Читать книгу The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines онлайн

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In stark contrast, when Kevin Keegan was asked for his favourite memory from Newcastle’s ‘nearly’ campaign of 1995/96, he recalled his players being applauded onto the pitch by opposition fans during the final few days of the season, away at Leeds and Nottingham Forest. Dalglish called his Blackburn side the ‘people’s champions’, playing on their underdog status, but Newcastle were the true neutral’s favourite, a team who played enthralling, attack-minded football. Keegan’s impact during this period was incredible; he took the club from the bottom-half of the second tier to the top of the Premier League, galvanising a whole city. Newcastle’s shirts displayed the blue star of the Newcastle Brown Ale logo, their goalkeeper’s shirt during 1995/96 depicted the city’s skyline, while Keegan spoke about the club’s cultural importance to the city in a manner that recalled Barcelona. At times their football was comparable too, and Newcastle were referred to as, simply, The Entertainers.

Newcastle earned that nickname a couple of seasons earlier, with a 4–2 victory over Sheffield Wednesday, but 1995/96 took things to a new level, and Newcastle’s title challenge was somehow befitting of British pop culture at the time. 1996 was the year of England hosting, and threatening to win, Euro 96, soundtracked by Baddiel and Skinner’s ‘Three Lions’. 1996 was when Britpop still reigned supreme. 1996 saw the launch of Chris Evans’s TFI Friday, a programme based largely around wackiness, and the debut of the loud, extroverted Spice Girls. 1996 was the year of Trainspotting, a film about a group of heroin addicts that managed to become a feelgood story. Somehow 1997 felt very different, a melancholy year dominated by the film Titanic, Radiohead’s OK Computer and the death of Princess Diana. 1996 was about mad-for-it extravagance, and here were Keegan’s Newcastle, The Entertainers, playing all-out-attack football with no regard for the consequences.