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Lee Du Maurier posted on April 06, 2009 16:53
"Dad, I've never been so cold in my life and why do the people at the bus stop look so pale?" Welcome to the North East of England son.
Fast forward 24 hours....Central Station Newcastle...the atmosphere is buzzing, the Messiah III is coming home.
Ladies in the street hand out free tee shirts celebrating the fact that Shearer has decided to single handedly save the world.......well the equivalent thereof in Tyneside and that the evil Dennis Wise has bolted (probably off to another Damned United)
Into the mighty cathedral....Thomas's eyes wide open in awe (or was it the unbelievably cold northerly straight from the Arctic Circle....I thought Christchurch was cold!) The crowd builded up...a 52,000 sell out (luckily the auld fella bought the tickets the week before THE announcement).....
The players were warming up...." Dad there's John Terry! Dad, there's Frank Lampard! Dad, there's Nicholas Anelka!" I didn't hear him say " Dad, there's Ryan Taylor, or Kevin Nolan or any other player in a black and white shirt come to think of it. And therein lay the problem.
3.00pm...the players came out...."Shearer, Shearer" boomed out from the terraces....hmm lets see what effect he's had.
2 minutes confirmed what I thought.
Chelsea looked fitter, stronger, slicker, more confident....Newcastle scurried around......in reality, it was men against boys. To see Alex in the flesh is awesome....what an athlete...Michael Owen stood no chance...(in fairness, Owen is no longer a Premier League player given the amount of pace he's lost).
Lampard was simply brilliant....doing simple stuff and doing it well. Even though the score was 0-0 at half time, you just knew that Chelsea had another 4 gears to move up to if they had to......and the crowd knew that as well.
10 minutes into the 2nd half....the awful Colocinni made a pigs arse of a clearance, which resulted in Lampard nodding into an empty net.....it was like releasing the air from a balloon.....the life was sucked out from the crowd.....10 minutes later, Chelsea made it 2-0 with a route one effort, finished neatly by Malouda.
For the remaining 35 minutes, Chelsea toyed with the home side.
With 15 to go, Owen had the ball over the line, however the linesman didn't give it and that was that. In all honesty, Newcastle were lucky to get nil. They were hopeless. And the Chelsea supporters knew it "You're getting sacked in the morning" they gleefully chanted to Shearer with five minutes to go.
The final whistle blew and other than a few murmurings from the crowd, they left the stadium silently......if Shearer had'nt been appointed, the cacophny of booing would have been heard in Patumahoe.....smart fella that Mike Ashley!
It'll be interesting to see who Newcastle go for next if Shearer throws in the towel...Sting? Jimmy Nail? Ant and Dec? Sid the Sexist? We're fast running out of homegrown Messiahs.....