Breaking the paradigm: Should Newcastle go all out for the League Cup?
Posted on September 22nd, 2011 | 28 Comments |
Conventional wisdom in the highest echelon of English football, ie the Premiership clubs and especially the top Premiership clubs, is that it gives them a chance to give their precocious bairns who aren’t quite “ready” yet a chance for some kind of meaningful competition. It is also a chance to dust down old cloggers kept in case of emergency and give them a chance keep their hands, or more correctly perhaps, their feet in, lest they spend so long on the sidelines that they seize up with arthritis, or forget that they were ever footballers on the first place.
There are undoubetedly reasons for this, which is why top managers who have forgotten more about football than I will ever know treat it in exactly this way. It is true for the lower Premiership clubs that survival in the division comes above everything for the financial reasons I’m sure you all know, and the teams at the other end have much bigger fish to fry, ie competing for the greatest prizes of all, the League and the Champion’s League. However, conventional wisdom can sometimes be so prevalent that the most productive thing in the long term can actually be to go against the grain, to break the existing paradigm quite simply because hardly anyone else is doing it.
Speaking before Newcastle united’s last League Cup tie, a nervy 4-3 victory over Championship strugglers, Nottingham Forest, Alan Pardew made the right noises about wanting to win the trophy which has eluded Newcastle United for so long, then made no less than nine changes to the team after suffering a narrow escape against Scunthorpe in the previous round when he did something similar. This included denying Steven Harper a game to give new third choice goalkeeper, Robbie Elliot, a go in goal. Speaking after the game he said:
“In any game where you make nine changes, you can’t expect a team that is nailed down and won’t make errors. Still, the goals we conceded were disappointing.”
Anyway, we scraped through thanks to the permed one’s heed in the dying seconds and are now into the last sixteen. If we can win just four more games, some of them against teams which will almost certainly continue with the same policy of bairns and shaking the cobwebs off their squad players, we would win our first major trophy in 43 years AND have a guaranteed place in the Europa League. If the club the size of Newcastle United is worried about relegation, that is an indictment of the club in itself. If not, then what are the club hoping for by the sacrifice? At the other extreme, despite our very good start to the Premiership campaign, it is still more doubtful that we would gain entry to Europe by being in the top six at the end of the season and we still wouldn’t get a trophy for that unless we beat the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea, and Manchester City for the very top spot. Are we holding back so that we may finish the season in ninth instead of twelfth or something similar?
When Newcastle last won a “major” trophy, the “Inter City Fairs Cup” which subsequently became the “UEFA Cup” and now, the “Europa League”, it was broadcast in black and white and the captain of that squad, the venerable Bobby Moncur, is now a 66 year old pensioner. The lack of a proper trophy since now resides in the deepest recesses of most Newcastle United fan’s psyches, especially so when we see clubs such as Portsmouth and Birmingham City holding glorious open top bus parades in glorious digital technicolour. It’s sickening, especially when you consider that even the vagrants of Wearside have won an FA Cup in colour. I even held it (and almost dropped it) that year which makes it even more sickening for me personally.
Even looking at it from Mike Ashley’s point of view, in other words to play advocate for the Devil incarnate, winning a trophy at this club really would be the ultimate propaganda coup, which would even keep truculent Geordies like myself quiet (for the moment) about those awful publicity signs the habitual misreprentation of what’s gannin’ on at the club.
Perhaps even Ashley himself could take a trip with the lads on an open top bus down the Westgate Road without kevlar body armour and a helmet. Who knows?
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NUFCBlog Author: workyticket
workyticket has written 1091 articles on this blog.
Let’s face it: this is the only trophy we’re likely to win any time soon. I’d like to see a full-strength side in the next round. Birmingham wasn’t relegated last season because they put good squads in for league cup games. It was their inability to score at all in the second half of the season that doomed them.