Typical Newcastle United, it’s been said by many following last night’s damp squib at home to Blackburn Rovers, a game which they deservedly lost 2-1. Ruddy typical, if you’re a kindly old man weary to this club’s trajectory; bastard bloody fucking typical, if you’re the young gentleman spitting your ire in to my ear on the metro journey home. But typical all the same.
Consider though, that the typical elements spoken of related to the team building the fans’ hopes up and then dashing them. And, yes, there was a hint of seen all this before as Blackburn scored their second goal from their only attack in the second half and our players looked at one another wearing the irritated expressions of somebody just in from work being informed it’s their turn to walk the dog. But to arrive at this slice of typicality, the fans’ hopes had to be raised in the first place, which they were via a stunning home win against Sunderland and an even more stunning win at The Emirates- neither of which, in performance or result, have exactly typified this club in recent years. The Arsenal result in fact was so impressive that it was marked by a strange feeling of regret that on my first ever visit to that stadium I have immediately rendered every subsequent visit as a let down, it being highly unlikely that we will ever go there again in my life time and pass them to death as we did in large spells on Sunday; it was the sheer antithesis of ‘typical’.
And it’s not as if that Arsenal game was a convoluted dream sequence. A bad result against Blackburn doesn’t scrub that result, nor does it suddenly make us a bad team. But it seems that in this frustrating, and at times outright bewildering, season of two steps forward, one step back our fans our taking the negatives to heart and being too quick to believe it’s the good results that are the confidence tricks.
And, yes, it’s hard to blame them for that when we play as poorly as we did last night. Too many players- Williamson, Simpson, Shola (not fit), Nolan- had terrible games, others like Tiote, Enrique and Collocini played nowhere near the level they’re capable of. Conceding the first goal to Blackburn- Tiote guilty of over confidence, or, if you have aspirations of teaching P.E to timid children, fannying about with the thing inside the box like a nugget- is a nightmare, to do it early in the game a death knell. Earlier in the day, I had insisted at Five a Side that I got to ‘be’ Tiote. My performance was the usual shambolic mixture of over earnest tackling, negligible ball control and dense stupidity. He improved in the second half, but in the first it seemed that rather than Cheick waiting for me to play at his level, he was attempting to meet me halfway.
It was freezing cold and, frankly, the biggest shock of the night was us scoring, Carroll ghosting in and heading it impressively back in to the corner from whence it came. As always, the overriding emotion of watching that man’s football team playing football is to dedicate thanks to a higher being (em, Mike Ashley, in this case) that that man is no longer managing our football club.
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