He is the man who helped turned the black and white of Newcastle into the red, white and blue of the French tricolor.
But for Graham Carr, the former Newcastle United chief scout who recalls riding the Eurostar to buy four French players on one January afternoon ten years ago, there will be no split loyalties when Paris Saint-Germain come to town on Wednesday.
“I love French football, I felt like I spent half my scouting career on a Eurostar to Lille watching one match or another, but Newcastle United is my club,” he tells i over a riotous hour recalling his rollercoaster seven years on Tyneside.
Carr is 78 years old now and has been semi-retired for five years but the phone still rings. Earlier this week it was the man from L’Equipe, a newspaper he became very friendly with when he was trying to attract the best of Ligue 1‘s talent for Newcastle’s French revolution.
A judiciously placed story every now and then was one way of keeping the club on the back pages in France. The other was keeping black and white boots on the ground, and usually that meant Carr, notebook in hand, introducing himself to agents, rival scouts, taxi drivers. Anyone who spoke English and had a snippet of insider info, essentially.
“I lived between Northampton and Kettering station so within 50 minutes I could be at St Pancras station,” he explains.
“Then I was an hour and a half from Lille – which was easier than getting to Manchester – and the players we were looking at were a hell of lot cheaper than the ones we’d have seen in Manchester.”
And, in many cases, much better.
“It was a great market and it worked for us,” he says.
“Our wage structure was about £40,000-a-week. These lads were on about 20,000 Euros so a lot of them came to us for £30,000-a-week, which made a big difference to them but didn’t break the bank for Newcastle.”
Hatem Ben Arfa was his first big signing in 2011, persuading a sceptical owner Mike Ashley over a conference call that he was “a perfect number ten, able to come in from the left on his right foot”.
Then came Yohan Cabaye, a player he’d first seen playing for France’s U18s in a tournament in Belfast.
“Great attitude,” he recalls. “Not the biggest but a superb long range passer and a tough bugger.”
Moussa Sissoko was signed in 2013 for £1.5m from Toulouse and Mathieu Debuchy nicked the same year, like Cabaye, from Lille. For a time it felt like he could do no wrong but he still recalls the ones that got away.
There was a private plane ride with Ashley to Saint-Etienne to watch a 16-year-old Kurt Zouma and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Carr told him both would be worth tens of millions but “nothing came of it”.
He alerted the club to a young Hugo Lloris, passed on a tip about an academy prospect called Eden Hazard and also remembers ringing managing director Derek Llambias excitedly about Raphael Varane, then a 17-year-old defender at Lens, and telling him Newcastle had to have him.
“It wasn’t always the club’s fault though you know,” he says.
“Newcastle is a fantastic place – and Northumberland is beautiful on its doorstep – but some of these lads, their first thought was how cold it is up there and why would you want to play there? And with some of them, you knew their agents had bigger things in mind.
“It’s why I’m so happy about where the club is now. You can sell them the Champions League and wanting to win things, which we couldn’t really at the time.”
Despite the tight budget he got on well with Ashley, understood what made him tick and has remained on good terms with his former employer who – he admits – “Looked after me when I left”.
Club meetings could be held on Ashley’s boat in Saint-Tropez and on one occasion, when a fed-up Carr was contemplating leaving, a helicopter landed close to his house and the owner turned up to talk him round.
“Mike’s first thought when you put a player in was ‘Will we get our money back?'” he admits.
He left when Rafael Benitez pitched up on Tyneside. “Rafa just wanted to run everything,” he says.
These days his football trips are restricted to Sixfields, where he is a director at Northampton Town. But he’s a regular visitor to son Alan, who he spent the weekend with in the company of Amanda Holden.
Alan is writing a second series of his successful Changing Ends sitcom, the semi-autobiographical tale of growing up gay in a football mad household in which Graham was depicted by actor Shaun Dooley.
“I met him and the rest of the cast for lunch, he did a great job,” he says. “The second series is when I won the league at Northampton so I’m looking forward to that one.”
But the scout in him is never far from the surface. Before he hangs up he wants to chat Sandro Tonali and his mixed start in black and white and before long he’s selling him to me.
“Good player, good age, short and long range passer. He’ll come good, you know….”
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