalglish doing the plc’s bidding, realising value on assets. Would he have let such players go, they asked, without pressure to balance the books – pressure at which Keegan had balked? There was also the heavy hand of an agent at play, Paul Stretford having overseen the deals that brought in Pistone and Tomasson and saw the back of Beardsley, Clark and Elliott. Clearly, six months into the job Dalglish was constructing a team in his own image; but the Newcastle support had seen so much that they liked in Keegan’s, albeit at huge expense and for no tangible reward.
Still, in pre-season Shearer and Tomasson looked promising together, even as Ferdinand went down to London to sign for Spurs. On the afternoon of 26 July Newcastle were seeing out a pre-season friendly with Chelsea at Goodison Parkwhen Shearer overextended himself for a ball from Albert, slipped badly, and did not get up. In a meaningless contest the £15 million man had broken his ankle and snapped ligaments. Dalglish and Fletcher, ashen, got on the phone to Ferdinand with desperate entreaties for his return – but the cards had been dealt. With a two-legged European qualifier against Croatia Zagreb just a fortnight away, Dalglish had to go shopping for strikers, on a budget. Calling a couple of numbers he knew well, he took John Barnes on a free from Liverpool and a slightly hobbled Ian Rush on a free from Leeds. To have dismantled Keegan’s side was one strike against Dalglish. To have restocked with vintage figures, veteran Anfield comrades – however limited the options – was quite another.
Newcastle began their league season at home to Sheffield Wednesday with all their new signings on the park but an edginess all around the ground. Tomasson, put clean through on goal, ran half the ground only to shoot tamely into the keeper’s sprawled legs. It fell to Asprilla, in his voluminous shirt, to do the business, twice, in a 2-1 win. John Beresford, of all people, got a brace that enabled Newcastle to head to Zagreb with a 2-1 lead. The heat of a Croatian summer had Dalglish sporting shorts in the dugout, and two late Zagreb goals sent the tie into extra time, but the unsung Ketsbaia grabbed a 119th-minute goal to see Newcastle through.
The reward was an illustrious group: Barcelona, Dynamo Kiev, PSV Eindhoven. But Newcastle seemed to be running on fumes, exacerbated when Pearce and Pistone got injured, and they lost at home to a workaday Wimbledon side the weekend before Barcelona arrived on Tyneside. Their Dutch coach Louis van Gaal was not particularly concerned on the basis of the scouting reports prepared by Gerard van der Lem. Newcastle looked short on threat and van Gaal advised his left back Sergi that Keith Gillespie was single-footed and cojo (lame). Still, Gillespie on the wing and Asprilla alone in the channels was the sum of what Dalglish could send out to go at Barcelona. The game began at pell-mell pace, before Asprilla was upended and won a penalty that he converted. Then Gillespie, full of vim, skinned his man and crossed for Asprilla to leap, hang and head a second. Three minutes after the break Gillespie again left Sergi in the dust and fed Asprilla: 3-0.
In the last quarter of the match Newcastle gave away space and Barcelona rampaged into it. Shay Given, admirable in goal, could not stop Luis Enrique’s header with 17 minutes left, but made two saves from Rivaldo before struggling with a corner from which Luis Figo fired Barcelona’s second. Newcastle, somehow, made it to the whistle. It was a low ebb for van Gaal’s faith in the dossiers of van der Lem. (Jose Mourinho, hitherto stuck in a translator’s role at Barcelona, would now stake his claim as the chief marker of cards on upcoming opponents.) But the plaudits belonged to Dalglish, pleased as punch with the scalp and the winning start, his best European night since Liverpool’s beating of Roma in 1984. Asprilla had excelled. Alas for Dalglish, those three goals were the last the Colombian would score for Newcastle.
This time around, Keegan did not stay out of football for long – though it was not the cut-and-thrust of the professional game that revived his energies post-Newcastle; rather, his restless sense of himself as an ‘entrepreneurial sort of a person’ for whom football success offered a portfolio of business possibilities. As such Keegan, nothing if not persistent, had returned to a scheme he’d come up with in the late stages of his Marbella sojourn: the indoor football leisure activity he called Soccer Circus. Keegan went calling for high-net-worth individuals who might take a punt on his idea, and secured a meeting with Mohamed Al-Fayed, Egyptian-born owner of Harrods. Al-Fayed thought Soccer Circus was all well and good but had in mind a bigger sort of investment in Keegan’s skills.
Al-Fayed had caught the fever of the times and bought Fulham FC and its Craven Cottage stadium, with plans for redevelopment and investment contingent on improving results. The team, revived by manager Micky Adams, had risen from 23rd in the Third Division to promotion. But Al-Fayed felt a bigger leap forward was needed, with a new man. He offered Keegan the job of chief operating officer at Fulham, plus a manager working under him. He would get £750,000 plus incentives and share options, and a guaranteed transfer kitty.
Keegan saw all too well what Al-Fayed had in mind. It was a job description – a mission to build and to buy success, with a five-year plan and a stack of money – that was tailored for no one in football other than himself or Kenny Dalglish. He had not seen a league as low as England’s third tier since his Scunthorpe days, but Keegan was no snob and knew what spending money could achieve. He took the bait and set about the new venture with his customary gusto. His former England teammate Ray Wilkins, coaching at Crystal Palace, came in as manager, and Keegan arranged for Arthur Cox to be engaged as his personal number two. Since his daughters were settled at schools in the north-east he commuted from Wynyard like a top executive, based at Harrods in Knightsbridge, dropping in and out of Craven Cottage. The football club was being run rather like a department of Harrods, with a young MD, Neil Rodford, seconded from the store.
The raptures that had attended Keegan’s arrivals on Tyneside were notably absent when his Fulham era began with a trip to Wigan, and Keegan’s heart could not have soared in finding himself in the cramped changing facilities of Springfield Park. Fulham’s travelling support, moreover, showed a visible loyalty to Adams, only three or four hundred making the trip, their view of Keegan at least free of the taint brought by Wilkins, alumnus of Chelsea and QPR. The media, however, turned out solidly, since Keegan always spelled column inches.
Wilkins, though, was ostensibly in charge of playing matters. Within four or five months Fulham, spending above their station, would recruit £10 million-worth of talent: Paul Peschisolido, Ian Selley, Paul Trollope, Chris Coleman, Maik Taylor, Rufus Brevett, Alan Neilson. Fulham climbed the table – credit to Wilkins, and yet Keegan and Cox were powerful figures near at hand, seen to be invigilating the project, whether or not that impression was intended.
Dalglish’s Newcastle squad had grown weirdly thin, by ill fortune on top of austerity measures. Keegan’s free-spending had inured the fans, who clearly wanted Dalglish to resist the financial constraints. But he had consented to them, and in consequence he had nothing like the strength in depth he’d had at Blackburn, nor was the team remotely comparable to those Liverpool sides of 11 men (Dalglish among them) good enough to work everything out for themselves. Dalglish had also needed time to build a Blackburn team, but quicker fixes were demanded at Newcastle.
Come October they resumed their European campaign against Dynamo Kiev, and two lucky second-half shots gave them an away draw; but Asprilla tore a stomach muscle to complete the depletion of the side’s recently enviable, now forlorn threat going forward. Ian Rush could no longer function as a centre forward, so the increasingly angst-ridden and goal-shy Tomasson was made to venture up front. And yet, Newcastle for a while seemed to play as though one or other of Shearer or Asprilla were there, the ball being worked quickly from back to front for Gillespie to cross to some phantom centre forward with a leap like a salmon. The line-up began to look defensive, but not in a way that inspired confidence. Away to PSV in the next crucial European game Dalglish was reduced to starting Rush. They lost in Holland and lost the home return and that, effectively, was that – sealed by defeat in Barcelona after which Dalglish’s players failed to acknowledge the travelling support. Dalglish did not like coming second, even to Barcelona, but he was having to adjust to uncomfortable realities.
His differences with Asprilla, plain as those with Ginola, meant that the Colombian was soon to be on his way back to Milan to re-sign for Parma. His son Paul, after fruitless apprenticeships at Celtic and Liverpool, signed for Newcastle in November 1997 but was not an obvious top-flight prospect.
Meanwhile, plans for a new stadium, unsurprisingly opposed by the council, ran aground and Newcastle resolved instead to refurbish St James’ Park. Yet the fixation on the size of the ground had a delusive look about it when the team’s top-flight challenge appeared to be waning. Suspicion remained that Dalglish had not yet taken ownership of Newcastle’s condition, that he did not feel himself fully beholden. Yet his ‘nice to be back’ ease of a year ago had certainly vanished.
‘Kenny,’ John Barnes would observe, ‘has never got over not being a player anymore.’ Dalglish was still mucking in with five-a-sides at Newcastle’s training ground and, for sure, still looked good with the ball at his feet, passing precisely, placing his shots, advising players on the astute use of the gluteus maximus when turning. Stuart Pearce, though, thought he looked somewhat adrift leading the training and coaching himself, shorn of Ray Harford as organisational foil. Five-a-sides were good sport, but Newcastle appeared to need more focus on things that were repeatedly going awry.
From 1 December into mid-January they lost six games, Andy Cole netting the now-obligatory winner for Manchester United, and relegation became a rear-view-mirror concern. In the first week of 1998, Newcastle scraped past Everton in the FA Cup on a muddy park, Dalglish redeemed by Barnes and Rush combining for the goal as if stirred by old Merseyside rivalry. The cup was a bigger shot at salvation, and Newcastle were in the hat for the fourth round.
Their surprise opponents turned out to be non-league Stevenage, whose barely 7,000-capacity Broadhall Way stadium had not been inadequate to host Birmingham in the previous season. Dalglish greeted the draw with some wary remarks about safety criteria that under normal circumstances – coming from a veteran of Ibrox, Heysel and Hillsborough – would have seemed reasonable to most neutral onlookers. But the air of disarray around Newcastle encouraged more cynical readings – not least after Newcastle sent a delegation to Stevenage and made clear their preference for a switch to St James’ Park. Stevenage’s manager and chairman affected a tremendous show of pique and accused Newcastle of running scared.
The FA ruled in favour of Stevenage, who rubbed their hands and erected a temporary stand, the cost of which was a mere bagatelle in light of the windfall due to them from Sky’s decision to televise the tie. The Sun, too, jumped in with glee, taking advertising at Broadhall Way and offering free plastic hats to the locals. Dalglish, never much good at public relations, had suffered a particularly acute defeat in a PR war, and he and Newcastle were cast as pantomime villains. Winless in eight, they would host Bolton Wanderers for a mid-January league game a week before the trip to Stevenage. More than ever, they were in need of their wounded local hero.
When at Blackburn, back in the great Shearer injury crisis of 1993, Dalglish had taken inordinate care in the nursing of his record signing back to match fitness, ignoring the player’s own testy declarations of readiness, wanting to be sure his chief asset was ready to go and free from the risk of breakdown. Newcastle’s peril in early 1998, however, allowed no such time to spare: the £15 million man had to be recalled to service, the strange six months of his absence meaning that Britain’s most expensive footballer returned to a side under threat of relegation.
On the day Bolton, marshalled by Peter Beardsley, looked the better team. Still, Barnes put Newcastle in front, only for Nathan Blake to equalise. With 18 minutes to go Shearer rose from the subs’ bench and got stripped and ready, visor-eyed, his familiar force field raised. In stoppage time he headed a ball across the Bolton goal and Ketsbaia rammed home a winner, subsequently kicking out at the advertising hoardings in a show of vented frustration that said rather too much of the siege mentality now shrouding Dalglish’s Newcastle.
They stumbled onwards to Stevenage where Shearer – subjected to vigorous verbal sledging from the home defence, who must have felt it was still Christmas – responded by heading Newcastle into the lead from a Gillespie cross. Stevenage, though, grabbed a headed goal of their own. It finished 1-1 and afterwards Stevenage defender Mark Smith told reporters he’d had Shearer ‘in his pocket’. Shearer waited, grimly, for the return at St James’, and did Stevenage with two strikes, though the first was later shown to have never crossed the line. Stevenage, then, claimed a sort of moral victory, while Newcastle’s shrunken morale seemed hardly improved. The prize, though, was a draw against Tranmere and 10 days later Shearer got them through that one, too. Barnsley would be next, so keeping a dream alive.
Shearer’s restoration, vital to Dalglish, spelled the end at Newcastle for the luckless Tomasson, swiftly despatched to Feyenoord. But Dalglish’s renown for knowing a good player when he saw one seemed at risk. Gary Speed came from Everton for £5.5 million and went straight into the side at home to West Ham, but Newcastle lost. Tomasson’s replacement was Andreas Andersson, signed from AC Milan for £3 million. Andersson wore an Alice band, which was one big strike against him with the Geordie support for starters. In time, Terry McDermott would characterise the tall, swishy-haired Swede as ‘the one who done for’ Dalglish.
Dalglish still had Shearer to lean on but the number nine was increasingly being seen as an egregious leaner upon others. Shearer, possibly conscious of the weight put on his shoulders in the midst of his fight back to form, was now routinely accused of throwing his weight into opposition defences. George Graham, now managing Leeds, described Shearer’s challenges at corners as ‘almost like assault’. Dalglish then took his squad to Dublin for a bonding exercise that occasioned a solid Sunday afternoon’s drinking at the fashionable Café en Seine, during which Keith Gillespie, pickled in booze, invited Shearer outside. On the street Shearer decked Gillespie in full view of passing shoppers, so entailing a ride to Meath hospital and the closing of Gillespie’s cut head with staples.
In the cup quarter-final against Barnsley their defender Adie Moses was sent off for a pair of fouls that Shearer had very astutely invited on himself; and yet manager Danny Wilson expressed the increasingly popular view (‘I don’t know how Shearer gets away with some of the things he does’) that Shearer was the one out of order. ‘It strikes me,’ Dalglish retorted, ‘that a lot of people have derived a great deal of joy from our misfortune. But if going to Dublin has helped us get through this tie, then we’ll go back again before the semi-final.’ It was fighting talk, typical of Dalglish in backing a player for looking after himself. Dalglish more generally continued to support his players in public – though Rob Lee would observe that he ‘probably had every reason to slag off a few of the lads he signed because there were a few who let him down quite badly’. But this was hardly an instance of defending the indefensible. For Dalglish the fun of that sort of quandary was all to come.
For anyone familiar with the special problems of family-run businesses, the issue of succession was known to be problematic. Case studies showed a certain propensity for businesses to diminish when passed from father to son, particularly if eldest sons were preferred by rote rather than ability, talent perhaps skipping a generation – the father, even, having to retain a kind of power behind the throne as an emergency remedy for incompetence. There was evidence of problems such as these in the case of Cameron Hall Developments and Newcastle United plc.
That Barnsley cup game was a big day for Newcastle’s loyal support; but also for chairman Freddy Shepherd and vice-chairman Douglas Hall, who had a big night out all planned to boot. The duo enjoyed a good drink before the game and after, then flew by private plane to Marbella for a meeting they had agreed to grant to an envoy from a would-be Saudi Arabian investor in Spanish football, who professed to seek guidance from the top-drawer executives of the publicly owned Newcastle United. The meeting venue was the swanky Marbella Club hotel but, since Shepherd’s and Hall’s host, trailing his full House of Saud regalia and trappings, was evidently a man of the world, the party went on to the MiLady Palace knocking shop and the Crescendo lap-dancing bar.
It was high-rolling, stag-do behaviour from an indulged scion and an overaged fun-lover, and would have been to no one’s great surprise, had the ostensible Saudi envoy not, in fact, been the News of the World’s renowned investigations editor, Mazher Mahmood. His stock-in-trade was this kind of costumed sting operation – though he relied, naturally, on the credulity of his victims before a calculated display of wealth and exoticism.
The newspaper got two Sundays’ worth of material to splash from the unguarded comments of Shepherd and Hall. In the lubricious world of paid female attention, the pair seemed to exult in sexual confidence. (‘Newcastle girls are all dogs, England is full of them,’ Shepherd opined, indicating his fondness for ‘a lesbian show with handcuffs’.) And yet something seething inside these men, awash with booze, seemed to want to come out. They knew themselves to be big men, for sure, but not as big as they ought to be, frustrated by assorted other unworthies. Alan Shearer they derided as ‘boring’ (‘We call him Mary Poppins’). Kevin Keegan, bizarrely, was dismissed as ‘Shirley Temple’, scorned for having spent £60 million and ‘won nothing’. Manchester United, who had won a fair bit lately, were mocked for having signed Andy Cole while the forward needed surgery, though one doubted that Alex Ferguson harboured any regrets. There was nothing more risible to Shepherd and Hall, though, than Newcastle’s support, whom the pair mocked for buying cheap overpriced replica shirts and for identifying, as they saw it, with the booze-and-bookies lifestyle of Keith Gillespie.
While the News of the World was laying out part two of these indiscretions, Shepherd and Hall insisted they would not be shifted from their senior jobs. Newcastle lost at home to Crystal Palace, and a hundred or so fans protested outside. Newcastle’s team of non-executive directors indicated they would walk if Shepherd and Hall didn’t go first. Finally, on 23 March, the two brothel creepers were off. Newcastle’s share price, which had never soared, sustained another big hit.
Newcastle were four points off the relegation places, with seven of their last nine matches away. They lost at Southampton and drew at Wimbledon. The only possible solace was the cup, and when a Shearer goal got them past Sheffield United they were in their first FA Cup final since the 1974 loss to the Liverpool of Shankly and Keegan. Dalglish was careful to salute the support – ‘they deserve better than some of the stuff we’ve been serving up’ – but undid any good work in that direction with friendly words for Shepherd and Hall. Did Dalglish go along with it out of loyalty to his employers, needing a friend while his team struggled? The fans didn’t want to hear it, certainly. But Newcastle’s 2-1 home win over Barnsley on Easter Monday sent their opponents down, which meant one less spot for Newcastle to occupy. Then came a 1-1 at Old Trafford, when even Andersson scored.
When Saturday came round, though, Newcastle lost at Tottenham and remained in hot water. There was no love lost in Ginola’s claim that Shearer set out to foul him; but Spurs boss Christian Gross accused Shearer of breaking Ramon Vega’s nose. During a subsequent midweek draw with Leicester, Shearer and Neil Lennon had some argy-bargy whereupon the two fell by the touchline. The officials weren’t looking closely but TV cameras were and Shearer, after wrenching his left foot free, looked for all the world as though he had directed a boot at Lennon’s head. Shearer’s visible frustration, perhaps compounded by the fallen status of the club he had chosen with heart over head, was seriously sullying his own image. Dalglish had plenty of issues of his own over which to brood. In early May, Newcastle secured Premiership safety with a 3-1 win over Chelsea, but this was the least Dalglish could have done in the post. He was utterly unused to relegation battles, to not having his football views respected and backed, and had come a long way in football just to be judged as a pale shadow of Kevin Keegan.
The glimmer of hope lay in the fact that a Newcastle boss only had to win six matches to be a club legend, so long as those games fell consecutively in the same cup competition. And so, at the end of a dismal season, Dalglish had a long shot at redemption.
As of March 1998 Keegan had another trusted sidekick on hand at Fulham – company, too, for his commute from Wynyard Hall – in taking Peter Beardsley on loan from Bolton. Keegan fixed him up with an Al-Fayed flat opposite Harrods, and they shared an East Coast Main Line train journey to put in their week’s shift down south. There remained a somewhat leisurely, part-timer’s feel to Keegan’s presence at the Fulham project, like a retired executive doing voluntary work in the public sector.
The job, though, remained a serious one based on heavy investment of private funds: Mohamed Al-Fayed had spent big, made his team a target, and good results – indeed, an elevator-like progression to the Premier League – were expected, to ensure the dignity of the proprietor’s aspirations. As Blackburn had in 1992, Fulham finished sixth and scraped into the play-offs. Grimsby would be their first hurdle. But in advance of that showdown came confirmation that Keegan and Wilkins had not seen eye to eye over the seven months of the latter’s employment. ‘He didn’t want any input from me,’ Keegan would say later, ‘so it came to an impasse.’ Since the power lay with Keegan, he sacked his friend and assumed control of all playing matters.
Before kick-off against Grimsby, Keegan told his players that ‘there were plenty of people just waiting for all this to go wrong’. Beardsley led the way and put Fulham ahead from the spot, but then all went awry. Paul Moody was sent off, Beardsley did his hamstring, Grimsby levelled and probably should have won it. But they won the second leg anyway against a weakened Fulham depleted further by Peschisolido getting his marching orders. For Keegan another testing season lay ahead. How much did he want it? Enough to stick around?
The FA Cup final came around – Newcastle’s first in 24 years, their day in the sun, and yet the team did not seem very glad of it, knocking around the turf pre-match dressed in sombre black suits. Against the champions Arsenal, they were Wimbledon-like underdogs, whereas their opponents had a swagger to them. Arsenal’s French manager Arsene Wenger had been ‘Arsene Who?’ on his arrival in the English game in 1996 – lightly mocked at first for his gangling, academic demeanour and his curious stint managing Japan’s Nagoya Grampus Eight. Wenger had become, however, a game-changing figure: a proper rival to Alex Ferguson and the first non-British coach to succeed in England, having brought with him a notable finessing sense of a football brain. He had got Arsenal players off the beer, onto good diets and scientific training habits – something Souness had tried and failed to instil at Liverpool. He had inherited a solid defence as a basis for 4-4-2, but had cannily imported foreign flair to the mix, having known where to look in France for midfielders Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit, and teenaged striker Nicolas Anelka. In Wenger’s first full season he had found a title-winning formula; now his team looked hungry for a double. And what did Newcastle United do on big days, anyway, other than lose?
In preparing his side Dalglish had become preoccupied by the pace of Arsenal’s Dutch winger Marc Overmars down the left. Perplexingly, he chose to deploy the left-footed Alessandro Pistone as right-back cover. Overmars only needed 22 minutes to put Arsenal ahead and, though their support urged attack, Newcastle had no means to surge forward. There were efforts to snatch a goal: Shearer hitting a post, Speed denied, too. But a second Arsenal goal from Anelka killed the game. Charged with negativity by the press, Dalglish would not hear of it. But Freddie Fletcher was heard to describe Newcastle’s season as ‘disastrous’, and Dalglish didn’t like that one bit either. He appeared beleaguered and untrusted as never before in football. The idea of any football club dispensing with the services of Kenny Dalglish was extraordinary, but stranger things had been happening in football for a while. Freddy Shepherd and Douglas Hall, for instance, engineering their return to the Newcastle board based on the size of their shareholdings, three other directors resigning in a futile protest.
Since he hadn’t been told otherwise, Dalglish planned for another campaign, weighing the idea of bringing in Ray Harford to assist him. Indeed, Newcastle backed Dalglish to the tune of £14 million in the transfer market. French international Stephane Guivarc’h was acquired for £3.5 million, Peruvian winger Nolberto Solano from Boca Juniors for £2.5 million, midfielder Dietmar Hamann from Bayern Munich for £5.5 million. Outgoings were expected, in the usual way, but in late July Newcastle agreed to sell Keith Gillespie to Middlesbrough for £3.5 million. Dalglish, however, made plain that he hadn’t given his approval to any such deal. (‘There’s a way to do things, and it’s wrong if I haven’t spoken to the player.’) Freddie Fletcher and Dalglish were known to be at loggerheads.
For the first game of the new season at home to Charlton, Dalglish put defender Nikos Dabizas in central midfield, Lee and Speed on the flanks, Andersson allegedly supporting Shearer. This was Dalglish’s team; it was full of proper players, but it had no width and little penetration. Even after Charlton had a man sent off inside the first half-hour Newcastle couldn’t go on to score, and they were booed off the park. The following weekend they bagged a respectable draw at Chelsea, with the rare sighting of an Andersson goal from a route-one punt and a Shearer flick-on.
Come midweek Dalglish was in Southport, fitting in 18 holes of golf, preparing for the visit to Newcastle of Liverpool. On Thursday morning he was in his car heading north-east when Freddy Shepherd reached him – whereupon he turned back. By evening, though, he had made it to Durham, and was taking questions from reporters in the incongruous setting of the back bar of a pub. ‘It seems to be the time for exam results,’ he remarked, ‘and I appear not to have done very well.’ Dalglish was ready to own up to shortcomings (‘Of course I’ve made mistakes’) but could not confirm the club’s story that he had resigned, because he had not. There was going to be war.
Newcastle’s appointment of ex-Chelsea boss Ruud Gullit put £7 million on the value of Newcastle shares directly; but, as with the Keegan pantomime, the whole production had a shaky look. Dalglish would lodge an £8 million claim for unfair dismissal, settling eventually out of court for £300,000. His standing with the Newcastle support had reached a stunning nadir. Within months the act of going to watch his son play in a reserve match at Rotherham saw him get stick off a waiting gaggle of fans – small-time stuff from a small minority. The main point was that, for the first time in a gilded career, Dalglish had left a team’s support bitterly disappointed; and, instead of choosing the manner of his departure, he had been given the boot.
Football managers are fated to take stick – if not outright ridicule – and the modern game had multiplied the means by which that stick could be applied: from BBC Radio’s 606 phone-in and Sky TV’s grim gallery of ex-player pundits, to the braying array of fan-run websites and bulletin boards. There was a kind of indignity in seeing men such as Keegan and Dalglish, supreme players in their day, subjected to such slings and arrows. But unless the team achieved success – and football permitted only a narrow elite – there was no hiding place. The longer such men lingered at the highest level, the greater the chance they would be caught out, a layer of varnish stripped from their reputations, victims of reversals they might rather have avoided.
Football was such a tough game in which to get a bit of fair credit. On the opening day of the Scottish season, Celtic chairman Fergus McCann was booed as he took the field, and this after Celtic had bested Rangers to win the Scottish title the previous May, the club’s first in 10 years. McCann was a Celtic fan and had begun to rival Rangers’ organisational success. The tarnish was that manager Wim Jansen resigned days after the title win. McCann, elderly, bespectacled and button-eyed, didn’t cut a figure like David Murray, and was careful about spending, something to which Jansen had gestured in frustration. Josef Venglos was now in charge. Celtic, as was now the way in football, made their first call on Jansen’s departure to the London Stock Exchange.
McCann had first approached Celtic’s intransigent board in 1989, only to be rebuffed and then rebuffed again. But within a few years Celtic were being left far behind by free-spending Rangers. Then came the Taylor Report, and the requirement for a new all-seater stadium. Celtic was run the old way: break even and avoid debt. There were no cash reserves, just a Bank of Scotland overdraft, and the bank, observing Liam Brady’s spending to the limits of Celtic’s £5 million overdraft, decided to call time unless £1 million was lodged in Celtic’s account. In stepped McCann, able to inject enough finance to satisfy the bank, keep Celtic in business, and take over the running of the club, becoming managing director and ousting the old board. It was akin to John Hall’s takeover at Newcastle. Lou Macari was the Ardiles figure sacked within months of McCann’s arrival. (He went for his next loan to the Co-op Bank in Manchester.)
McCann had overseen flotation in early 1995, oversubscribed and raising £21 million that helped to redevelop Celtic Park and revive season ticket sales. McCann had stabilised the club, but to some supporters he was just a dry-as-dust moneyman. He had committed to a five-year plan but he made no bones about wanting his money back, plus profit. Now he made clear he would be selling his 51 per cent majority shareholding and heading back to Canada (to where he had emigrated in his youth and made his fortune selling golfing holidays). His intention was to sell to existing shareholders and season ticket holders.
But in November 1998, Dalglish attempted a board takeover of the club where he was first a hero, joined by Simple Minds singer Jim Kerr and Ayrshire businessman Jim McAvoy, the linkage to the consortium’s major backing. McCann as majority shareholder rejected this approach and a public war of words ensued, over the heads of Celtic fans who had never learned to love McCann and liked, at least, the noises Dalglish was making about buying players. But by December 1998 that sortie was going nowhere. Still, something about the game was summoning Dalglish back into the fray. Newcastle hadn’t knocked it out of him. Since there was no vacancy at Liverpool, why not Celtic?
Properly installed in the dugout at Fulham, Keegan did the business, helped inordinately by Al-Fayed’s approval of yet more spending. Fulham’s attack-minded summer spend brought nippy wingers John Salako and Gus Uhlenbeek to supply a forward line newly bolstered by German striker Dirk Lehmann. By Christmas Fulham had 50 points on the board, and the project was motoring. Peter Beardsley, inevitably still wanting to play every week, made one last sensible move in order to do so at Hartlepool.
It was at Newcastle, though, where Beardsley was granted a remarkable testimonial game in late January 1999. Celtic would provide the opposition – Beardsley’s boyhood team, all because of Kenny Dalglish, though as his career had turned out he had ended up much the closer to Kevin Keegan. Still, Beardsley’s Newcastle XI – in which Andy Cole and Alan Shearer would combine with Chris Waddle and Paul Gascoigne – had room on the bench for both Keegan and Dalglish, even though the latter was still in legal dispute with his ex-employers at St James’ Park.
In the event Dalglish jogged on after 67 minutes to replace John Barnes, and enjoyed a notably warmer reception from the visiting Celtic fans. But when Gascoigne left the field 10 minutes later and Keegan bustled over the white line in the number seven shirt, the huge ovation told that this was the guest star the fans had come to see. Chants of ‘Walking in a Keegan Wonderland’ persisted to the end, though Dalglish looked the tidier of the two in the game, squeezing a shot narrowly by the post before, in the dying seconds, releasing Shearer to be tumbled in the box for a spot kick that Beardsley scored at the second attempt. A nostalgic night for legends, then; Beardsley went back to Hartlepool, Keegan to a rather bigger game for Fulham at home against Northampton. But another project had come across Keegan’s sights, and Craven Cottage was about to be made to look a lot like the minor leagues, too.