Shearer: a canny lad

Okay, so we’re all clear with the fact that it wasn’t an April Fool’s Joke; Alan Shearer will lead his beloved Newcastle into the relegation fray. Respect to the man – the statistics show that he was one of English football’s greats, with nearly 350 senior club goals in well over 500 games and one goal every two games for England. More importantly, he seems like a genuinely nice bloke (although unfortunately I haven’t met him) in a time when that particular breed seems to be dying out.

On top of his remarkable playing career, his first managerial job is to see him thrown in at the deep end trying to save a huge club from relegation from the top flight, with all the disastrous consequences that that entails. I hope his decision to finally step up to the plate pleases the diehard Toon fans. It is certainly a decision which has overshadowed Roy Keane’s appointment at Sunderland.

To my mind it is a very intelligent decision, one which shows another facet of an already highly respected man, in that it is a very safe one. First of all, he has decided to become manager at a time when expectations have changed dramatically. Gone are the high – but not necessarily unrealistic – ones of the start of the season, which in the case of a club the size of Newcastle centred on a place in Europe, to be replaced with one single, clearly-focused expectation: stay up.

This being the situation, it is certainly difficult for things to get any worse for the club and its new manager. If Newcastle were to go down both he and especially the fans can blame the relegation on a number of reasons, none of which have anything to do with Shearer. If he saves Newcastle – and I sincerely hope he does, because let’s face it, they really are ‘too good’ to go down – he will be God. (They are too good, perhaps not as a team but definitely as a club, so please forgive the cliché.)

The smelly end of the stick is not taking over a relegation-threatened club, and Shearer is obviously too intelligent to fall for the alternative: taking over a mid-table club and not managing to move them anywhere after months of mind-numbingly boring football. At a club with expectations as high as Newcastle’s, not even Shearer would recover from the slating that effort would receive.

Good luck to him and the club – Sunderland have traditionally been in the top flight, but United really are a Premier League club.