Shepherd must carry the can for the shambles at St James'

Thus far, this blog has focused largely on the two clubs closest to this writer's heart - but over the weeks and months ahead, it will be branching out into covering all aspects of the footballing world: starting here, with an analysis of the appalling state of affairs at Newcastle United, one of England's truly great clubs, and one for which the author has more than a soft spot too. Last night, Newcastle's inept home defeat by Sheffield United plunged them into the Premiership's bottom two, and resulted in hundreds of fans calling for the resignation of Freddy Shepherd's board. Given the shocking degree of failure which Shepherd has presided over for the best part of a decade, the wonder is that the figure calling for his head did not in fact number several thousand; for the loyalty and patience of the Toon Army has, surely, been pushed to breaking point by his stewardship of their proud, famous club.

Shepherd, by way of reminder, is the man who was once notoriously recorded referring to the women of Newcastle as 'dogs', while lampooning the naive loyalty of the supporters, before incredibly being able to worm his way back onto the board and become chairman; who preposterously described the Magpies - a club with not a single piece of domestic silverware to its name for more than half a century - as one of the three biggest in the country, and the manager's position as one of the eight most sought after in the world; who callously dismissed the idea of sympathising with the financial predicament of the nation's smaller clubs with the words, "when we have 52,000 fans at each game, the last thing we are worried about is the Third Division"; who publicly boasted of being about to sign Wayne Rooney, only to be entirely predictably gazumped by Manchester United, leaving his club once more held up to universal ridicule; and who cut Sir Bobby Robson off at the knees by publicly announcing that 2004/5 was to be his final season as manager: so removing any authority Robson might still have had, and making inevitable the disastrous start which resulted in his exit.

Yet the above pales almost into insignificance when we begin to explore the far deeper problem: the profound lack of even a semblance of a long-term plan at the club, and constant sense that it has preferred the publicity and glamour offered by making big-money signings to the nitty-gritty of building a strong, successful squad. For Shepherd certainly cannot be accused of having failed to back his managers: Robson and Graeme Souness, to name just two, spent close on £120m between them. But all too often, vast quantities of this budget were thrown away on attack-minded, often flaky acquisitions, seemingly in a constant effort to demonstrate the ambition of the club: £10m on Laurent Robert, £9.5m on Albert Luque, £8.5m on Hugo Viana, £7m on Carl Cort, £4.1m on Christian Bassedas. And this is before we even consider the money spent on players who either were, or could yet prove a success, yet were always liable to render such expenditure a dangerous hostage to fortune by picking up a long-term injury: £6m on Craig Bellamy, £6m on Kieron Dyer, £16m on Michael Owen, £10m on Obafemi Martins.

Invariably, other top clubs use their transfer budgets in a far more measured way, with top-quality defensive signings regarded as just as important as their counterparts at the other end of the field, and above all, with the aim of ensuring that the squad is able to cover all foreseeable eventualities. Yet an injury to one mere (albeit key) player, Bellamy, derailed Newcastle's title challenge in 2001/2; a rash of them involving Bellamy, Dyer, Jermaine Jenas, Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate scuppered their UEFA Cup dreams, hopes of qualifying for the Champions League, and indeed, Robson's chances of staying in the job in the final months of 2003/4; and this writer's jaw dropped in disbelief as the club - one of England's big five - entered a critical UEFA Cup quarter-final/FA Cup semi-final double-header the following season dependent on the likes of Amdy Faye, Charles N'Zogbia, James Milner and Steven Taylor. Talents these four players may very well be - but put simply, none of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool or Chelsea would have ever found themselves relying on such inexperienced individuals in a pair of such hugely important games.

It is tempting to put all of this down to bad luck: indeed, such an explanation proved irresistible to Robson and Souness when explaining the defeats and disappointments they oversaw. But it completely misses the point; for a policy of spending huge amounts of money on glamorous, 'big name' players, but ignoring the need for quantity as well as quality simply invites such a scenario. Robson, for all the vast improvement he oversaw during his first four years at the helm, never seemed prepared to tackle his team's obvious defensive deficiencies: when they met Manchester United in April 2003, for example, a game which the Magpies had to win in order to maintain their flickering title aspirations, the limitations of players such as Titus Bramble, Aaron Hughes and Olivier Bernard could not have been more ruthlessly exposed. United won 6-2, and in so doing underlined that, for all their immense expenditure, the gap between Newcastle and the championship was as big as ever: perhaps shell-shocked by this realisation, Robson's side never recovered during his remaining time at the club.

So why has the club continually pursued such a brazen, carefree strategy: one which, after another £15m was spent on just two players this past summer, has left it ludicrously undermanned in both defence and attack, and with an astoundingly thin squad overall? The answer must surely be that Shepherd is himself a fan, and buys into that romantic, widely-held idea that Newcastle supporters want an emphasis on out-and-out attacking football above all else. Kevin Keegan, of course, once suggested that the Toon Army would prefer to lose 4-3 than win 1-0, and endured the scars at Anfield in March 1996 to prove it; yet after a domestic trophy drought of what will shortly be 52 years, is this really the case?

To be sure, like all supporters, Geordies want to be entertained, and would probably prefer to win 4-3 than win 1-0; yet the mark of title-winning sides is an ability to play gloriously and expansively one week, and grind out a result the next. To have one but not the other simply does not work: so for example, Gerard Houllier's Liverpool made hay in various cup competitions, but came miserably unstuck in the league thanks to a predictable, inflexible strategy; and Arsene Wenger's Arsenal have discovered in recent years that all the most beautiful, flowing play in the world isn't going to win the championship unless it can be matched with fight and steel. Sir Alex Ferguson's Manchester United were best able to combine these two qualities in the 1990s, and Jose Mourinho's Chelsea have been so more lately: yet for some strange reason, Newcastle, whether under Robson or Keegan, never appeared to cotton on to basic footballing reality.

Still more disastrous was Shepherd's attempt in the earlier part of the decade to do much the same as his counterpart Peter Ridsdale at Leeds: to spend big in an attempt to gatecrash the Champions League, only to find that, once there, failure to match the inevitably higher wages and anticipated budget in the seasons ahead would have catastrophic results. David O'Leary's job was untenable after his Leeds side failed to reach the Champions League for two straight years; and Robson suffered the identical fate after his team floundered to fifth spot in 2003/4. True, they had finished third a year earlier, but their elimination on penalties to Partizan Belgrade in the qualifying round - in arguably the most pivotal game in the entire modern era of the club - meant that the writing was already on the wall: failure to finish in the top four in the season which followed would have horrendous ramifications.

And the thing is, Shepherd's policy was bound to fail. Just as Leeds had done before them, Newcastle were competing for Champions League spots with three exceptionally stable, well-run clubs in United, Arsenal and Liverpool: none of whom had broken the bank in achieving their pre-eminence over the English game. Newcastle could perhaps hope to take advantage of, say, one of them slipping up in any particular season, but there was already little margin for error, and once Roman Abramovich arrived at Chelsea in Summer 2003, the rules of the game completely changed. Newcastle, who had believed they were moving closer to United and Arsenal step by step, were simply blown out of the water, and left with almost no room to breathe: for even had they managed to pip Liverpool to the fourth and final qualifying position in May 2004, it would only have been a matter of time before the Reds inevitably reasserted themselves.

When you combine all this with a strategy based around signing expensive, exotic stars, rather than developing a robust squad, it's a recipe for short-term success, but long-term disaster. The only way for clubs to break into what is now an established Big Four is to build gradually, and never risk spending money which can only be recouped if the team proves as successful as is hoped. Such are the financial realities of football nowadays, failure to reach the Champions League when budgeting to do so is even more disastrous than being relegated from the Premiership when expecting to stay up: and if a club does not immediately recover the following season, the repercussions are both harsh and long lasting.

Unlike at Elland Road, Newcastle's debt is based on secure, long-term loans, and the Magpies are therefore highly unlikely to experience the horrific off-field problems which have crippled Leeds in recent years; but at differing points during this decade, Leeds, Newcastle and Manchester City have all chronically overstretched in an attempt to 'live the dream', and all three have suffered the on-field consequences: City, indeed, didn't even get near the top four, despite a wage bill under Keegan designed to catapult the club back into the big time. And it is no coincidence that they, like Newcastle, now face a season-long relegation battle: for Stuart Pearce and Glenn Roeder are both dealing with problems sown well before they took over in the hot seat.

But there have been other mistakes under Shepherd too: for while Robson's failure to reach the top four in 2003/4 made his position untenable, it was simply ludicrous to keep him in place only to sack him (and then, disgracefully, drag the settlement of his contract through a protracted legal process: Robson, remember, being the man who, as a Geordie himself, had identified perfectly with the supporters, had transformed the team from being one caught in a death spiral when he first took over to achieving successive finishes of fourth, third and fifth, made the club so popular that it was once more the second favourite team of much of the public, and conducted himself with typical class, grace and dignity throughout his entire time at the helm), a handful of games into the following campaign.

This not only left the club with a far narrower range of possible successors to choose from, but compromised whoever that figure would be: for any manager needs a full pre-season in order to get his own ideas across, and make his own signings too. For this to happen once would be bad enough; but at St James' Park, it has happened no less than three times over the past decade: Kenny Dalglish, Ruud Gullit and Robson all packing their bags within weeks of a new season being underway. To make matters worse, Shepherd's idea of the man to lead the club back to success turned out, incomprehensibly, to be Souness, who was in the process of failing with Blackburn, had a record of hounding out of various clubs anyone who said boo to a goose (and for Andrew Cole and David Dunn at Ewood Park, read all too quickly Bellamy and Robert at St James'), and never appeared to have the faintest inkling as to what Newcastle United were all about; and, it must be said, the choice of the combustible Scot's successor left more than a little to be desired too.

Glenn Roeder is, without question, a thoroughly decent, likeable man: but his record in management is not only atrocious, but has followed an alarming pattern. After almost taking Gillingham into the Conference, Roeder's subsequent spells with Watford and West Ham resulted in false, flattering seventh-placed finishes based on late-season runs achieved against teams already safe in mid-table and with little else to play for, followed by relegation the following year. And where did Newcastle finish last season, after a surprising late-season run mainly achieved against teams already safe in mid-table and with little to play for? You've guessed it: seventh.

Roeder can only do what he can: but the real question is, why is such a profoundly under-qualified figure in charge of a club which, given its unparalleled levels of failure over the past half a century, must be regarded as the most difficult to manage in the entire country? And that brings us back to where we began: Shepherd, who thanks to the complete failure of his stewardship, needed as cheap an option as one could possibly imagine; Shepherd, whose appalling mismanagement of the club's finances has led to a loss of over £12m over the past year, and a state of affairs so absurd that last night's game against the Blades - one which could have massive ramifications come the end of the season - was played less than 48 hours after a UEFA Cup trip to Palermo. And why? Because Newcastle - unlike any other club in the same situation - failed to ask the Premier League to move the game back to Sunday: they needed the money provided by SKY's screening of it on pay-per-view.

In their astonishing passion and devotion to the cause, despite enduring decade upon decade of heartbreak, Newcastle supporters are, along with their partners in under-achievement from the blue half of Manchester, simply the finest in the land: put simply, they deserve far, far better. But sometimes one can't help but sense that their loyalty is taken for granted; and indeed, that they can't bring themselves to even criticise, let alone condemn, a figure who continues to be revered simply because he owns the very thing which they hold so dear. But this time, surely, enough must be enough.

Over the past decade, this writer has seen more than his fair share of poor Magpies teams under Messrs Dalglish, Gullit and Souness; but never before has he genuinely believed that the club faced the real prospect of relegation. But with Sheffield United, Charlton, Fulham and Bolton already faced at St James', a pathetic one point having been taken from these games, none of the Big Four having even visited yet, and with a frighteningly thin squad which cannot be reinforced until January, Newcastle are in dire trouble. It is not a question of simply blaming the manager: the problems go far deeper, and start at the top.

Shepherd, the man who, lest we forget, has not so much fiddled while Rome burned as taken over £5m out of the club in share dividends while awarding himself a hefty half-a-million pound plus salary year on year, must either resign or the supporters must force him out; for given the shambles his policies have led to, to allow him to remain would be to tempt a truly horrendous fate. In football, when a fan thinks things cannot possibly get any worse, they quite often do: Magpies fans would do well to bear this in mind when deciding how to respond to the massive crisis now engulfing their great club.