Newcastle Utd - 4 Manchester City - 3: On the day Kevin Keegan finally does choose to retire they should fill this stadium and stage a seven-goal thriller that he actually wins.
Keegan gave Newcastle United fans times they will never forget and yesterday he brought Manchester City here to give Geordies another Sunday afternoon epic they will long remember.
It was at Anfield in April 1996 that Keegan's Newcastle lost 4-3 to Stan Collymore's last-minute winner. The game was voted the Premiership match of the decade, though it was a stern nail in the coffin of Newcastle's title ambitions that season.
Six months later Newcastle commissioned commemorative mugs to mark the 5-0 home win over Manchester United but in March, 1997, Keegan took Newcastle back to Liverpool and lost 4-3 again.
Newcastle were duly labelled "CarToon" and Keegan mentioned Disneyworld after yesterday's game. He did so at the end of a lengthy diatribe against the referee - Keegan did all but call Steve Dunn a "homer" - and there was something cartoonish about yesterday's second half.
That is when all seven goals came, City coming back from 2-0 and 3-2 to level before losing to Craig Bellamy's 89th-minute winner.
It almost had to be Bellamy after the week he has had - and Graeme Souness still took him off before the end. This time there was no reaction from the player towards his new manager but St James' Park stood to applaud their explosive Welshman.
Keegan, meanwhile, sat on the bench looking as if he had seen a ghost from seasons past.
Keegan had been raging at Dunn long before, so much that even Souness advised Keegan to regain some calm. But Keegan entered the press room to say: "Astonishing? Yeah, if you look at 4-3 and get carried away with it. The astonishing thing is that the referee wasn't strong enough and got so many decisions wrong."
Keegan then went through a number of perceived errors and said all he wanted was "a little bit of fairness", adding he had visited the referee's room to inform Dunn of his opinion.
The first half was nearly devoid of incident - Lee Bowyer had a 39th-minute shot cleared off the City line by Paul Bosvelt.
But four minutes after the interval Laurent Robert stepped up to clip a free-kick over the wall and leave David James flat-footed. Keegan did not think Bosvelt had fouled Nicky Butt for the kick to be given.
Seven minutes later Butt and Alan Shearer harassed Steve McManaman and Ben Thatcher into mistakes and suddenly Stephen Carr was sidestepping James. Not even Souness thought James touched Carr but Dunn pointed to the spot and Shearer made it 2-0.
Shaun Wright-Phillips pulled one back, and two minutes later Robbie Fowler, a half-time replacement for Nicolas Anelka, fell under a challenge from Butt. Again Dunn thought it a penalty when the evidence was dubious. Fowler rolled in the spot-kick.
Keegan's agitation increased when Dunn judged Sylvain Distin to have brought down Jermaine Jenas and, from the Robert free-kick, Robbie Elliott made it 3-2 with a backward header.
Back came City, Wright-Phillips making it 3-3 after a throw-in by Distin came off Jenas.
The winner arrived when Olivier Bernard's cross found Bellamy and he volleyed into the far corner. Keegan's distress was complete.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/YVIRIOZQ35EWRPZXR27KGMO6YU.png)