LOCKERROOM: The affection offered to sad and pathetic old Newcastle angers and bemuses me, writes TOM HUMPHRIES
THE INVERTED nature of the entertainment on offer in the Premier League is a cliché certainly but by now this column is to cliché what Madonna is to little babies in Malawi or what coals are to Newcastle. A good home.
Every year around this time the column you are now struggling through emits a loud and theatrical yawn directed at the shenanigans unfolding between the money bag corporations who rent the top end of the Premier League table for themselves. No thanks, says this column and being a man of the people he turns his yes to the flat-capped masses huddled in and around the relegation zone.
This year, as so often in the past, it is amusing to find Newcastle United down there crossing their fingers and hoping for a break. I like Newcastle. I like their fans and I like the people, BUT as a person who has pledged his troth to Leeds United I am always vexed and bemused by the great affection offered to sad and pathetic old Newcastle, especially when I weigh it against the spite directed at Leeds.
I write from a position of some smugness knowing that after Saturday’s demolition of Tranmere that it must only be a matter of time before the big TV companies insist on tampering the Champions League format so that Leeds can play in it and illuminate that circus. We shall be just like that talent show woman Susan Boyle strolling on stage at a Royal Variety performance. Warm, gushy feelings aroused in every heart and all around people were saying, we are sorry Leeds if we thought of you as ugly and provincial at first, now for the first time we see how pure and affecting your beauty is. Meanwhile, explain this. Why is it always considered a disaster for football and a terrible indignity for a great old club if Newcastle have to spend any time with their fat asses hovering over the relegation blender and none of the serial misfortunes visited upon Leeds United is ever humiliating enough to satisfy the bloodlust of those who keep themselves alive by hating Leeds?
Why is it a given that Leeds, with a population of almost three-quarters of a million people and a distinct literary tradition, is considered a suitably dank back water for what is essentially a second-rank club to return to? Newcastle, however, with just quarter of a million inappropriately dressed citizens and the home of, God help us, Ant and Dec, is considered a grand old place in which to house a beloved Premier League club.
I don’t get it. I just don’t. Newcastle last won a league title in 1927. Their last FA cup was in 1955. Why does football “need Newcastle United”? Leeds can match Newcastle stadium for stadium, fanatic for fanatic, financial crisis for financial crisis, objectionable owner for objectionable owner, flat cap for flat cap. But we are the scum of the earth. And Newcastle are just so huggable, like so many gum-chewing little seal cubs in slingbacks.
Leeds aren’t even as funny as Newcastle unless you are still chuckling over Davo and his babies. Leeds are small-time players in the messiah market. Mere dabblers. Newcastle have made us laugh till we cried with an endless succession of (ho ho!) angels of the north. Ardiles! Keegan! Dalglish! Gullit! Bobby Robson! Souness! Uhm Glenn Roeder and Sam Allardyce (spoken quickly), Keegan again! Kinnear (oh lawd a pound shop messiah) and Alan Shearer! Now that’s two decades of solid gold comedy stylings. But somehow everybody wants Newcastle to succeed and for Leeds to be eradicated. Going back to the royal family, why are they Diana and why are we Camilla?
In the matter of this season’s tightrope jousting above the relegation ravine, I have elected Sunderland to be the proxies of Leeds United and it behoves every right-thinking person to pause now and consider the joy it would bring to Wearside if Sunderland were to survive and Newcastle PLUS Middlesbrough were to be cast into the abyss.
Sunderland fans must know a lot of the resentment Leeds fans feel toward Newcastle. And then some. After all their last FA Cup (1973, a fluke) and League wins (1936) were more recent than those of Newcastle but nobody cares. A few months back we passed the 100th anniversary of the greatest win which Sunderland as a club have ever had, the 9-1 demolition of Newcastle back in 1909, a day when Sunderland scored eight second-half goals in 28 minutes. Newcastle still won the league. Sunderland just escaped the drop. Still.
You have to love Sunderland. You have to root for them. Even if Big Niall wasn’t there in his nice suit, the history alone is so appealing. Sunderland actually had coal. Newcastle never did. Sunderland used to use the Wear for exporting the coal they dug. So in 1610 the Royalists down the road at Newcastle got a royal charter to restrict the shipments of coal from many nearby ports, including Sunderland. At the time about 15,000 tonnes of coal was going from Sunderland to London every year. Now Sunderland’s coal revenue was going to royalist merchants in Newcastle. And so Sunderland never really warmed to being a Royalist town in quite the same way that Newcastle did.
In England they have always taken a different view of Cromwell than we Irish have (he says breezily before moving on) and Sunderland, by the time of the English Civil War, was a Cromwellian town populated plentifully by Scottish traders. By 1943 the Civil War was in full swing and Hull came out in support of the Parliamentarians and banned Charles from visiting Hull. Parliament banned London coalships from sailing to Newcastle to collect more northeastern coal unless the city supported the Parliamentarians. By late 1644 the Scots had taken Newcastle after a 10-week siege. Things then went quiet between the cities until the 9-1 game in 1909, but what a prelude to a football rivalry.
As Leeds fans we can reach out to Sunderland and feel their pain. Sunderland have suffered for their footie rivalry. We have survived Ridsdale and are now under the yoke of Bates. And hopefully in a few weeks when Sunderland are safe in the Premier League and our play-off heroics are over and done with we can share their joy. Football needs Sunderland. And Leeds.
