Newcastle soap opera descends into farce

PREMIER LEAGUE:Even by Tyneside's melodramatic standards, the past two weeks have been absurd

ENGLISH FOOTBALL has a tenuous grip on reality at the best of times, but this can now officially be regarded as one of its Looney Toons moments.

The national team has gone all giddy again, fuelled by the explosive arrival of perhaps the most polite sporting prodigy in history, while the Premier League, ever the epitome of self-restraint, has embarked on the kind of goggle-eyed rampage more commonly associated with Wile E Coyote. Now we await that awful moment of realisation that we are running on nothing other than thin air before plummeting to earth, with Road Runner's mocking "beep beeps" ringing in our furry ears.

The cartoon analogy is apt, because the events of the last fantastical fortnight have somehow been at once startling and predictable - the equivalent of seeing poor Wile E struck by the same over-sized Acme anvil in each hopeless pursuit of his feathered prey.

Any English teenager capable of running with the ball without looking as if he is trying to dribble a hand grenade is immediately bestowed with a Messianic reputation and poor Theo Walcott will now have to become accustomed to seeing his every tweak, pout and tumble scrutinised to the nth degree. Just be thankful the boy appears to share Lewis Hamilton's sang-froid, as well as the carefully sculpted sideburns.

And then there is Newcastle United, the only top-flight club which demands library footage of fans contorting their faces in Munch-esque howls of despair. Even by Tyneside's sky-high standards of melodrama, these have been an absurd two weeks, full of flounces, foaming mouths and febrile tempers.

Nobody's reputation has emerged unscathed, not even the supposedly saintly Kevin Keegan. Newcastle's management system might have more tiers than a Harrods wedding cake, but it did not appear to pose a problem to Keegan when he accepted Mike Ashley's multi-squillion pound contract offer in January - a deal which, incidentally, arrived just in time to save the former England manager's ailing soccer school. His subsequent railings against the admittedly odious Dennis Wise merely cemented his reputation as a thin-skinned drama queen whose time, surely, has now gone for good.

Then again, when your boss is Ashley - a man who grows more akin to Vizmagazine's "Cockney Wanker" with every passing week - he is probably best out of it.

The sportswear tycoon's "man of the people" act always looked a touch strained and now that his reputation among Gallowgate regulars has sunk faster than a pint of Emirates stadium lager, and he has been advised not to attend home games because he could be assaulted, he has revealed his intention to sell the club. Given this is Newcastle we are talking about, it's impossible to predict what the the next twist in the tale will be.

Either way, the vast supply of goodwill Newcastle stored up during their oh-so brief heyday in the mid-90s - when the lunacy was, for the most part at least, confined to the pitch - has now run dry. Instead, they have become an irritant, too wrapped up in their own isolated bubble of self-importance to realise the rest of the world stopped caring about their petty feuding a long time ago.

Sadly, Manchester City appear to be going the same way. There used to be something rather charming about City: there was never a shortage of histrionics, but the soap opera was sharpened by a dry wit and knowing self-deprecation which has always been lacking at Newcastle. You could see it everywhere, from the bright blue ketchup which squirted out of the sauce dispensers in the executive boxes - no red at City, of course - to the club's mascot, Moonchester, who looked like a reject from a Mork and Mindycasting session.

But City seem to have lost their sense of self. For a club which prides itself on its salty, working-class reputation, the meek acceptance of Thaksin Shinawatra - a condemned human rights abuser who treated the Thai people with contempt during his Premier League spell - was thoroughly dispiriting. And now, with Thaksin's assets in the deep freeze, we have the Abu Dhabi United Group, the investment arm of the Gulf state's royal family, with all their attendant hundreds of thousands of millions and, in Garry Cook, an executive chairman whose over-arching ambition is the creation of a Premier League of 12 super-rich clubs safeguarded against relegation.

We will laugh at the tea-towel headdresses and "Middle Eastlands" rebranding, of course, and coo over the sexy new signings and, who knows, even the odd trophy. But the overriding emotion will be one of dismay in seeing one of English football's more soulful institutions board the bandwagon of greedy self-interest. It's enough to make you wish for one of those Acme anvils to squash the whole damn lot of them.