FAMILIAR FACE IN ST JAMES’ CROWD
IF IT’S grim now at Newcastle United, 30 years ago it was possibly bleaker still.
Not for the first, or last, time the club was in turmoil on and off the pitch – only on this occasion they were marooned in the oblivion of English football’s second tier.
It was February 23, 1991 and the Magpies were hosting Wolves – another big club whose glory days were well and truly in the past – at St James’ Park.
Jim Smith was the United manager and a modest crowd of 18,612 brave souls turned up at the down-at-heel stadium to watch the Saturday afternoon game.
The game finished 0-0. The hoped-for promotion push simply hadn’t happened and the Magpies found themselves 13th in the table. Smith would be gone, replaced by Ossie Ardiles, a month later.
To add insult to injury for Newcastle United’s long-suffering fans, in the midst of the mediocrity, one of the club’s finest ever players, and a Geordie to boot, was in attendance that afternoon.
The only trouble was, 23-year-old midfield prodigy Paul Gascoigne was by then a Tottenham Hotspur player and a mere spectator at Gallowgate sitting in the stands.
Paul’s exit from St James’ Park in the summer of 1988, followed hot on the heels of two other massively significant departures – Chris Waddle (also to Spurs) in 1985 and Peter Beardsley (to Liverpool) in 1987.
Both were Geordies and both, like Gazza, were prodigious young talents. The three departures symbolically hammered home the the club’s ongoing decline.
When the supremely talented trio shone for England at the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy, it was a bitter pill to swallow for fans of Newcastle United, whose club had just lost in the promotion play-offs to Sunderland (of all teams) and faced another season in Division Two.
Thirty years ago, it seems the insipid footballing fare on Tyneside wasn’t to Gazza’s taste that day, with one newspaper story noting: “Wisely, Paul Gascoigne left his seat in the directors’ box 15 minutes from the end of a match that had Second Division mediocrity stamped all over it.”
He would, however, be pictured in the crowd once more, later in the year, on that instance in the Gallowgate End watching the Magpies play Derby County.
Come the end of the 1990-91 campaign, with the club’s centenary looming, Newcastle were 11th in Division Two and heading nowhere.
For Paul Gascoigne, a delayed high-profile move to Lazio in Italy and myriad newspaper headlines, not always positive, lay in store.
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