Notes from a sporting week – 14/01/08

Hot air off the Tyne:

Well the sorry saga of Sam Allardyce’s reign at Newcastle United reached its logical conclusion when chairman Mike Ashley showed him the door following the 0-0 draw with Stoke City in the FA Cup third round. With a replay to be played the timing of the axing seems odd, but not in the context of the January transfer window. Ashley may have money to spend on the magpies, but evidently he doesn’t trust Allardyce with one penny of it.

It’s pretty harsh seeing as he has only been in the job since the summer and even more so considering that the team are currently 11th place and 13 points behind the UEFA Cup places, a hardly perillous position to be in. Harry Redknapp has already turned down the job, content with life on the south coast at Portsmouth and Mark Hughes at Blackburn is favourite to take over.

At the centre of it is Allardyce who went to St James’ Park with high hopes of using his scientific approach to coaching as a way of throwing off years of mediocrity. His use of sports science was intended to push Newcastle up the table and fulfil their much-talked about promise. All that seems to have happened is that they have negotiated a sloppy start to the season to reach the relative safety of the middle of the table.

Where then did Allardyce differ from anyone else? Certainly not a lot from Keegan or his successor, Kenny Dalglish, who took the team to second in the table, nor Sir Bobby Robson who established them in the top five, before his mild-mannered approach was elbowed aside for the granite fisted Souness. He went the same way as his predecessors, which also included Ruud Gullit who started the ball rolling at Chelsea with the FA Cup back in 1997. As for Glenn Roeder, having taken West Ham down he was fighting a losing battle from the start. In short he did nothing spectacular, but nothing too wrong either.

Of course there is no team like Newcastle for elevated opinions of their hopes and expectations, let alone the empty rhetoric of how they are a big club blah, blah, blah. Sure they have a large fans base, a fine 52,000 capacity stadium slap bang in the centre of town, but they haven’t won a sausage since the Fairs Cup in 1969. Since then Stoke City, Oxford United, Sunderland, Middlesborough and even West Ham United have lifted some form of silverware. Yet it is all we ever hear from the ‘toon army’, that most passionate of populations that fled the clubs in droves whilst in the old second division, until Kevin Keegan returned and ran amok with Sir John Hall’s chequebook.

For a while now Alan Shearer’s name has been bandied about as a potential candidate to succeed Allardyce, as it was for the England job. Again, why should be beyond most people as despite working towards his coaching badges he seems far too comfortable as a pundit for the BBC and has shown no desire to go into management. It would also be an utter joke if he did, as like the England job if he truly wanted to become a manager then he should work his way up from the lower leagues in the manner of someone such as Martin O’Neill. Sure, the Newcastle fans would love it and one suspects that they won’t be sated until he has been in charge for a while, whether a success or failure, but it would help matters if he came out and said he wanted the job or not, rather than act all coy and put out a message that he doesn’t want it ‘through people close to him’.

One also has to question what sort of chairman Mike Ashley is. His ‘man of the people routine’, in which he sits with the fans, wears the jerseys to matches and, despite owning a private jet, prefers to travel on the supporters coach, is beginning to wear thin. What must other director think, let alone the manager? How can they trust someone who is surrounded by the baying mob, a self-styled Caesar who takes himself away from the senate? And we all know what the senate did to Caesar.

Quite where Newcastle go from now is like sticking a pin in a map. Mark Hughes would be a good choice of manager as he would realise the club’s limitations, but go about it in a quiet, undemonstrative manner that wouldn’t put the supporters’ backs up. His teams generally play a decent quality of football and he has done well with Wales and now Blackburn.

The first thing whoever takes over should do is sit down with goalkeeper Shay Given and ask him who he wants in central defence as having performed heroics behind the likes of Jean Alain Boumsong and Titus Bramble he certainly deserves something more solid. One things for certain though is that Ashley needs to make the correct choice of manager and stick with it if his team are to finally win the trophy that we are continually told the club and its fans deserves. Then we may finally hear the end of the Newcastle myth.

2008: Year of Liu?

At the start of 2007 the host of a radio programme asked her guests to guess the name of the athlete who she believed would make the year their own. The person in question was Dan Carter, who was imperious as New Zealand’s fly half and appeared set to make 2007 his crowning glory with success at the Rugby World Cup. Alas we all know it ended anything like that, with Carter nursing a strained calf muscle on the bench at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium, whilst his teammates floundered to a loss to France with a performance that was crying out for his poise and control.

With the Beijing Olympic Games on the horizon the person looking forward with the year in the palm of their hand is undoubtedly Liu Xiang. The Chinese hurdler, gold medallist in Athens, world champion and world record holder already has massive expectations on his shoulders and they will only increase as the games get nearer.

The fact that he is such a dominant athlete in his event means that the expectations around him would be high, but China has already made him their face of the games and comparisons have been drawn to what he is going through and what Australia’s Cathy Freeman went through in the build up to the Sydney Olympics. However, whereas Freeman was able to base herself in London throughout the northern hemisphere summer, Liu will be based at home far more, though he will be coming to Europe for the Grand Prix meetings in the summer before the Olympics start.

How he copes with these pressures will make or break his year and possibly his career. If he is successful then no doubt he will be feted by his countrymen and be set up for life, as well as becoming regarded as one of the greatest hurdlers of all time, alongside Ed Moses at the top of the pile. If he doesn’t it will be a very interesting time for him as he seeks to rebuild his career and a massive anti-climax for those watching.

Luckily for Liu he knows what it is to miss a gold having only taken silver at the 2005 World Championships. Since then he has used that disappointment to drive him on and with it add the world record in 2006 and the world title in 2007. He will need to double this if he is to defend his crown come August this year, otherwise his crowning glory, which very few athletes have the opportunity to go for, will have passed him by in the worst of circumstances.
JI 14/01/08