Shearer may not have the vision or the back-up

PREMIER LEAGUE:Newcastle United's faith in their former striker is clouded by his exploits as a player, write ANDREW FIFIELD.

LIFE AT Newcastle United will always be played out in black and white. A club as determinedly romantic as they were never likely to fully embrace the technicolour age and St James’ Park’s club shop must be the only one of its kind where the team photograph comes in only one tint: sepia.

There are no shades of grey in this singular city. Managers are either saviours or lepers; players are bellowed to the rafters or damned to the murky waters of the Tyne; scarves are being twirled joyously one minute and used to fashion impromptu nooses the next.

Whether the club’s managerial appointments are causes of this state of emotional flux, or merely symptoms, is a moot point. Either way, supporters have swung violently between the polar extremes of unbridled pleasure – the arrivals of Kevin Keegan, twice, and Bobby Robson – and, in Graeme Souness, Sam Allardyce and Joe Kinnear, rank despair.

There is no doubt which category best befits Alan Shearer and Newcastle fans have dutifully fulfilled their contractual obligations to Sky Sports News in the past few days by swarming around the stadium bar which bears his name, gurning manically into the cameras and showing off their number nine tattoos.

Anywhere else, much would have been made of Shearer’s appointment as caretaker manager – Newcastle’s third this season, which gives the lie to the notion that Brits don’t want jobs in the service industry – being announced on April Fool’s Day. But at Newcastle, each dawn heralds the start of a new carnival of the absurd.

Mike Ashley, the club’s desperate owner, has taken what he thinks is a calculated gamble in hiring someone who will either prove a Messiah or a very naughty boy. Shearer undoubtedly has presence and the memory of his stellar performances as a player should cajole some of the more limp-wristed members of Newcastle’s under-performing squad.

But, equally, Shearer is patently not blessed with Keegan’s charisma – this is the man who famously celebrated winning the Premier League with Blackburn by creosoting his fence – or, if his appearances on the BBC are anything to go by, searing tactical insight.

The Shearer era started with the inevitable whimper on Saturday although the man himself would have filed anything gleaned against Chelsea under “bonus”: his tenure begins in earnest at Stoke on Saturday.

The small matter of avoiding relegation aside, Newcastle’s real problems lie in the long-term. Assuming they dodge the Championship bullet, it would be inconceivable for Shearer not to be handed control permanently, and yet even Ashley would surely harbour doubts.

He knows that the adrenaline shot of his arrival will inevitably wear off and, when it does, it will take more than Shearer’s name to sustain a revival. Newcastle are a club crying out for a radical overhaul, the sort of root-and-branch reform which requires imagination by the bucket-load.

While Shearer’s eye for goal could never be doubted, he is hardly a visionary and the fact it has taken the current crisis for the Geordie boy to climb off the pundit’s sofa hardly suggests he is a man in love with the notion of management.

At other, saner clubs, a managerial novice would be bulwarked by an older hand but, while Shearer claimed his preferred number two, Iain Dowie, boasted enviable “experience”, he failed to mention that most of the former Northern Ireland international’s expertise is in getting sacked at various low-flying Championship clubs – Crystal Palace, where his tenure ended in the High Court and a lost legal battle with owner Simon Jordan; Charlton, Coventry and, most recently, Queens Park Rangers.

Over the course of this nomadic career, Dowie has acquired the reputation of an “impact manager”, someone hired to jolt clubs out of their comfort zone. Then, after a few months, players begin to tire of the early-morning swims and boxing bouts and sink back into their grotty old habits.

Shearer’s decision to allign himself with Dowie perpetuates the notion that Newcastle’s powerbrokers are blinded by short-termism.

It is as if Ashley, the captain of HMS Toon, has gambled everything on dodging the Titanic, only to forget about the iceberg looming behind it.

And while Shearer’s reputation at the moment sparkles whiter than white, a failure to effect real change at Newcastle would leave the kind of black mark which could prove impossible to shift.

After that, there is only one Geordie hero left to shake the club out of its torpor.

The problem is, even Paul Gascoigne might not be mad enough to take the job.