John Carver organised a football match between Newcastle United’s backroom staff and north-east-based journalists last Friday.
The game – won 6-0 by the interim manager’s support team – may appear to be an inconsequential event but, in the context of life at St James’ Park, it was a significant and subversive act that emphasises why he should not be underestimated.
Considering that Mike Ashley, Newcastle’s owner, spent much of 2014 restricting the written press’s access to the club, Alan Pardew’s interim successor knew that his invitation for a kickabout was politically loaded but pressed ahead with the plan regardless. Whereas Pardew had swiftly bowed to pressure from above to abandon the idea of an “off-the-record” lunch with reporters last summer, Carver made it clear he was his own man.
After a narrow home defeat by Southampton the previous Saturday the 50-year-old blithely overruled the boardroom edict that Newcastle managers must no longer offer reporters representing daily newspapers separate briefings. Instead everyone was summoned to a quiet corridor where Carver made his opinion plain that his bosses could not allow the potentially damaging hiatus over Pardew’s replacement to endure much longer. He also let it be known that he was disappointed at the lack of communication he had received from Lee Charnley, the managing director, and said sufficient time had passed for a decision to have been made.
If Charnley may have begun to appreciate a little of what Craig Bellamy felt when, more than a decade ago, Carver stood up to him over a spot of selfish car parking, the Tynesider’s sometimes spiky ability to fight his corner was reputedly beginning to command Ashley’s slightly amused admiration.
Rather than sacking the former Toronto manager and Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield United and Plymouth No2 on the spot, Newcastle’s board had been persuaded that he is precisely the right sort of character to remain at the helm until the end of the season.
Although Carver’s appointment on Monday as head coach is strictly short-term, he has been told he will be considered for a longer-term contract alongside other shortlisted potential Pardew replacements, including Steve McClaren, Frank de Boer, Christophe Galtier, Thomas Tuchel and Rémi Garde.
Triumphing in this beauty contest will entail winning assorted battles on various fronts. The most urgent involves results. After presiding over three defeats and a draw Carver needs a win, preferably at Hull City on Saturday.
With the team 11th on 27 points with 16 games to play, the boardroom consensus is that a side that have beaten Chelsea and Manchester City this season are too good to go down. Lose at the KC Stadium, though, and talk of Newcastle being “in crisis” will suddenly become deafening as, inexorably, Carver’s brand new tracksuit turns toxic.
His challenge at Hull – and in the series of tricky fixtures beyond – is to prove precisely why Ruud Gullit, Sir Bobby Robson and Freddy Shepherd rated his talents so highly. After Gullit catapulted him from an obscure role working with the club’s youth players to coaching Newcastle’s first team back in 1998, Robson made him his No2 and Shepherd, the club’s former chairman, recently said he made “a big mistake” in appointing Graeme Souness rather than Carver as manager after Robson’s sacking in 2004.
Immensely popular among the club’s class of 2014-15, he still possesses the volatile streak that led to him, infamously, wrestling with Bellamy on the floor of a Newcastle airport departure lounge. Happily it is countered by an engaging generosity of spirt and unwillingness to hold grudges so pronounced that, during his time in Toronto, the former Wales forward spent a holiday in Canada staying at Carver’s home.
Yet if he commands locker-room loyalty, JC remains the subject of suspicion among fans, many of whom regard him as synonymous with Pardew’s widely detested regime. Winning hearts and minds probably requires somehow transforming the once impressive Fabricio Coloccini and Cheik Tioté from fading forces to key players while praying Ashley does not sell Moussa Sissoko and Papiss Cissé before the end of the month.
Although the squad craves both an extra striker and a defensive replacement for Steven Taylor – out until August with a ruptured achilles tendon – Pardew’s interim successor is not expecting reinforcements but simply prays that a number of gifted individuals returning from long-term injuries, including Rolando Aarons, Mehdi Abeid and Davide Santon, enable him to deliver Charnley’s stipulated top-10 finish.
Along the way Carver intends to show a sceptical public that tactically he is really much closer to Robson and Kevin Keegan than his most recent boss. Only time will tell but Ashley’s biggest fear must be that results confirm those unfashionable yet strangely compelling theories that Pardew was appallingly underrated on Tyneside.
