[The Funk]

Sod that rational attitude you boring bastards. A fairly long piece I wrote for a Toon forum:

You know, I was firmly in the looking for an experienced manager camp. Probably foreign, one to install a good technical style of play. Build us up and add the odd skillful player to the mix. I didn't want a Hughes or a Redknapp, I was bricking it over McClaren for a bit. I just wanted someone to get a bit excited by. Even a new up-and-coming guy I'd never heard of. Someone to symbolise a new era. I didn't want a newbie Alan Shearer in charge, although I do think he could make a very good manager some day, and I didn't even think about the old guard.

Then we hear some quotes about how Mike Ashley wants good, attacking football. He wants his team to entertain, to go about the country and try and give everyone a battering. Great I thought, Chairman's got his head in the sky, the game's different now. Don't get me wrong, there are many worse types of chairman to have than an attack-minded idealist. I mean, every Toon fan would love to relive the Keegan days as well, but seriously man, Keegan's gone.

Only Mike Ashley isn't like me. For a start he had tons of cash and he also owns Newcastle Football Club, and apparently, if he wants to go back to the Keegan years, he bloody well can and will. I was shocked when I saw the news. An hour or two earlier it had been Deschamps being touted. Suddenly, out of the blue King Kev is back. The recent interviews I'd read he'd seemed so bitter about the loss of 'the game' and it's replacement with 'the industry'. I then thought Shearer will blatantly get a piece of this action, and when Keegan buggers off in a huff in a little while he'll take over, hopefully having learnt a bit on the way. If that's our long term plan then, to be honest, I can think of worse.

But you know what, after that I stopped thinking about all that long-term ****, because I was too busy smiling. Keegan is back! I know why many won't like it; football's moved on, can't turn back the clock, he's been out of the game, need a new era. I understand all that and probably largely agree with it. But right now to be honest I don't give a **** because Keegan is back and I'm too busy smiling to care. This appointment just pushes all the primal sporting buttons; passion, hope, idealism, sentimentality. Everything that makes football and sport what it is, and Keegan, though he has his faults, epitomises all of these things, and even more so at Newcastle.

I love what he stands for in the game: he just wants it to be fun for everyone. Idealistic? Yes. Naive. Yes. The way it damn well should be? Definitely. The only way Keegan could have a chance of succeeding is if he had a chairman who shared his idealism, and I think in Mike Ashley he does, and furthermore I think the only club where even that combination could be successful for him is at Newcastle.

To be honest, right now I don't care about trophies. I'm just sick of boring football. I'm sick of watching dour rubbish, of watching us toothlessly and statically attack waiting for the inevitable headed clearance and counter attack that follows. I'm sick of thinking and acting like we're the underdog, even when we do have some good players. I can't even the remember the last time before a game that I genuinely thought, you know we're gonna put a few past these guys today, and I think our players have felt the same way since Sir Bobby left. Our supporters have been labelled fickle and impatient over the last few years, but in truth we'd just lost hope. Any fans would have with the last few repeated cycles of crap we've been served. If anyone represents hope for Newcastle fans it's Keegan. That's why as a Toon fan I ****ing love the guy and love this appointment.

There isn't another manager like Kevin Keegan and there isn't any other club for him. The next day I still can't stop smiling. That's the effect Keegan has. That's the effect football should have! Keegan and Newcastle is one of the great football stories of recent memory. If you're a Toon fan it is THE great story. It may well all end in tears again, but it's a story that badly needed another chapter and pretty much whatever the outcome I think it would have been a sadder thing if it had never had the chance to be written. This is an appointment from the heart not the head, but you know what? Being a football fan is an emotional thing, and in the modern professional game there is far too little done from the heart. I'm sure loads of other fans will scoff at our deluded fans trying to relive the glory years, but they're wrong completely wrong to do so, because it's stories like this that make football the ****ing great game it is, and if our idealism means we have to play the role of the tragic hero again, that's fine by me, because that's a pretty exciting, juicy role, and I'd take it over a steady supporting character any day.

This has got quite long-winded so to sum up:

Keegan is back at Newcastle, where he damn well belongs, and as a passionate, sentimental, idealistic, football-loving fan (like all good fans), even though it goes against almost all common sense I ****ing love it!