For Boro as Swans points with penalty
CLUB HAS ISSUED STATEMENT AFTER FAILED BID
SAM Allardyce was on board Freddy Shepherd’s helicopter when the pilot turned to the Dudley native and asked him what line of work he was in.
“Football. I’m going to be the manager of Newcastle United,” Allardyce said.
It was perhaps the first and last time the Magpies’ newly-appointed boss encountered someone who did not know anything about the beautiful game during his eight months in charge.
Indeed, Allardyce’s wife, Lynne, never forgot the number of black-andwhite shirts she spotted the first time Steve Bruce’s other half, Janet, took her to the Metrocentre in 2007. It was the moment she realised just how big the club was.
Allardyce probably did not need reminding. Before they touched down at Newcastle City Heliport, Allardyce asked the pilot if it would be OK to swoop over St James’ Park.
The sight of the iconic stadium from the skies had Allardyce dreaming: imagine being the man who finally ends the club’s trophy drought?
Allardyce had previously turned Newcastle down in 2004 and, two years later, the black-and-whites decided against appointing the Bolton manager and instead gave the job to caretaker boss Glenn Roeder on a permanent basis.
Following Roeder’s resignation, in 2007, it was a case of third time lucky for both parties after Allardyce and Shepherd agreed on a three-year deal over dinner at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant at Claridge’s in London.
Allardyce was unveiled as the club’s new manager just a few days later and there were plenty of supporters there inside St James’ to greet the new arrival. Chants of ‘Sammy’s a Geordie!’ even broke out.
Little did Allardyce know at the time, however, that the club was about to be taken over by one Mike Ashley.
Allardyce had ambitions of signing Luka Modric, Leighton Baines and Phil Jagielka but the trio were not among the whopping nine new senior players through the door that summer.
David Rozehnal, Paris Saint-germain’s player of the year the previous season, was instead one of Allardyce’s first signings.
“I felt from the coach that he wanted me,” Rozehnal told the Sunday Sun. “From the first day when I came there, we were in the same hotel and he was talking to me.
“He wanted to try and help me with finding a house and settling down really fast so I could concentrate on football and the games.
“He was leading the team, everything. It was special. It was a good feeling for me because I was new there, a young player from Europe, and coming to a team with big players.
“But if you have a manager who trusts you from the beginning, it’s much easier. Afterwards, it was up to me to prove that I had some skills to play there.”
There were not just new faces on the field, of course. It took Allardyce six years to put together his backroom team at Bolton but he effectively did it in six weeks at Newcastle.
Shepherd was well aware of how much Newcastle had been struggling with injuries and the chairman gave Allardyce carte blanche to build a similar set-up to the one that had made Bolton’s comparatively small squad so durable.
Allardyce had been influenced by the staggering set-up he witnessed at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during his stint as a player with the Tampa Bay Rowdies, who shared the NFL side’s training facility.
As a result, Allardyce ultimately ended up assembling the largest group of staff in Newcastle’s history. Fitness coach Mark Howard, head of medicine and science Mark Taylor, head of performance analysis Gavin Fleig, chief scout Steve Walsh, physio Jamie Murphy and sports therapist Mark Sertori were just some of the figures who followed Allardyce from Bolton. Nigel Pearson, meanwhile, was kept on as firstteam coach following a recommendation from Bryan Robson, while Terry Mcdermott and Steve Round served as assistants.
Reserve team manager Lee Clark was Allardyce’s man in the stands on a match day and while it is certainly not out of the ordinary in 2021, the New
I’m sorry it didn’t work out...i’d love to have had more time to have done better and think I would have done.
Sam Allardyce
castle boss also made sure his analysts’ observations influenced his halftime team talk.
“Sam would be getting clips taken from, say, the first half that he wanted to use at half-time so he was actually using the technology more than coming in and, if things weren’t going well, just ranting and raving,” Clark told the Sunday Sun.
“Sam was there pointing it out on footage on the big screen in the dressing room. He was pointing out where things had been done well – obviously he wanted to praise players when they had done things well – but also pointing out the reasons why a team were causing us problems as well.
“Behind the scenes, we had two analysts who did all of that stuff. They were actually just based in a room underneath the stand at St James’ with a live feed and they were clipping them because they obviously had to get the clips done very quickly and ready for half-time because we couldn’t waste any time.”
However, while he certainly tapped into modern technology, on the field, Allardyce was a stickler for the outdated POMO (Positions of Maximum Opportunity) and believed players would score goals if the ball was crudely played into these particular areas enough times.
When it came down to it, there were a handful of basic fundamentals to
Allardyce’s approach: clean sheets win games; don’t give the ball away in your own half; always play the first pass forward; win second balls; and make the most of setpieces both offensively and defensively
Players like Emre and even Stephen Carr liked to pick out their man but Allardyce was big on getting it into who was Allardyce’s first captain at Newcastle, remembers a manager with a ‘typical English style’ of the time.
“He did not come out to the training pitches, for example, on Monday or Tuesday,” Geremi told the Sunday Sun. “He would leave the coaches working but he came on, say, Thursday and Friday.
“I remember we were working in training with the speakers around the training pitches and Sam had a headset with a microphone around his mouth.
“I understood that because the message he was giving was for the defenders or the goalkeeper far away from the play, too.
“This was the kind of thing that was totally different from the Spanish style or the Italian style of coaching. But, at the end of the day, it was trying to help the team to win, to get some results.”
Newcastle actually made a decent start, claiming 17 points from their first nine games, but Allardyce would go on to win just two further matches before Ashley sacked him in January, 2008.
Allardyce gathered his staff and some of the players around before packing up his belongings in the Durham house he rented. Given how Allardyce was only at the club for eight months, it was far from an emotional goodbye.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” he told them. “I’d love to have had more time to have done better and think I would have done.
“But it’s not to be and somebody else will be coming in.”
Ashley, for his part, later admitted he was ‘too hasty’ and apologised to Allardyce. Chris Hughton aside, Ashley has only since sacked managers if the Magpies have been in serious relegation trouble.
Having never been Ashley’s choice, Allardyce maintains to this day that Newcastle was the right club at the wrong time but it never seemed the perfect marriage.
Allardyce’s biggest successes in management, after all, have been when a club have embraced his philosophy rather than the other way round.
However, goalkeeping coach Paul Barron, who was brought to the club by Allardyce and worked under Kevin Keegan, Joe Kinnear, Alan Shearer and Chris Hughton, believes Big Sam ‘would have had to have adapted to the demands of Newcastle – the club and the supporters – somewhere down the line.’
“Having been in the North East quite a long time before I went up to Newcastle, it took me a while to understand what people wanted,” Barron told the Sunday Sun.
“You’ve got to understand that if you’re going to survive in the area. You have to understand what it is people turn up and expect to see.
“If you don’t provide that, you better win. Otherwise, that’s not going to work. It’s a strange equation but you can see over the years more people have got it wrong than they’ve got it right.”
IT’S never dull on Tyneside – even on a Friday morning. Just two hours after Steve Bruce faced reporters for the first time since his bust-up with Matt Ritchie, Newcastle United issued a club statement on a High Court judgement.
Newcastle confirmed the club had failed in a bid to remove Michael Beloff as chairman of an arbitration panel due to hear the Magpies’ legal dispute with the Premier League. This legal row, of course, comes after a Saudi-led consortium encountered complications with the governing body’s owners’ and directors’ test last year.
Newcastle’s statement stressed the club were ‘committed to the speedy and fair determination’ of their claim so that the proposed takeover ‘can go ahead as soon as possible.’
“The club shall continue to actively pursue its claim in the arbitration and calls on the EPL to resolve the matter in a speedy and transparent way that does not prevent the substantial investment into English football, and the North East region, that the proposed takeover would bring.” an excerpt from the statement read.
This was the key message Ashley was keen to get across as this takeover saga enters its next stage: arbitration.
There may be other parties interested in buying the club – as always, take that interest with a pinch of salt – but
Ashley is intent on fighting ‘tooth and nail’ for this particular deal.
The Newcastle owner knows only too well that he would struggle to find another consortium willing to pay quite so much in one hit during a pandemic.
Ashley is also acutely aware that the buyers – Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the Reuben Brothers and Amanda Staveley – remain keen if the Premier League are willing to give the bid the green light.
Rather than writing the deal off last summer, Ashley has been hell-bent on somehow finding a way forward and the fact the Newcastle owner took the arbitrators and the Premier League to the High Court in this instance reflects that ambition.
The details of the case have actually been published on the British and Irish case law & legislation website after the club’s legal team, Nick De Marco, Shaheed Fatima and Tom Richards, successfully argued that there was a public interest in doing so.
As a result, the identities of the three-man arbitration panel have been revealed: Michael Beloff, Lord Neuberger and Lord Dyson.
Beloff is actually a member of the same firm, Blackstone Chambers, as De Marco and Fatima, and has been described as the ‘godfather of sports law’ by Legal 500.
Newcastle had initially accepted Beloff’s appointment as the arbitration panel’s chair but the Premier League’s lawyers later disclosed that the QC had previously advised the sports governing body in relation to a potential change in directors’ test.
As a result, the club’s legal team argued that ‘gave rise to justifiable doubts as to his impartiality.’ It is worth noting in Newcastle’s subsequent club statement that the Magpies pointed out how ‘shortly after the chairman provided that advice in 2017, there were changes to prevent a foreign owner involved in alleged broadcasting piracy from passing the test.’
At a hearing at the High Court on Friday, however, Judge Mark Pelling pointed out that Beloff giving this advice ‘in excess of three years prior to his appointment would not cause the fair-minded and informed observer, having considered the facts, to conclude that there was a real possibility’ that he was ‘biased.’
When it comes to the actual substance of the arbitration, itself, Judge Pelling referred to the letter the Premier League wrote to Newcastle last summer.
The judge said that the text of the letter ‘makes it abundantly clear that the sole issue’ that the Premier League had decided (and then only provisionally) ‘was that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia satisfied the definitions so that it was to be regarded as a director.’
Therefore, according to Judge Pelling, the ‘only dispute that can or will be decided in the current arbitration is whether this conclusion is correct’
It will fall to the arbitration panel to decide just that.
its owners’ and