We were in the Milburn stand of Newcastle United football club. The foyer smelled of last night's cigarettes, and although full ashtrays are not what you nowadays associate with "a top European football club," in that stand, dedicated to that man, they were fitting. Jackie Milburn liked a smoke. A famous picture of Newcastle's greatest hero has him happy as Larry, with boots around his neck and a tab in the corner of his mouth.
There were 20 of us. We'd paid £8 each for the Newcastle club tour, and along with my brother and his family, and me with mine, there was Dean, the tag-along boyfriend, and seven-year-old James, the ardent nephew, in full club kit with a golden number nine on his back and tricky red boots on his feet. As well as the Colls tribe, there was a young couple in baseball caps pushing a buggy each, an older Irish family, a pair of students holding hands, and a hyper youth who kept on saying to his long-suffering Dad that he wanted nothing but "Shearer." "Sheeerruhh." We were a motley crew, but dead keen.
Twenty of us, and one of him: Barry stood to attention to meet us out of the lift. He carried a grey club blazer, taken in at the sides, and a clipboard. He stubbed out his cigarette to welcome us to "the best football stadium in all Europe." Great. Let's get to it.
Next stop is all along the deep pile to the Learning Centre, opened by Tony Blair in 2000. Barry tells us that "this is for the kids, to give them something back." But there are no kids to be seen. Fifty computers stare back at us in silence.
As we walk, Barry describes himself as a long-time "club servant" and former policeman. We appear to be changing floors but it's hard to tell because whatever the level, everything has the same soft blue sheen of an international hotel.
We are herded into one of the executive rooms. The suites are named after northern castles. Most of the boxes belong to private businesses, though some are public sector. A few belong to players.
Our attention is drawn to the Trevor Bennett Suite. Bennett is a Leicestershire businessman who gave the club the money to buy Alan Shearer. We tread the corridor ("this entire carpeting area cost £2m") to the Bamburgh Suite ("largest function room this side of Birmingham"). Flushed with drink, a wedding party spills out of the door.
By now, the kids are getting bored. James is showing serious signs of soccer starvation. What to do? He sways through a swing door. He wrong-foots a bar stool. He flashes red leather at a crisp packet. Just kidding. He didn't put his boots on for this.
At last. In the Alnwick Suite we find some football. Just photographs and paintings mind you, but you learn early with this club not to build your hopes up. On the far wall—and all the walls in this place are far—we see pictures of Kevin, Shack, Sir Bobby and the lads. They aren't too good but they're what we're here for. A photograph from the 1920s catches the eye: goodfellas in black bowlers, big coats, white spats and silver-topped canes. Al Capone at the front.
"Did he play for Newcastle, Uncle Rob?"
"His name was Hughie Gallacher—he played for us, and in his day he was the best in the world."
In fact, Barry, our guide, had worked with Gallacher just after the war. Gallacher had retired from football by then, and was labouring up the Team valley.
"He didn't talk much. Worked hard, kept his head down. At nights, though, he drank. After a fight with his son he put his head on the railway line just before he was due to appear at Gateshead magistrates'."
The group bursts into life. Everyone has questions about poor old Hughie.
At last, the ground. Stepping delicately through glass doors, we go out to meet it. Nothing can beat this. Barry gestures to the largest cantilever in Europe, but what's that to me? I first came here 45 years ago. I knew then that I'd never forget that pitch. Saturday afternoon, three o'clock, the beautiful game runs out into your dreams. We look steeply down, sit tight, and shout to the echo. We wander the miles of empty seats turned up like gravestones.
Barry's phone rings and an instruction is given. "Well, let's leave it there, lads. It's been nice having you. Please make your way to the lift and out of the ground. The club shop is on your left."
"Leave it there?" "You can't do that." "What about the dressing room?" "What about the tunnel?" "What about the pitch?" "That's what we're here for." "Make time because we're not going until you do."
Barry gives in. The dressing room is small, white-tile, non-slip. In this airless bunker there is nothing that you might call personal, or identifiable; nothing to remind the players of where they are; nothing to connect them to all that life that soars like an alp above their heads. Some of the tiles carry the club coat of arms—as in any boy's bathroom—but that in itself seems small. The showers have the same sort of soap dispensers that you find in public lavatories. Same sort of soap as well.
We avoid the club shop. All postmodernism aspires to the condition of shopping, but for a football club this is disastrous. Every time the players run out on to that pitch, every Geordie believes that he and they together can beat any side in the world. What Newcastle United really has, therefore, is nothing you can buy. It deals in faith, not indulgences. That the lads don't deliver, have not delivered for over a generation, only serves to build the dream that is actually the delusion. The less you win, the more important it is to win, but winning only diminishes the dream. We might call this Shearer's paradox, after one famous sufferer.
Even so, in him, and me, and my brother and our children, and the rest of us, our love of Newcastle United is genuine—not just for now, not just for tomorrow, but for all those who have ever filled these terraces, and on behalf of every player who has ever pulled on the black and white. In the middle of a city with more than its fair share of vandalism and graffiti, the vast estate of St James' Park is untouched, and untouchable.
Newcastle United football club does not seem to understand the magic it works. On the tour there was minimal reference to football and footballers, or supporters, and the best part we had to stir up for ourselves. The club doesn't even have a museum.
And yet so much in the British game is tied up with history. For every home crowd gazing down, history looms up. True fans are defined by what they remember and, because football grounds are still held by an oral tradition, older fans remember more. But younger fans can have their say too. In recent years, moreover, the fan base has become more female, as well as reflecting the growing black and Asian presence in our cities. No one remembers a bad shot, though they will remember a bad player. But no one will remember a bad player more than they will remember a great one. They remember pale wingers who, like rare and delicate flora, flourished in only three feet of cliff edge. They remember centre-forwards who came like trains to make crossbars twang. They remember heroes who kept trying to get free—as all great footballers must. In their deep knowledge of how to play and do battle, crowds cannot be deceived. Every "kop end" is a standing conference of local historians.
Not every club calls their "end" a "kop" end, but every ground has one (at Newcastle it's the "Gallowgate end," or the "corner"). Those who gather there do so in a gesture of pure presence. Down on the pitch, most players are bought in a global market which has nothing to do with those who watch—except, of course, that it is changing the world they live in. The financial grotesqueries of Premiership football are signs of the economic times. Up in the stands, however, the fans are part of something that is continuous and tangible. Football fans, therefore, manage an identity that is halfway between the diversity of the pitch and the historic community of the crowd. They know the score; they know how the business works and, being realists, they accept it. If chairmen own the club, the crowds possess it and uphold it, in their hearts at least, right to the end.
Every kop end worth its salt believes that it can turn a game by the sounds and gestures it makes. They are as alive to the action as any medieval audience was to the drama—where tomfoolery and carnival (not always funny), mixed with personifications of good and evil (not always fair), to produce the always disputatious consequence (not always nice). As football crowds tell referees time without end: "You don't know what you're doing," and compared to them, of course, he doesn't. How could he? English crowds have been doing it for centuries.
In his book Golden Goals (1957), Jackie Milburn remembered as a kid getting up on Christmas morning to find a new pair of football boots among his presents. He put them on, shivering in the dark, and went out at half past three in the morning to find "most of my friends, wearing their new boots, playing football by torchlight in the middle of the street."
Because it doesn't understand this, I don't understand Newcastle United.
