Are NUFC doomed after missed chance at Portsmouth?
Apr 29 2009 by Luke Edwards, The Journal
Newcastle’s failure to beat Portsmouth was yet another missed chance to lift themselves out of the relegation quicksand, but are their survival prospects as bleak as we fear? Chief sports writer Luke Edwards reports
MOST condemned men never give up hope. For those who have been sentenced to death, even in the bleakness there is always the chance of clemency being shown.
Even when the evidence is stacked up against them and every possible escape route has been exhausted, they believe, like a classic plot from an action movie, that a last-minute reprieve will come. After that, well, there are always miracles.
That is how Newcastle United’s players and supporters will feel following the team’s failure to beat Portsmouth on Monday night. The Magpies’ shot at salvation is a long one, but it remains a shot nonetheless and it is up to them whether they take it.
Where there is a will, there is a way and if willpower alone was enough to beat Pompey, Newcastle would have romped it. Unfortunately, if endeavour and effort were all you needed to be successful in sport, we would have a country full of Tiger Woods clones.
Instead, having won just four home league games all season – and just one in 2009 – the Portsmouth game was just the latest in a long list of must-win fixtures the Magpies have failed to win this season.
When all is said and done, whatever else has gone on at St James’s Park – and it has been a traumatically dramatic season even by Newcastle’s standards – failing on the pitch is the fundamental reason why, with just four games left to play, Newcastle are third from bottom of the Premier League and three points adrift of safety. Newcastle have an unbalanced, mediocre squad which is so short on confidence it is a wonder some of the players can get out of bed in the morning.
They have been kicked, pushed and pulled all over the place ever since Kevin Keegan flounced off one final time back in September, with four different managers in a single season an unwanted club record.
Yet still they keep going, still they keep coming back for more like a hopelessly outclassed boxer whose chin is far better than his defence. Durable rather than resilient, perhaps, but these are qualities, nonetheless, which may still get United out of trouble.
While results have not markedly improved under Alan Shearer – two points from a possible 12 was not the instant lift hoped for at the start of the month – performances have, ever so surely, got better and better.
