PREMIER LEAGUE: Underperforming players must bear the prime responsibility for Newcastle's fate
KUDOS, Newcastle United. It takes a truly monumental effort for a club boasting a €79 million wage bill, 50,000 crowds and a supposedly Messianic manager to be relegated; to tumble out of one of the worst Premier Leagues on record, and on a day when favours were being dispensed like confetti by the equally dreadful Hull and Sunderland, is the kind of stirring achievement which would have prompted the ancient Greek poets to write an epic poem – the Tooniad, perhaps.
There seems little point in once again pointing figures at the club’s clueless hierarchy: there are only so many times you can call Mike Ashley a fat-headed buffoon before it loses all meaning.
There is, however, plenty to be gained by labelling the club’s shamefully underperforming players as grossly unprofessional incompetents whose attachment to Newcastle stretches no further than supplying their bank account number and sort code.
It is not just the easy targets who are deserving of opprobrium – frizzy-haired foreigners like Fabricio Coloccini, too tongue-tied to defend themselves, or the criminally insane such as Joey Barton.
Mark Viduka, for one, appears to have been granted a shamefully easy ride during the inquest to this wretched farce of a season. In fact, when the Australian did extract his middle digit from his considerable Antipodean backside two weeks ago, the club’s management staff gave the impression that they were pathetically grateful to him for doing the job which pays him around €90,000-a-week.
By rights, no club with a shred of self-respect should even consider offering a contract to Viduka, a man with form for this kind of thing, having once refused to emerge for the second half of a Scottish Cup tie at Celtic and then contributed to Leeds’s wretched decline. But, of course, some hapless mug will come along, like those bumbag-sporting American tourists you see wandering down insalubrious alleyways, offering another sack-load of cash (Manchester City, anyone?).
Then again, when it comes to shameless money-grabbing in return for minimal effort, even Viduka would have to doff his be-corked sun-hat to Michael Owen, a man whose ratio of useful contributions to pounds earned would make a banker blush.
Some numbers, just to underline the point: Owen has earned roughly €26 million during his four years on Tyneside, in return for 78 appearances and 30 goals. That’s €340,000-a-game or roughly €860,000 for every net bulge. And they say footballers are out of touch with the common man.
It would be nice to imagine Owen – who commutes to training by helicopter, naturally – would recognise this absurd imbalance between the trifling amount he has done for Newcastle and the sums he has been paid to do it and make some kind of selfless gesture in return, such as taking a 90 per cent wage-cut to lead the club in the Championship next season.
If this all sounds rather too sunflowers-and-lollipops for the cut-throat world of professional football, it’s worth remembering the example of Damiano Tommasi, the former Roma midfielder, who was so embarrassed at his pitiful injury record that, when the Serie A club offered him a year’s contract extension, he demanded a youth team player’s salary of €1,500-a-month.
A similar decision from Owen might be appreciated by Newcastle and their staff, many of whom will doubtless be bracing themselves for redundancy, but we shouldn’t hold our breath. Professional footballers are not generally blessed with pointed self-awareness, although Owen might like to consider the impact such shameless avarice would have on his saintly reputation.
As for Newcastle, the debate over where the club goes from here – aside from Peterborough, Doncaster and Plymouth – will stretch well into the summer.
In the short-term, the agony will be acute. One-club cities such as Newcastle need sporting success, particularly in these tortured economic times, and losing their elite status will inflict a huge blow to civic pride. The taunts will sting and Middlesbrough’s ignominy will be of scant consolation when Sunderland are still clinging to the top flight by their fingertips.
But, when the dust has settled and time has offered a little perspective, relegation might yet offer the club the chance to reinvent themselves. The dead wood can be replaced with new players boasting real hunger and humility; they can even hire a real manager, not some two-bit part-time pundit in painfully tight trousers.
That’s the theory, anyway. In reality, life will doubtless roll on much the same, the club lurching from one disaster to the next, like some hapless Quayside drunk staggering between chain bars.
But that’s Newcastle for you: doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over until the tear-swollen Tyne finally bursts its banks and washes the club clean of its grubbiest elements or everyone simply stops caring.
