A VIDEO NASTY!
The film flop which helped land Newcastle their box office boy
WHAT convinced Isaac Hayden to ditch a cushy life at Arsenal for a promotion scrap with Newcastle?
The lure of Rafael Benitez. A heartto-heart with Arsene Wenger. And a terrible film from the mid-noughties!
Goal! tells the fictional story of Santiago Munez, the son of a Mexican gardener who wins a trial at Newcastle, breaks into the first-team and eventually joins Real Madrid.
With cameos from Alan Shearer, Zinedine Zidane and, er, Howard Webb, it was roundly panned on release but won a cult following – including a ten-year-old from Chelmsford. “I’ll always remember watching
Goal!” laughs Hayden, Benitez’s fifth signing of the summer when he made a £2.5m switch from the Emirates in July.
“I was only a kid and I remember thinking ‘Wow, if they’re making a film about Newcastle it must be some club!’ Everything about it was just magical. It’s stuck in my memory ever since. Whatever has happened on the pitch, Newcastle has always been a big club to me. When I was growing up, watching Match of the Day, they were regularly a top-six side. I used to look at people like Alan Shearer, at the size of the crowd.
“What is it – 52,000? And that’s the same against Huddersfield as it is against Arsenal. How many other clubs would do that?
Playmaker
“This is an amazing club to play for and from the first conversation I had with Rafa Benitez, I knew this was the only place I wanted to go.”
Yet if Arsene Wenger had got his way, Hayden would still be at Arsenal. The Frenchman pleaded with the midfielder to wait for his chance but, at 21 and with last season’s loan spell at Hull fresh in mind, he couldn’t face another spell in the stiffs.
“I instigated the move,” he explains. “I spoke to Arsene at the end of last season and he told me he was keen to bring in another midfield player, a playmaker who could make things happen. I said ‘Listen, that’s fine but you know I need to progress. If you don’t see that at this club then I’ve got to go’.
“He said he wanted to keep me and I went on holiday to think it over. I had a year left on my deal and I didn’t want to be in the position of signing for another two years and then spending them constantly out on loan.
“When you’re 18, you need that experience. At 21, you need to put down roots. It’s no good going away, settling in for a year, then leaving again.
“You end up in a kind of permanent limbo – you’re not really part of the loan club but you not really part of Arsenal either.
“That’s not to say I didn’t feel part of things at Hull last year. I did. But in the back of your mind, you know that when May comes, you’ll have to leave all those people behind. And Hull’s players were thinking ‘This guy could go at any time’.
“I wanted to go somewhere and be part of the fabric, not just a visitor or a bit-part player. So in the end, I went back to Arsene and said ‘Look, it’s in everyone’s interests that I go’. They were very good about it.”
Hayden’s experience is familiar. With just 33 per cent of Premier League players now English, space for up-and-coming youngsters is scarce.
Of England’s 23-man Euro 2016 squad, nine were forced to forge a career outside the top flight before fighting their to international honours – and as the newest TV deal imbues Premier clubs with near-unlimited buying power, Hayden says he won’t be the last youngster to take refuge in the Championship.
“You’ll see a lot more young English players playing at this level, especially those who’ve come through the academies at top-six clubs,” he says.
“Managers are under serious pressure. The top four are trying to win the Champions League. They can’t afford to say ‘Oh, today I’m going to give a Isaac a try instead of Granit Xhaka who we bought for £35m’. If they did that and lost, they’d get slaughtered.
“But those young players who can’t get a game at Arsenal or Man City don’t have the reputation to join a Premier League club. So the only place they can go is the Championship.
Anxious
“From there, you just have to hope you can work your way back up. That’s certainly my aim with Newcastle.”
That objective hasn’t got off to the greatest start with defeats by Fulham and Huddersfield puncturing earlyseason optimism and making a mockery of the Toon’s prohibitive title odds.
Benitez described his players as “anxious” but Hayden insists nobody is feeling the pressure.
“The favourites tag will be on us all year,” shrugs Hayden, who started ahead of England star Jonjo Shelvey at Craven Cottage. “It’s inevitable.
“And Fulham was disappointing. Let’s not hide from that. We have to improve and make sure we do what the manager wants.
“Last year was a big eye-opener for me. And the biggest thing I learned was that consistency is key and home form is massive. Win your home games and you won’t go far wrong.”