More About Newcastle United
City face Port Vale at the end of a week in which Stuart McCall became something of an endangered species.
The departures of Premier League pair Alan Curbishley and Kevin Keegan leaves only Middlesbrough’s Gareth Southgate as a top flight manager who has played for his club.
Indeed Keegan and McCall both enjoyed the protection of legendary status at their clubs - people actively want them to succeed - and parallels between the two are often drawn.
Nevertheless Premier League has clubs owned by multi-nationals and League Two clubs by the local butcher and while the local butcher in this case sells the chips that guide Amaram missiles the differences between top and bottom are becoming more and more marked as the weeks go by.
Not least in the fact that coming off the back of two good-performance-shame-about-the-result City are more able to focus on the positives of the week rather than being scooped up in a 24 hour news cycle.
City have lost two games but performance levels are high and McCall has been able to minimise any negativity and move on to this game.
Matthew Clarke is in contention for a return after his ligament damage was downgraded to cramp and is expected to slot back in alongside Graeme Lee. Pauls Arnison and Heckingbottom are full backs in front of the goalkeeper Rhys Evans who causes concern.
Dean Furman is expected to drop back to the bench after a first start at Leeds with Lee Bullock and Paul McLaren in the middle and Joe Colbeck and Omar Daley out wide. Both wingers are in exciting form and there is little more watchable in football than an on form winger.
Peter Thorne’s form is not under question despite his penalty miss last week and the five goal hit man is partnered with Michael Boulding in the forward line.
The game represents City’s third away game on the bounce – we return to Valley Parade next week to play Exeter City – and fifth game of the season that has brought three wins and a defeat. Working out that a team will get promoted should it win all home games and draw all away then after five games split two home, three away the Bantams should have nine points which at present they do. Vale offers a chance to get ahead of the curve.
That curve of expectation and realism - unlike in the cases of best start to the season in a decade Curbishley and legend Keegan – still has some meaning at Valley Parade for Stuart McCall.
England will beat Andorra on Wednesday night, but there is the possibility that the tiny team could sneak a 1-0.
There was a chance - one supposes - that Bon Accord faced up against Arbroath on September 12, 1885 they thought they had a chance of a win. They were beaten, and some, so from that point on it was decided that seeding competitions was probably a good idea. Relying on the assumption that the seedings are calculated reasonably accurately, any match of any two teams in any competition, there exists the real possibility that team A can beat team B and vice versa.
Regular top ten ranked England and Andorra - 182nd - as one of the more one sided games in any competition, but in the weekend that the FA Cup’s qualification started when the first or third rounds are played, we will hear that two teams separated by not more than a couple of dozen places in the pyramid are to play out a foregone conclusion.
It will be - we are told - unthinkable that a team from League One could beat a Premiership team because football is not that competitive.
Likewise when Liverpool faced up to Standard Liege it was “embarrassing” that they only won 1-0 AET.
This was not Bon Accord or Andorra but rather two teams that had qualified as the cream of Europe. Nevertheless there is something afoot that is there to tell us that is a superior group of teams that are to be considered unbeatable.
On Saturday Newcastle United would have gone top of the Premier League should they - and I quote BBC - “Upset Arsenal.” Upset was previously a word used for non-league clubs knocking out sides from the top two divisions.
Two teams in the same league should not - and cannot - “upset” each other. Teams play matches - much as City did and lost on Saturday and Tuesday - and from that a winner can emerge. Unless the competition is woefully unbalanced then either can win without employing the terminology that one would use to describe Bon Accord doing over Arbroath or Andorra beating England.
Nevertheless as one of the (in)famed top four, Arsenal are judged as only to lose games as a shock result and while perhaps a case could be made for this in the Premier League - more of which later - it cannot be the case in leagues in which the top clubs are promoted at the end of each season.
Yet this coverage of football, where results of games amongst the same or similar divisions are seen as preordained by the press and then the public, has taken a grip to such an extent that losing to a team below/a team that has spent less money than you/a team that is less famous than you/a team that has recently been promoted (delete where applicable), is considered to be an upset for them and a disgrace for you.
Take City’s 2-0 defeat to Southend in the first home game of 2005/2006. Southend went on to win the title that season and City only flirted with play-off places, yet on that night it was considered a massive upset and one which Colin Todd was to be held accountable for. In actual fact it was a game - pure and simple - which was contested and won. The resultant blow to City’s morale - on and off the field - shaped the season in a rather ugly way. We believed we had been humiliated and reacted thus, yet in eight months time Southend were promoted and the result put in the context of playing the best, statistically, in the division.
Without the negativity of that August night the Bantams might have mounted a promotion campaign (Go with me on this one, dear reader, for the factors around it matter less than the understanding that it was possible in theory) and should we have played Southend on the last game of the season it could have been a top of the table clash.
Nevertheless, the belief was that City had been beaten by someone poor and thus were poorer. That City had been shocked and thus were shocking. That City were upset.
Back to the Premier League which this week is in uproar over the signing of Kevin Reeves Robinho. The indication being that Manchester City will now create a “top five” by spending flipping great wodges of cash on players who cannot get into the Chelsea and Real Madrid starting line-ups, has been common in the media and on the streets.
“The week that turned the Premier League on its head” one tabloid - adding the Kevin Keegan curio and the fact Alan Curbishley has left West Ham after the best start to a season in a decade to the pot - blazed and one could be mistaken for paying no interest to the Premier League on the understanding that it is, in fact, all decided by who has spent well in August. Read enough red tops, listen to Mark Lawrenson enough, and you would think that the table in May is sorted out now.
However Newcastle, before the fall out, drew at Old Trafford. Chelsea drew at Spurs. Liverpool drew at Aston Villa. All three viewed as shock results. It takes a special kind of mentality to see a shock or two every weekend and still consider it a “shock”. Whatever the agenda is behind the idea that there is an unimpeachable set of clubs who should win every week, the effect lower down the leagues is that a club like Bradford City who have set sights on promotion are expected to do it flawlessly. One is expected not to perform like a Manchester United, but rather like the projection of what Manchester United achieve which - oddly - not even Manchester United can do.
We have a situation of impossibly high targets and unachievable goals. No club can ever be as good as they are expected to be and no manager can ever do as well as is expected of him. Kevin Keegan - probably exiting stage left at St James’ - is the only man the fan’s there will tolerate because they will forgive him perceived failures in competition and the non-domination of football leagues and matches. We know this because our fans feel the same about Stuart McCall.
Fabio Capello’s England side will no doubt beat Andorra but a win in Croatia - a high task - is what is expected and anything less will be considered failure because Capello’s job is to win in every game and that is understandable, if not realistic, but open your mind to the thought that Andorra could win.
Not that they will, but they could.
Open your mind to that thought - look around at the times when the less fancied of two teams wins such as Chester’s 5-0 mauling of Barnet last weekend or Doncaster winning promotion last season - and you will see that football is not the haruspical and predictable procession that some would have you believe it is.
The optimistic nature of the football fan should never be forgotten and - in the case of Stuart McCall as he ends his first six months in charge at Bradford City - is a powerful agent in making the more important shifts in the culture that when crafted can generate success.
The recently deceased John Harvey Jones specialised in turning around companies but even he would be impressed with the way McCall’s men have gone from eight defects to play off dreams since Boxing Day.
It is business turn around at the speed of light and it works. Most clubs in football struggle not for the want of ability but rather organisation and motivation. A bit of positive thinking can do a power of good.
Take Newcastle United as a prime example. The Magpies are blessed with players as talented as any in the Premier League - Owen, Duff, Smith, Martins and Geremi would not be out of place in any squad in the top flight - but they flounder because as ill fated Big Sam found they are gripped by a culture of defeat.
Indeed so gripped is St James Park in the notion that the club will always under achieve that they see no irony in describing the big chair there as a poison chalice. Recast as ‘a job at a team that could compete’ - and there are precious few of those - then the role may be more appealing.
Appealing or not the problem Sam was beaten by at Newcastle and McCall addresses at City is one of institutional memory. Put simply just as a player learns patterns to be repeated in muscle memory so a club retains habits good and - in the majority of cases - bad.
At Bradford City since the fall from the Premier League defeat has become the default setting and while players, managers, chairmen and almost everything has changed the institutional memory clings onto the negative culture.
Ask one of the tea bar staff if City will win and they will say probably not. When new people come into the club at any level they are tacitly invited to join this way of thinking.
Shifting from negative to something more bright is difficult but not impossible and Mark Lawn and Julian Rhodes are attempting manfully. The most significant move was bringing in The Legend McCall whose presence has been the most significant change in the culture of the club in recent years. His presence alone has stopped much of the negative thinking.
Indeed should Newcastle United be looking for a sign of the effects of having an Alan Shearer or a Kevin Keegan at the helm then they would do well to look at Valley Parade and McCall. It is not just the patience with which the Bantams fans stuck with the manager through that long period of defeats but the ease in which the mood of the ground was turned around.
Put simply with the club’s legend at the helm the supporters want to believe. That is a significant shift at Valley Parade.
Persistent change in institutional memory - to get a club to forget the (footballing) past and look forward - is a more difficult thing to master but Stuart is doing better than anyone at City in the last ten years. He is the shock to the system to change the memory.