SPECTATOR SPORT
Buzzing all over
Frank Keating
THE PLACE to be throughout the English soccer season so far has been St James's Park, where Newcastle United have contin- ued to threaten all the record books with an irresistible series of performances. Can it be that the unfulfilled old giant of the north Is at last, and permanently, stirring itself With a vengeance? Kevin Keegan, England's fizzing, fuzzy- haired little forward of a decade ago, arrived as manager towards the end of last season with the club going through another of its regular laughing-stock phases. 'It was like a mortuary,' says Keegan, who finished his peripatetic career as a player at Newcas- tle in 1984, and has since been in comfy retirement with a villa in Spain and a farm in Hampshire. 'Now singing is allowed in the mortuary — and tap-dancing,' he says. Certainly the old area is buzzing all over, never more so than on Sunday, when neigh- bourly and legendary rivals, Sunderland, attempt to stop Keegan's runaway train in its tracks.
Although Keegan, who was born in Don- caster, made his name playing for Liver- pool, there remains a genuine touch of a Prodigal son's return. His father, Joe, was a Durham miner of Irish (Roscommon) stock Who was transferred in the 1940s to York- shire's Markham Main colliery. Kevin has ever been a delightful young fellow, with his head screwed on and an engaging dol- lop of earnestness about him. It has been difficult in recent weeks for him not to get carried away. Everyone else up there has been being just that. The team, by all accounts, have been playing classic, one- touch stuff — and keeping it on the carpet, too, which was always the 'Magpies' signa- ture in the rare handful of decent sides they have produced down the century.
Not that the club has been without a string of memorable — and idolised as nowhere else — players, especially among the forwards. And particularly centre-for- wards — Gallacher, Stubbins, Wayman, Milburn, Keeble, White, Davies and Mac- donald come to mind. They could have had, of course, Bobby Charlton, nephew of the great Milburn and from the same mining village of Ashington. Bobby and his older brother, Jack, were reared on St James's Saturdays in their uncle's grand days of 40 years ago — in on the bus, sixpence for a cup of tea and a pie, and ninepence for the match, `stretchered' down over the heads of the vast throng to their precious regular spot in the front row. But Bobby went to Busby at Manchester.
Albert Stubbins was an early Charlton hero in the No. 9 shirt. Once, when there was a First and Second Division and the Third was split into northern and southern divisions, the relegated United began a new season in the Second Divvy. First game, Stubbins misses heading the ball but hits the crossbar with a tremendous clang. Kay- oed, he is carted off to the Royal Northern Hospital where he wakes, hours later. 'Where am l?' he mutters to the bedside nurse. 'Don't worry, luv,' she says, 'you're in the Northern.' We didn't,' says Albert, 'stay long in the Second, did we?'
Stubbins, Milburn and Macdonald included, finest of all Newcastle's No. 9 strutters was the diminutive Hughie Galacher. They called him 'Tyneside's King'. He scored 387 goals in all. The most he earned in a week was £1 1. He ended up playing for Gateshead in his 40s. Within ten years, in 1957, broke and disillusioned, he put his head on the rails at a level crossing just before the Edinburgh-York express was due to pass. It was on time. They still call the place 'Dead Man's Crossing'.
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