The most famous image of Kevin Keegan is of a man shaking with emotion, gripping a microphone, headphones clamped down over his ears, shouting how he would “love it, absolutely love it if we beat them”.
He seems a man on the brink, who knows that he will not beat Manchester United and that his vivid, passionate affair with Newcastle would not end well. Keegan, the young naïve optimist, brought down by the curmudgeonly wiles of Alex Ferguson. Keegan is like the young card sharp, Steve McQueen, who in The Cincinnati Kid stakes everything on his belief that the old poker hand, Edward G Robinson, does not have the jack of diamonds. He is wrong.
The 1995/96 Premier League season had the feel of a film. Newcastle, young, buccaneering, full of goals and glamour, tore through the old order – although defensively they were remarkably tight. On 23 December, they were 12 points clear at the top. Tyneside was going through something of an economic boom. The Quayside had gone from being a place of derelict wharves to a place of clubs and bars with names like The Quilted Camel.
If you turned to the screens of some of the new sports bars, you had a good chance of seeing Kevin Keegan’s face. He was forever giving press conferences, armed with the soundbites that fuelled the dreams of a club that had not won the title since 1927. If he were a politician, he would have been Tony Blair, who claimed to be a Newcastle supporter and invited Keegan to the Labour Party Conference, where they were photographed heading footballs.
However, by the time Blair took office in May 1997, Keegan had quit as manager of Newcastle United, and the giddy dreams had gone. Ferguson’s jack of diamonds came in the form of five 1-0 wins. In four of them Eric Cantona scored the only goal. The fifth was against Leeds on 17 April. Leeds, who had seen their keeper dismissed after 16 minutes, almost held out and Ferguson wondered aloud whether these players could raise their game against Newcastle. They had, he said, “betrayed their manager” by only turning it on at Old Trafford.
Significantly, Ferguson had consulted the Leeds manager, Howard Wilkinson, about what he planned to say. This was something Keegan said he would never have done, not least because he did not have many close relationships in football, which he rarely watched. His friends tended to be outside the game.
When playing for Liverpool, he lived not in the traditional haunts of Southport or Formby but in rural north Wales, where he and his wife Jean raised their family and their horses. After retiring as a player in 1984, he spent eight years in Marbella, honing his golf handicap and being a father to his two daughters. Then in 1992, he was called by the Newcastle chairman, Sir John Hall, whose club faced relegation to the Third Division, “There are only two men who can save Newcastle United,” said Hall. “And we are speaking on the phone.” A little over four years later, they were almost champions of England.
Manchester United won that title on the last day of the season and the sweep of that contest, followed by the drama of Euro 96 was partially responsible for the upsurge in attendances that cemented the Premier League as the wealthiest in the world.
However, this failure gnawed away. On 8 January, he walked out, never having signed the ten-year contract he had been offered. Ferguson, driving to Glasgow and hearing the news on Radio Five being delivered like the assassination of a president, thought the coverage bewildering.
As a player, Keegan had timed his exits wonderfully. After winning championships and FA Cups at Liverpool, he left after lifting the European Cup in Rome. There was another European Cup final with Hamburg, lost to Nottingham Forest, but there was also the Bundesliga title and two European Footballer of the Year Awards.
After captaining England in the 1982 World Cup where a back injury limited his participation to a few fitful minutes against Spain, he joined Newcastle who were then in the Second Division. His father was from the North East; his grandfather, Frank, had led 26 Durham miners to safety on a February day when 168 were killed in the West Stanley pit disaster. There was a romantic attachment, and Keegan was forever a romantic. There was also plenty of money, a contract underwritten by Scottish and Newcastle Breweries.
Two years later, after they had celebrated promotion with a testimonial against Liverpool, a helicopter came to pluck him from the pitch and take him into the skies. In terms of silverware, which may be one measure of sport, Keegan’s greatest feats had come on the shores of two great estuaries, the Mersey and the Elbe, but it was by the Tyne that he achieved immortality
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