Sir Bobby Robson’s Advice to Shearer Can Help Owen Save Newcastle
History has a habit of repeating itself in the most uncanny ways. So much so that Alan Shearer may experience a strange sense of déjà vu when he sits down for his first tactical chat with Michael Owen.
Rewind almost 10 years to 10 September 1999. It was the night before Sir Bobby Robson’s first game as Newcastle’s manager – by coincidence against Chelsea, although at Stamford Bridge rather than St James’ Park – and Robson had summoned Shearer to a private meeting in his west London hotel suite. The invitation was not to admire the views of Chelsea harbor but to recalibrate an attacking game in real peril of falling into chronic disrepair.
Days earlier Ruud Gullit had demoted Newcastle’s No9 to the bench for a home defeat against Sunderland. That team-sheet effectively served as the dreadlocked Dutchman’s managerial suicide note but Shearer was out of form and Robson knew his game needed urgent fine tuning. Shearer will see the parallels with Owen, who was dropped to the bench by Chris Hughton for Newcastle’s last game, a home defeat against Arsenal.
Back in Chelsea Harbour a decade ago Robson informed his center-forward that Gullit had a point and he was no longer the player who so terrorized defenses while leading Blackburn Rovers to the Premier League title in 1995. The former England coach told Shearer precisely how he could reprise former glories by radically varying his off-the-ball movement and spending less time with his back to goal.
Although the pair did not always see eye to eye, a mutual respect was born and Shearer has recently thanked Robson for re-inventing and extending his career. Now his challenge is to do the same for Owen, a mere passenger during Newcastle’s recent draw at Hull.
Granted the 29-year-old’s game is somewhat different from the less injury-prone Shearer’s but the pair share a voracious appetite for polishing off crosses. Owen – not the tallest of forwards but capable of a prodigious leap – scores regularly from centres, just like Shearer did.
The only hitch is that Newcastle’s wingers, Jonas Gutiérrez and Damien Duff, have not remotely resembled Stuart Ripley and Jason Wilcox, who in their Blackburn pomp created such a high percentage of Shearer’s goals. It will be interesting to see whether Newcastle’s training sessions will now involve wingers concentrating on crafting balls into the area between the six-yard box and the 12-yard mark. Ray Harford, the late Blackburn coach, knew Shearer was at his most dangerous facing forwards. Accordingly he asked Ripley and Wilcox to dispatch crosses from advanced positions on either side of the opposing penalty area. Such deliveries would swing away from the goalkeeper and his defenders who typically tended to drop back to the edge of their six-yard box, leaving Shearer sufficient space to conjure yet another goal.
Owen’s positional sense remains similarly unerring but whether he can forge a successful partnership with the pacy but individualistic and instinctive Obafemi Martins could yet cause Shearer – who must be hoping Mark Viduka makes one of his traditional springtime returns to fitness – sleepless nights. Martins might not be overly enamored at having to sublimate his natural game for Owen’s good.
Newcastle’s latest manager always liked to be the dominant partner in any on-field relationship but dominance is a quality sadly lacking among a defence he has criticized on Match of the Day. Turning the disappointing Fabricio Coloccini into even an approximation of a £10m Argentine international defender may be beyond the powers of Tyneside’s newly anointed Messiah but Shearer’s BBC-inspired appreciation of the powers of televisual analysis indicate his charges could be in for a few afternoons watching tactical DVDs behind closed blinds.
Club insiders claim there has been a debilitating shortage of such briefings and team meetings. Significantly when the players earlier this year were engrossed in a PowerPoint presentation addressing their problems compiled by Paul Barron, the goalkeeping coach, they were dismayed to hear Joe Kinnear mock its content. Shearer may have been an old-fashioned center-forward but he is unlikely to be so old school.
No hi-tech training aid or smartly worded piece of managerial oratory will compensate for Newcastle’s glaring lack of pace and creativity in central midfield but Kevin Nolan can nonetheless expect to be asked to remind everyone of those late, scoring dashes which confounded so many backlines during his Bolton days.
Shearer’s original mission when he first arrived at St James’ as Kevin Keegan’s record £15m signing was to bring goals and glory to Newcastle. Thirteen years on his job title has changed but the brief is essentially the same.
