November 2008 Archives

It's normally as predictable as a race between a one-legged Sumo wrestler and Usain Bolt or as uninteresting as naming which four Premier League teams will qualify for the Champions League next season, but this year's BBC Sports Personality of the Year could actually be quite exciting.

Let's face it, British sport isn't normally littered with magnificent victories, whether it in athletics, football or ice-skating, but we do normally do a rather nice line in valiant failures.

Basically, if you win something - unless you are David Beckham of course - you are pretty much guaranteed to take the back-slapping and applause at the annual waste of licence-fee cash bash in December. We Brits, you see, really do believe that it is the taking part which counts, or at least we've had to adopt that mantra through decades of under-achievement. However, this year has been different.

You are normally more interested in sales after Christmas, but every single Newcastle United fan will be hoping the St James's Park clear out happens before the Festive season gets underway.

Before I go into too much detail, I'd like to point out Newcastle were dreadful against Wigan at the weekend. The first 45 minutes were as bad as any of the dross we've had to sit through this season and even in the second-half, United only really started to get on top of things after Emmerson Boyce was incorrectly dismissed for a second bookable offence.

If I'm being positive - and I do try you know - the point was enough to lift the Magpies out of the relegation zone, but with a trip to Chelsea next weekend they will almost certainly be back in it this time next week. Depressing stuff and if we didn't really need the point hammered home, Newcastle, as things stand, are relegation material.

You can always tell when a manager is under pressure because you start to hear rumours of rows, talk of tension and the quiet, whispered suggestions of a sacking around the corner.

Make no mistake, Roy Keane is under pressure at the moment after four successive defeats and sure enough Friday brought the first noise about Keane quitting on the jungle drums.

It turned out to be nonsense of course, but it says a lot that, on the same day, other people were putting about a rumour the Irishman was on the verge of being given his P45 by the Drumaville Consortium which has financed chairman Niall Quinn's takeover of the club.

The bottom fell out of North East football over the weekend, like your guts after 12 pints of lager, two cheeky Vimtos and a dodgy back street curry. There was a tonic to our ills, though, and it came in the unlikely form of Blyth Spartans.

As Newcastle and Sunderland both fell back into the bottom three with frustrating defeats to Fulham and Portsmouth, the part-timers from Blyth were writing a new chapter in the club's FA Cup history with a sensational 3-1 win over Shrewsbury Town.

William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is a comedy - well it's vaguely amusing which is apparently enough when good old Will is concerned - but Blyth's version was a classic FA Cup tale, full of action, drama and, of course, romance. This was a giant killing Jack himself would have been proud of.

It was impossible not to get a little excited by Newcastle's win against Aston Villa on Monday night, not just because it lifted them above Sunderland in the Premier League table for the first time since August, but because it came against a team which is supposed to be the best of the rest.

By that I mean, with the Big Four still the only names on the list when it comes to entry to the Champions League party, Villa are believed to be the side best equipped to gatecrash. Yet, Newcastle, despite riding their luck a little in the first half, beat them and beat them well.

It was easily the Magpies' best performance of the season and even suggests, having predicted they would be involved in a relegation battle all season, that ambitions and objectives can be raised a little.

I wonder if Roy Keane is a James Bond fan because Sunderland's manager has been doing his best to appear cool, calm and collected under pressure these last few days.

Keane even managed a little smile and a joke in front of the television cameras after the Black Cats were thrashed 5-0 at Chelsea last weekend, but I bet he wasn't really in a jovial mood. He was similarly affable after the 1-0 defeat at Stoke and you can bet he was raging inside after such an abject showing from his players.

No matter that Sunderland were in good company following Arsenal's defeat by Stoke at the weekend, that defeat was a major setback and raises some worrying question marks about the mentality of his squad.