Sporting clubs bringing sense of pride back to city with elite coaches at helm
I CAN well recall as though it were yesterday the agony and ecstasy of a May weekend in London’s capital 20 years ago this week.
It began on Saturday, May 16, 1998, when I sat in Wembley amid growing dismay as Arsenal dismantled Newcastle United 2-0 in the FA Cup final to complete league and cup double.
This was a harsh reality check after United’s gentle run to the Twin Towers.
While we had great club achievers like Alan Shearer, Rob Lee, Steve Howey, Shay Given, and Gary Speed in Newcastle’s ranks we also had Nikos Dabizas, an aged Stuart Pearce, and Temuri Ketsbaia and called up subs John Barnes and Andreas Andersson in our hour of need.
However 24 hours later across a great city at The Stoop, Newcastle Falcons completed a fairytale rise to the pinnacle of English rugby by winning the Premiership title, destroying the aristocrats of Harlequins 44-20.
Sir John Hall – a dismayed figure at Wembley – was lofted on the players’ shoulders in jubilation. The contrast was startling.
Hall had taken ample advantage of rugby going pro by jumping ahead of all the Falcons’ competitors to buy superstars like Rob Andrew, Inga Tuigamala, Gary Armstrong, Pat Lam, Tony Underwood, and Doddie Weir and so gained the coveted Premiership trophy only a year after promotion.
If you only get what you pay for then Sir John was the ideal figurehead of Newcastle’s sporting empire.
He smashed the world-record transfer fee of £15m to bring Shearer home to SJP and made Tuigamala rugby’s first ever £1m player.
United seemed to smash their club-record transfer fee every time they went into the market during the building of the Entertainers. From early 1993 to July of 1996 they signed the likes of Andy Cole (£1.7m), Peter Beardsley (£1.3m), Darren Peacock (£2.7m), Warren Barton (£4m), Les Ferdinand (£6m), David Ginola (£2.5m), Faustino Asprilla (£7.5m), and finally Shearer.
But Hall had the backing of two similarly shrewd and charismatic “managers” of his playing affairs in Kevin Keegan and Rob Andrew who brought the cream to the city. But by the FA Cup final of 1998, Keegan had sadly gone and Kenny Dalglish was beginning to dismantle the Entertainers.
To this day the Falcons’ championship win remains their only topflight title but tomorrow afternoon they can chase down that incredible feat when they unexpectedly participate in the semi-finals of rugby’s play-offs.
If Sir John literally bought the Falcons’ last success then this is a very
different tale of meticulous club building by owner Semore Kurdi and director of rugby Dean Richards that has defied logic, history, wage structure, and crowd size to propel Newcastle to a top four finish.
Maybe the Falcons face an almost impossible task away to current champions and league leaders Exeter Chiefs at Sandy Park because they are in ominous form finishing the league campaign with 17 wins from 22 games.
But, hey, miracles occasionally do happen and the happy overachievers from Geordieland can bask in the glory of making the play-offs against sanity and all odds.
Let us remember, too, that the Falcons actually managed to beat Exeter up here during the regular season.
Their talisman as they go into history-making battle is quite a character. Vereniki Goneva is an explosive runner who has scored 13 tries this season, his most memorable being at St James’ Park when, in the black and white stripes of his football brethren, he celebrated with the famed one-armed salute of a certain ace marksman – Alan Shearer.
Goneva is a Pacific Islander who started playing for his village before graduating to a club Nadi where he was paid 70 Fiji dollars (around £20) which he said enabled him to buy some cows for the family.
From a desperately poor background, mum and dad bought him his first pair of boots at 18 and he wore them for five years.
Such has been the eye-catching rise and rise of the Falcons that they swept the prizes at the Premiership Rugby end-of-season awards bash this week. Goneva was crowned Aviva Premiership Player of the Season while Dean Richards took the Director of Rugby gong.
I have much time for leaders Kurdi and Richards as well as people such as Dave Walder and Toby Flood from the old school and I wish all well tomorrow afternoon.
Win or lose this has been some season for the Falcons, as well as United. Rugby’s play-offs and a top10 finish in football’s Premier League is quite a double.
The financial structure of both clubs has changed significantly since the 1990s but one major factor remains the same – where Keegan and Andrew dominated the dressing rooms back then, the two clubs both boast European championship-winning coaches in Rafa Benitez and Richards, who claimed the Heineken Cup twice with Leicester Tigers.
The sporting city of Newcastle has every right to be proud.