Steve McClaren has spent most of a vexing season in calm and measured mode but on Friday Newcastle United’s manager finally lost his cool and ended up in a furious row with a journalist.
The pair had to be separated after McClaren accused the journalist, a former Newcastle employee, of writing half-lies and pursuing a negative agenda after being “released” by the club. The reporter responded by saying the manager was out of his depth.
McClaren, whose future will be in serious doubt if Newcastle fail to win at home to Bournemouth on Saturday, snapped when asked by television reporters about the journalist’s story that the club’s players were surprised McClaren had not been sacked and there were tensions between the backroom staff.
“Someone told me about it, and unfortunately it’s been done, obviously, by a journalist who for the last 18 months has written nothing but negative things about Newcastle, a journalist who used to work at this football club and who four or five years ago was released from this club,” said McClaren. “Whatever that journalist writes I’m afraid I don’t read it. That article is half-truths and half-lies. It destabilises everything we are trying to do in the dressing room. We have to ignore it.”
As the broadcast segment of a media conference drew to a close the journalist pursued Newcastle’s manager out of the room. Annoyed by suggestions he had an agenda against the club and that his material was inaccurate he and offered a vigorous defence of his position. “Don’t you dare accuse me of having an agenda,” he said. “You are second bottom of the league. Is this your latest excuse? You’re the problem not me. Walk away Steve, smile, grin. He has been out of his depth since the moment he walked in.”
Eventually the warring pair repaired to a quiet corner for a private conversation. McClaren apologised for mentioning the fact a reporter he has praised in the past had worked for Newcastle some years ago and an amicable truce was reached.
Maybe it was all an elaborate attempt to create a siege mentality while deflecting attention from the team’s struggles to escape the bottom three and the need to beat Bournemouth, but it felt as if the report had touched a few raw nerves. When asked if his players were still behind him, McClaren said: “Absolutely, absolutely.”
Later McClaren acknowledged the vulnerability of his position in charge of the division's 19th-placed side. Does the board still believe in you, he was asked. "You'll have to ask the board," came the reply. Shortly afterwards he reiterated that he has next to no contact with Mike Ashley, Newcastle's owner.
Yet despite being well aware that, with the transfer window closed, Ashley’s sole means of changing things is switching managers, McClaren said he did not sense dismissal may be a single defeat away.
Do you feel like you’re on the brink, someone inquired. “I don’t, no,” he said. “But I think that has been there all season at certain times - after losing to Leicester and Crystal Palace there was a huge debate that I was on the brink. Then I’m even more on the brink now. We’ve just got to ignore what’s going on out there and control what we can control. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again. We’re taking it one game at a time.
“I know I’m in a fight, I know it’s a battle but I do know that in that dressing room we’ve got the talent. Now we’ve got to demonstrate the character to get out of it.”
Although he remains close to Lee Charnley, Newcastle’s managing director and the man who drove his appointment last summer, McClaren accepts boardroom patience cannot be infinite.
“I speak to Lee Charnley every day,” he said. “We chat all the time. But it’s football. It’s a results business. I know that, everybody knows that and we need results. We need to make sure we’re in the Premier League next season. Obviously the pressure is really coming on now.”
He also needs his backroom staff to be united and could do without the evident tensions between Alessandro Schoenmaker, the club’s strength and conditioning coach, and Steve Black, who has a broad brief combining psychology, motivation and conditioning. The pair are understood to have differing views on the reasons behind the rash of injuries which have helped derail this season’s campaign. “We’re disappointed with the amount of injuries,” said McClaren.
During a recent training camp at La Manga in Spain McClaren attempted to produce some creative tension and edge among an underachieving and sometimes rather complacent-looking squad which has registered six straight away defeats.
“We can’t control what’s happening externally but I think that we’ve created a good tension [in the dressing room],” he said. “We’ve said [to the players]: ‘There’s a fight going on, let’s join in,’” he said.
“I thought we did that at Stoke [where they lost 1-0 on Wednesday]without getting the deserved result. But Bournemouth is a massive, massive game. We’re not thinking about losing it.”
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