Alan Shearer is already taking out insurance on being a false Messiah

Another of those weeks when very little made sense and, once again, the catalyst was Alan Shearer. There he was surrounded by adoring press doing his best to look like a Messiah (albeit a pro-tem Messiah) and in reply to a tame question admitted he had taken the job because a friend had said to him how would he feel if he didn’t take the job and Newcastle managed to stay up.

This was odd. Surely the point of being a Messiah/Hero to the Geordie nation is that you take on the role because you could not live with dodging your destiny and Newcastle being turfed out of the promised land. If your nation, be it Jewish or Geordie, can be saved by a stricken Joe Kinnear or interim Chris Hughton there really is little call for a Messiah. With one answer Shearer had revealed that this whole exercise is all about Shearer and very little to do with Newcastle. He, and his brand, couldn’t live with someone else receiving credit for something he might have done so he graciously/grudgingly agreed to do it for however many hundreds of grand a game. Once again it is all about Shearer. If he succeeds he is hailed; if he fails he can say like so many false Messiahs before him, “if only I had had the time”.

The Shearer brand is based on the Shearer look and it was in evidence as he cased his many friends in the press room just reminding them, if such a reminder were needed, that it would be unwise to stray out of line. He even tried it on the fans, perhaps trying to stare down anyone tempted to put in an early critical call to 606. It is very similar to the look that Alan Sugar employs from his stacked chair as he surveys his boardroom full of nincompoops and it is probable that Shearer used it in his job interview.

Big Al has the brand, the look, the patented goal celebration but he doesn’t have the medals to back it all up. In fact he only has a single medal (1994-1995) for actual achievement and a host of gongs for mythical achievements (Overall Player of the Decade, Outstanding Contribution to the Premier League and the rest). Ruud Gullit was on to something when he told him he was “the most overrated player he had ever seen”, even if it cost him his job. It is also notable that the Geordie that Alex Ferguson regrets not signing most is the rickety and unreliable Gascoigne rather than the creosoted Shearer, and not signing him has never cost him his job.

Shearer’s appointment will automatically improve Match of the Day and thereby allow the BBC to increase its advantage over its only terrestrial competitor as ITV’s coverage continues to be hobbled by an over-reliance on one man. When they have a slot to fill the call goes up “Where’s Andy?” and, having located the tagged Townsend, the cameras are dispatched to do the show right there with Andy and whoever else is around. So it was that Wednesday night’s “reaction” programme featured Andy and drinking buddy Graeme Le Saux and someone who I assume must have been an autograph hunter and had been roped in at the last minute to do a bit of linking under the obviously cod name Matt Smith. How else to explain a discussion on “Being Wayne Rooney” which possessed not a shred of sense and Smith’s perpetual use of the phrase “at international level”. As in “you can’t waste chances at international level” whereas, I suppose, at national level, as the career of Shearer attests you can waste as many as you like and still be judged to have made the “outstanding contribution”.

New manager casts off his pundit’s caution as he sees first hand how tough it will be to keep his struggling team in the top flight

This report is a messiah-free zone, because to ascribe too many miraculous powers to Alan Shearer would only conceal the mediocrity of the side he now has seven games to save from relegation.

They can change the icon but the chaos that brought such a motley band of players to the Tyneside cathedral is still wreaking damage. Half an hour into this 2-0 defeat to Chelsea, Shearer watched Jonás Gutiérrez make a hash of a cross and yelled to his assistant, Iain Dowie: “That’s useless, that is!” Too late, you might cry, has Shearer’s punditry acquired an acerbic edge.

On the evidence of some fruity denunciations of his team’s often abject play we could conclude that he will do his best work for Match of the Day in the technical area of the ground he graced as a player. The last of the saviours will fancy his chances of a win a bit more at Stoke on Saturday yet this performance will hardly encourage him to break his pledge to stay for eight games and eight games only.

“It was a very hard task when I arrived and it’s harder now,” he said. “We know we’re in a fight and we’ll give it a fight. I’m still confident, and my players are, that we can avoid the drop.”

Outside the players’ entrance here, there is a bank of steps where the upturned faces of the barcode congregation have gathered over the years to cheer, beg, welcome back, denounce, protest, despair and generally vent their emotions on a club who have toyed mercilessly with their emotions. These scenes have led outsiders to see Newcastle’s following as a kind of cult for whom adoration of the leader is a necessary part of the St James’ Park experience. Shearer, though, is not buying into it.

Kevin Keegan always stepped on to this stage with a faintly moist-eyed, choked up look, but for “Super Al” it was the gunslinger’s entrance in a white shirt and tie and smart grey suit. As the snappers jostled and the bulbs flashed he walked to his vantage point at a stately pace and offered no acknowledgment to the crowd.

High marks are earned for that. The caretaker was being true to his promise not to hog the frame. He has seen too many empty personality cults to make himself another one. He left the field the same way after goals from Frank Lampard and Florent Malouda had left Newcastle three points from safety.

“I’ll try and do everything to deflect the thing away from myself. I think the result might do that, to be honest. Not that that’s a positive. Yeah, I was determined to try and keep it as low-key as possible.”

Inscrutability was always Shearer’s favourite mask and he wore it well except when forgetting that his comments were audible in the press seats. As the game commenced his gaze settled on a jumble of players assembled in different eras and from contrasting managerial philosophies, most of them incompatible.

“Who’s supposed to be picking up John Terry?” he demanded of Dowie after the England captain had carted his special brand of menace into the Newcastle penalty area for a set-piece. These are the unglamorous specifics of the survival trade: proper marking, defensive set-ups and the like. If messianic auras play a role in these areas, it is only to inspire players to perform the jobs they have been assigned on the training ground and in team talks.

Relegation-threatened teams place results against the Big Four clubs in a separate file. These are matches they expect not to win. Which is just as well, because Newcastle have not beaten Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United or Arsenal in 17 attempts. They have one win from 13 Premier League matches, or six from 31 overall. They have had as many managers (four) as they can claim home victories. This was their 200th Premier League defeat.

There is a pattern there, and Shearer can only hope to change it in the next seven games through sheer force of personality. He can neither buy new players nor sell those who materialised from obscure locations and have no business wearing a Newcastle shirt. He is heavily dependent on Michael Owen, Nicky Butt and Steven Taylor, who was absent yesterday.

According to the local paper, The Journal, “The Alan Shearer effect has created a spending boom in the region,” with the benefits felt in the “leisure, travel and retail sectors”. Five thousand extra ticket inquiries and an 8% rise in hotel bookings were cited as evidence. Hardly Klondike, but around town there was an unmistakable sense that this would be a day for expectant striding towards the ground rather than the usual pessimistic trudge.

By the time the game kicked off, though, the excitement seemed slightly mannered, as if the fans can no longer bring themselves to believe in saints. Not when they have to watch Ryan Taylor and Peter Lovenkrands. Or Obafemi Martins on one of his aimless days, which this undoubtedly was.

The pre-match idea was to urge Argentina’s Gutiérrez further forward and restore Owen to the heart of the team’s attacking play. Owen performed a role similar to Wayne Rooney’s for England, only a lot deeper, but Martins is no Emile Heskey or Peter Crouch. No real centre-forward play, a lack of width and duplication in a central midfield of Butt and Kevin Nolan: this is not a formula likely to have impressed Houdini.

At close of play, football across the north-east was threatening to take a three-club pratfall. A survey commissioned by the Football Association has found that this region produces more England players per head of population than any other. Yet Newcastle and Middlesbrough are in the Premier League’s bottom three, with Sunderland only one place higher. The odds are shortening on the fight to stay out of the third relegation spot descending into a giant derby match between Sunderland and Newcastle.

Home wins against Portsmouth, Boro and Fulham remain conceivable but even then points would be needed from the trips to Stoke, Spurs, Liverpool and Aston Villa on the final day. On his debut day as a manager, Shearer was looking at a team that reflects the endless sackings, U-turns and drift that landed Chris Hughton with the task of managing the side while Joe Kinnear was undergoing heart surgery.

Keegan, Kinnear, Hughton and Shearer. Even at such a capricious club no Newcastle fan could have expected that to be the managerial sequence in 31 Premier League assignments. For the fourth man in there can be no doubt now that this team need demolishing and reconstructing, which will cost money Mike Ashley, the owner, is probably disinclined to part with.

But for now Shearer can only be part priest, part hard man and part schemer as he seeks to eke out the 11-plus points Newcastle need to endure in the highest tier.

“The players don’t want to hear harsh things about themselves, they want to hear good things about themselves and the football club,” he said. Seven games to correct the seven deadly sins of chaotic ownership over many years.

• Stamford Bridge manager has his doubts about rookies
• Chelsea must tackle Newcastle today without Didier Drogba

Guus Hiddink has warned Alan Shearer that his experience as a leading player will not prepare him fully for management. Although the Chelsea manager expects Shearer’s appointment to galvanise Newcastle United, beginning today at St James’ Park in their Premier League fixture, he believes that former players who have not taken coaching courses are wrong to think they know it all. He also feels the most outstanding players, of which Shearer was one, can have trouble as managers in relating to others who are less gifted.

“It’s not always when you are a top player that you are guaranteed to be a top manager as well,” said Hiddink who, like Shearer, is in interim charge at his club until the end of the season. “Most of the time the players who have not reached the top level, they sometimes can imagine a little bit more what the difficulties are [of] not being top. Top players think everything, because of their talent, is going to happen automatically. For them, having the talent, it’s rather normal. But for most players who are not that gifted, you have to help them out in practice in a different way and it’s not a guarantee.”

Hiddink said that in the Netherlands the appointments of top former players without the requisite qualifications could happen under exceptional circumstances, but in general they enrol first on fast-track coaching courses. Shearer follows Gareth Southgate, Paul Ince and Gianfranco Zola in taking a Premier League job without the supposedly mandatory Uefa Pro Licence.

“You must also add many tools to be a manager and that’s why we set up a course [in the Netherlands] for ex-international players,” said Hiddink. “It is not as long as the normal course, which is four to five years. It is instead one and a half years for people like Gullit, Rijkaard and Van Basten. First, the players react by saying ‘Ah, it’s not necessary, I know everything about football.’ But when you start these courses, after two months they say, ‘It’s very interesting to know a lot more about managing a team or a club.’

“We aim [as managers] every day [at] a strategic, physical or tactical aspect of the game. That’s the part where the new managers have to broaden their knowledge and they get interested. I have the experience of players saying, ‘I know the game,’ and that’s what you have on top of your course. These are several aspects of being a manager. You can have your studies and your practice.”

Hiddink, 62, who admits he is still learning new managerial tricks, has the utmost respect for Shearer, who scored twice in England’s 4–1 victory over his Holland team at Euro 96. “I felt isolated that day,” said Hiddink. “It was a big defeat but we were lucky to score our goal which got us through to the quarter-finals. Shearer is quite a personality and always gives his influence in a team.”

Chelsea can expect to feel the force of it today. “Sometimes in these circumstances any input, especially from someone with a big personality and history with the club, is good,” said Hiddink, who will be without Didier Drogba today due to an ankle problem. “He [Shearer] may have no experience of being a manager but in this phase of the league it is not always important to know how to do training sessions in a responsible way. It’s more about the psychological and mental input from ex-players like him.”

Hiddink feels that Shearer is in a “no-lose situation”, while he reiterated his own intention to leave Chelsea even though he has just overseen Russia’s unimpressive World Cup qualifying wins over Azerbaijan and Liechtenstein amid criticism and demands that he quit the job some pundits claim he is not fully focused on.

• ‘Shearer is regarded as a god up there – and quite rightly so’
• Bosingwa and Deco expected to recover from injury for Newcastle trip

The England midfielder Frank Lampard has urged Chelsea to combat “the Shearer effect” at St James’ Park tomorrow in order to keep their fading title hopes alive.

The Geordie faithful will provide temporary manager Alan Shearer with a thunderous reception when the former Newcastle and England striker takes charge of the Magpies for the first time. But Chelsea, who retain the best away record in the top flight, are used to silencing the dreams of the home fans and Lampard hopes they can do the same once more on Tyneside.

“We had the same scenario when we went and played Manchester City just after they signed Robinho,” recalled Lampard. “But we have to react to the atmosphere and we have to try and get a result to put us back on track after the Tottenham game.”

The Blues ran out comfortable 3–1 winners against Manchester City despite going behind to a deflected Robinho free-kick. But Lampard acknowledges there will be the Shearer factor to overcome as the former United striking legend steps out to a hero’s welcome.

“You can imagine what the atmosphere is going to be like,” said Lampard. “Alan Shearer is regarded as a god up there – and quite rightly so after what he achieved for the club. He will definitely get the Newcastle fans going and he will get the Newcastle players going.”

Lampard’s views are echoed by the Chelsea and England captain John Terry. He is determined to wreck Shearer’s return. “The title race is still not over for us and we will be going there to hopefully upset him [Shearer] in his first game in charge,” said Terry. “Alan Shearer is Newcastle through and through and him taking over as the manager is going to give them a massive lift. But it is down to us to go there, show what we are capable of, which we have been doing a lot of the time recently, and get a result.”

Chelsea are hoping that their full-back Jose Bosingwa will be fit to face United after collecting a gashed leg while on international duty with Portugal, while his fellow Portugal internationals, Deco and Ricardo Carvalho, both returned to Chelsea on Thursday and joined in with light training. Deco has recovered from his hamstring problem and is expected to be in the squad for the game against United.

The striker Nicolas Anelka, still struggling with a bruised toe which forced him to pull out of the France squad, trained with the rest of the Chelsea team yesterday but is likely to miss out on the trip to Tyneside.