Newcastle United out of Toon in 1978
IT was all smiles for the players of Newcastle United as they flew out of the city’s airport for a pre-season tour of Sweden exactly 40 years ago?
But behind the scenes all was not well.
Less than a decade after the thrilling success of the club’s first European campaign, and with the exploits of 1970s goalscorer supreme Malcolm Macdonald still fresh in the memory, United were at a very low ebb.
The newly-relegated Magpies found themselves in football’s Second Division for the first time since 1965.
It was a shock to the system for the club - and its fans for whom the last 10 years had delivered a piece of silverware and plenty of excitement.
The previous season - 1977-78 - had seen the Toon implode on and off the pitch, however.
Back in Europe for the first time in seven years and on the back of a fifthplace finish - the highest since 1951 - it had been a disaster.
After beating Leeds in the opening fixture of the campaign, United lost their next 10 league games on the bounce, sowing the seeds of the season’s ultimate failure.
They also quickly bowed out of the League Cup and UEFA Cup, all against a backdrop of player unrest.
Manager Richards Dinnis - a former schoolteacher installed after an unseemly episode of ‘player power’ - was soon out of his depth as United found themselves in the bottom two.
Dinnis’s dismissal and the arrival of his replacement, disciplinarian Billy McGarry, did little to halt the slide.
After beating Leeds - again - on January 2, 1978, they failed to win another league game for the rest of the campaign.
They went down with barely a whimper, relegated after a defeat by Aston Villa in early April with six games still to spare.
So what would the 1978-79 season bring? Surely a club as big as Newcastle United would bounce straight back to the top flight - or so young fans like myself, relatively untainted by bitter experience, believed.
New faces included experienced heads like Mick Martin from West Brom, Colin Suggett from Norwich, Jim Pearson from Everton, and John Connolly from Birmingham.
There was also a welcome return for will-o’-the-wisp midfielder Terry Hibbitt, who’d so brilliantly provided many of the bullets for Supermac to fire.
They would soon be joined by centre-forward Peter Withe, who surprisingly joined from League champions Nottingham Forest for a club record £200,000.
And then there was impish striker Alan Shoulder recruited from Blyth Spartans, and the promising homegrown midfielder, Nigel Walker. Tommy Cassidy was still there too.
United should have had enough, but it would not be so straightforward.
The club’s best player, attacking full-back Alan Kennedy, departed for Liverpool and, looking back, who could blame him?
Meanwhile, home games would be played in a relatively muted atmosphere. The demolition of the famously vociferous Leazes End
toward the end of the previous season has robbed St James’ of much of its fabled partisan atmosphere.
On the pitch, after a shaky start that included losing the first two games, United climbed to a heady seventh place in November when they beat Cambridge United.
But as 1978 turned into 1979, there were consecutive defeats to Sheffield United, Brighton, Orient, Leicester and, infamously Sunderland, who won their first league game at Gallowgate since 1966. A few weeks later, the Magpies were trounced 5-0 at West Ham.
Despite the best goalscoring efforts of Withe (who knocked in 16 that season) and Shoulder (11), this Second Division business wasn’t the piece of cake many of us thought it would be.
In an era before nearly everyone had season tickets, back then you could pick and choose your games, and fans voted with their feet. Average home league attendances at St James’ hovered just over the 20,000 mark.
The last game of the season, a 2-0 win over Wrexham, meant Newcastle United would finish the season in 8th spot. The game attracted a crowd of 7,134. It was a post-war low.
The club was in freefall and the arrival of a saviour, a certain Kevin Keegan, was still years off in the future.