United can brag, but this season belongs to Keane

May 13 2008 by Luke Edwards, The Journal

Neither Newcastle nor Sunderland have had much to celebrate this season but the Black Cats will still be the happier of the two.

MANCHESTER United and Arsenal fans are used to measuring it in trips to cup finals, trophies and winners’ medals, but outside of the ‘Big Four’ success is a far more relative affair.

When Kevin Keegan declared the Premier League had become boring last week he was right in some respects. The same four teams have dominated English football for the best part of a decade and, barring any major upheaval over the summer, the same four sides will dominate again next year.

For some, such matters are just an extension of Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory. The strongest always dominate and prosper at the expense of the weak.

However, rather than fade and die with the passing of time – as in the natural world – Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United appear to be getting stronger as they feast on their yearly Champions League riches and their rivals weaker as they are forced to feed off the scraps they leave behind.

Yet, Keegan was also wrong in another respect, the Premier League is anything but boring. For the first time in 40 years, Manchester United pipped Chelsea to the title on the last day of the season, while the battle to avoid the drop was as tense and dramatic as ever as Fulham pulled off the great escape and condemned Birmingham and Reading to relegation.

When you also throw into the equation Tottenham Hotspur’s Carling Cup final victory over Chelsea and the fact two unfancied sides, Cardiff and Portsmouth, will contest next weekend’s FA Cup final at Wembley, there has been enough unpredictable excitement to keep the general population entertained.

But, in the North East there has been precious little to get the pulses racing. All three of the region’s sides have disappointingly finished in the bottom half of the table via varying degrees of relegation danger and not even a Fair Play Award from Uefa will bring European football here next season.

All three have flirted dangerously with the drop, albeit in different ways. Sunderland’s was a widely predicted affair and it lasted a long time before fizzling out in the last few weeks of the campaign. Middlesbrough’s was a more surprising one, but it proved to be a serious and long-term relationship, despite the fact they did not appear well suited at first. Newcastle’s was completely unexpected – short, but extremely intense before it was emphatically ended by the Magpies a month ago.

Yet it is Sunderland who will still feel the happiest at the way their relationship with the Premier League has unfolded and it is Newcastle who will reflect over the summer and have the most to regret.

Sunderland finished below Newcastle and Middlesbrough in the table, but when there is no silverware involved and no clear distinction between winners and losers, success can only be measured when it is put into some sort of context.

Roy Keane’s main objective this season was to keep the Black Cats in the Premier League and he achieved that goal with something to spare.

He spent more than £40m to achieve it and, at times made some horrendous blunders in the transfer market – right-backs Paul McShane and Greg Halford at a combined cost of almost £6m the most glaring. But his reputation as a manager has been enhanced by keeping the Wearsiders afloat in the top flight.

Sunderland’s supporters, for all their bravado 12 months ago about taking the Premier League by storm, knew this season would be tough and many of them lived in fear of another immediate return to the Championship. Keane banished those fears and he has brought hope and expectation back to the Stadium of Light.

So too has Keegan at Newcastle after a stunning transformation in the team’s results in the final few weeks of the campaign. But that cannot paper over the cracks at St James’s Park.

Newcastle began the season with far bolder ambitions than their neighbours with a highly-rated new manager at the helm in Sam Allardyce and a billionaire owner, Mike Ashley, in the boardroom. After the club’s best start to a Premier League campaign in more than a decade, this was supposed to be the season United re-established themselves as part of English football’s elite but they have ended it, once again, as one of the also-rans.

Newcastle’s pre-season ambition of pushing for a European place was replaced by an unexpected battle with relegation while a nation sniggered and laughed at their demise.

While Sunderland, for all of Keane’s clever posturing and tendency to deliver withering attacks on the state of the game as whole, have looked a club at peace with itself, Newcastle have been anything but.

Appearances, of course, can be deceptive, but this has been another season where Newcastle have attracted attention for all the wrong reasons – poor performances, bad results, supposed takeovers, political intrigue and sackings. There is a new cast in place, but the soap opera at St James’s Park continues.

As it is, both clubs will be happy the summer months are stretching out in front of them as they look to regroup and rebuild for next time.

An England-less Euro 2008 and a few weekends enjoying the dubious delights of an English summer will probably be enough to recharge the batteries and generate a fresh wave of pre-season optimism, but for once it is Sunderland who can look back on the last nine months with some feeling of achievement – even if they did drop four points in the Tyne-Wear derbies.

Local bragging rights belong to those in black and white for finishing the season in the highest position, but Sunderland still have plenty of cause for comfort and that, given their recent Premier League history, can be regarded as success.