Almost exactly three years ago Newcastle United faced Benfica in a Europa League quarter-final. The first part of their journey to Lisbon involved a short bus transfer from the airport terminal to the club’s chartered plane but, as they approached the main runway, assorted warning lights began flashing.
An urgent message to apply the brakes crackled over the radio, further alerting the driver to impending danger. Within seconds a rapidly accelerating, Dubai-bound, Emirates Boeing 777 hurtled past. “Wow, you wouldn’t want to be hit by that,” said someone as it disappeared high into the Tyneside sky.
This weekend a club for whom European nights have become an increasingly distant dream are once more bracing themselves for impact on Saturday. Rafael Benítez continues to do everything in his power to choreograph a last-minute swerve to safety but there is only so much that even a coach as distinguished as the Spaniard can do.
Should Newcastle fail to beat Swansea City at St James’ Park on Saturday no one will blame Benítez. Like his old, ahem, friend Sam Allardyce down the road at Sunderland, the former Liverpool, Chelsea and Real Madrid manager has inherited a mess confected primarily in the boardroom.
If Sunderland lose at Norwich City on Saturday lunchtime, Alex Neil’s side will be firm favourites to escape relegation and thereby condemn the north-east’s supposed “big two” to joining Aston Villa in the Championship next season.
Unlike the driver of that Newcastle airport transfer bus, Mike Ashley and Ellis Short appear set to pay heavy prices for ignoring all manner of neon warning lights and clanging alarms. Having made billions from the respective worlds of discount sportswear retailing and private equity, the owners of Newcastle and Sunderland apparently assumed they were cleverer than the rest and could afford to cut all sorts of corners.
Foremost among the parallels between two less than friendly neighbours are mutual blind spots regarding recruitment – in the football sphere at least. While Short surely regrets ignoring the pleas of Dick Advocaat, Allardyce’s predecessor, for a radical squad overhaul last summer, many close to both clubs still cannot quite understand how he over-promoted the inexperienced Margaret Byrne to the post of Sunderland’s chief executive or why Ashley places so much faith in Lee Charnley.
Like Byrne, the latter is well-liked in football circles and his astonishing rise from a junior clerical position at St James’ to CEO remains, in one sense, refreshing. Yet, like his now-departed former Wearside counterpart, Charnley has some serious questions to address.
Foremost among them is why he waited so long to challenge the Sports Direct owner’s strategy of recruiting only players aged under 26 from “better value” leagues while selling Newcastle to their agents as a “stepping stone” to Europe’s elite clubs.
This season alone Graham Carr, Newcastle’s 71-year-old scout, helped invest £80m of Newcastle’s money on the largely underachieving Florian Thauvin (swiftly loaned back to Marseille), Aleksandar Mitrovic, Georginio Wijnaldum, Chancel Mbemba, Jonjo Shelvey, Henri Saivet and Andros Townsend.
Unfortunately the squad remains so unbalanced that Benítez lacks specialist full-backs and swiftly scrapped the tentative idea of experimenting with a back three against Swansea after realising he had only two fit centre-halves. Equally damningly, the team still crave streetwise on-pitch leaders.
“We have quality but that’s not enough,” says Wijnaldum, tellingly. “You have to be all together and do it as a team. As a team you can win games.”
Considering Newcastle have recorded only six league victories all season, the omens are not good. If only Ashley had listened to Steve McClaren – replaced by Benítez last month – when the former coach publicly challenged the “25 and under” policy last autumn. Instead McClaren received an official warning.
The former England coach’s ambitious plan to implement a patient passing game capable of transforming his team into Barcelona-on-Tyne may have been ill-advised but a lack of autonomy ultimately undid him.
Unwilling to stand for any such nonsense Benítez has belatedly been afforded the control McClaren and Alan Pardew were denied. Indeed Ashley is so desperate to keep the Spaniard that he has offered him carte blanche to conduct a long overdue root-and-branch reform at a club where the struggling under-21 and under-18 sides have each registered just a single victory during 2016. The only problem is that relegation may dictate Benítez will no longer be around to oversee change next season.
The drop could also spell the end for Allardyce at Sunderland, with much hinging on the financial response of an owner whose reaction to the Adam Johnson debacle has been to keep his head well below the parapet. By resigning in the wake of the winger’s imprisonment for child sex offences Byrne – privy to too many details of the case not to have suspended Johnson immediately when he was charged – arguably took a bullet for the board.
Allardyce quickly persuaded Short to scrap Sunderland’s failed director of football system and spent £15m wisely on Wahbi Khazri, Lamine Koné and Jan Kirchhoff in January. The subsequent improvement is tangible but slow. So slow he fears his installation, last October, came too late to reverse the damage already done by a toxic, Newcastle-esque blend of boardroom arrogance and complacency.
