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
There has been a positive reaction from the players without the win so desperately needed to go with it and, if there were eight games left to play now, as there were when Shearer was appointed, the encouraging aspects of the Pompey display would have given tangible hope of staying in the top flight for a 17th successive season.
Newcastle did not play great football against Portsmouth and they did not slice the visiting defence open with slick passing and clever movement. They created chances because they simply refused, until fatigue gave Pompey’s players the better of the closing stages, to stop going at them. It was, in many ways, a primeval fight for survival. Wild, exhausting and ugly at times, but passionate and heartfelt.
Newcastle’s players can be accused of many things, but they have at least shown under Shearer that they genuinely care about what happens to this football club. It is not much, but it is something to cling on to between now and the end of May. As far more experienced managers will tell Newcastle’s former captain, it does not always take a vintage performance to win a game of football, but it does normally need a bit of composure, mixed with luck, in front of goal.
Shearer simply could not legislate for each of his three strikers failing to convert any of their chances on the night – a mixture of the great, good and half varieties. Had he still been sat on a comfortable couch in the Match of the Day TV studio, Shearer may well have grinned slightly at the irony of seeing Newcastle’s superstar strikers finally playing together and then failing to score. As manager, though, all he could do was grimace in pain.
He should, however, comfort himself with the fact that teams have got themselves out of even stickier situations than this with four games left to play.
Both Bolton Wanderers and Fulham pulled off the “Great Escape” last season from positions almost as precarious and, in the Cottagers’ case, worse than that now facing Newcastle, rallying unexpectedly at the end of a poor season to climb out of the drop zone with no room to spare. It can be done and Newcastle, as Shearer will repeat again and again on the training ground this week, are not down yet.
As few as six points from their remaining games could still be enough to keep them up, given the poor form of those around them in the table, but this really is drink-up time in the last chance saloon. The must-win games against Middlesbrough and Fulham are literally, and utterly, that.
