Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
The view from the lower section of the Milburn Stand at St James’ Park, across to the East Stand, is up there with the greatest sights in English football.
That one-tiered stand is a source of some lament as Newcastle United’s owners seek greater revenue and thus accelerated ambition.
One of two things will eventually happen: we’ll lose that view or we’ll lose this ground entirely. It will be sold as progress and I get why.
But, to this relative neutral, it is the East Stand’s diminutive presence that makes it so perfect.
For almost 25 years, the Leazes Stand has towered high in comparison like the vast steeple at one end of the cathedral on the hill.
But the steeple is no better than the rest of any religious building; they are as one. So it is at St James’ Park: the joy is in the contrasts.
If you’re smart and you’re coming here, you’ll arrive nonsensically early for an evening match in winter, as I have.
Newcastle is my favourite city in England and that would stand true on a sunny Sunday in June, but it peaks in these conditions.
At exactly the time you would expect the streets to be busy anywhere else, an odd hush is created in Newcastle as locals are taking shelter and ale inside.
They step out and walk up the hill in clouds of fog as if recently spun on a hot wash.
You want to be inside the ground by now, if your seat is in the Milburn. From there you stare at the words “Newcastle United” opposite and allow yourself to be blinded by the lights.
Those lights scream 1990s nostalgia and initially you can’t quite work out why.
Then you realise that it’s because that is when Newcastle United last competed regularly for trophies and so the view was on your television on the nights that mattered. It became imprinted upon your childhood psyche.
Competed for, but never won. Combine historical hauls of silverware, size of fanbase and agonising failure and there are few teams in all of professional sport whose trophy drought is longer and harder to explain.
Newcastle won four titles before the Second World War and three FA Cups in five years shortly after it. They have won no domestic trophy since 1955 and none of any sort since 1969.
The only seven football clubs with more league titles and FA Cups combined than Newcastle are almost self-evident to those of us who love English football: Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea, Everton, Aston Villa. Five of those have won a domestic trophy since 2018.
Everton (1995) and Aston Villa (1981) have endured lean times, but even they have caveats: Everton won the title twice in the 1980s, Villa won two League Cups in the 1990s and both have won European trophies.
Newcastle have had nothing. English clubs who have lifted silver since them: Oxford United, Luton Town, Swansea City, Ipswich Town, Coventry City, Wigan Athletic. Middlesbrough. Sunderland.
That creates its own pressure, not least because Newcastle have never fully committed to not winning trophies either.
They lost two domestic cup finals in the mid-1970s. They have had 11 European campaigns and finished in the top six nine times in the Premier League era.
St James’ Park was extended in 1993 and by 1995 there were 20,000 on the waiting list for season tickets.
You don’t notice that pressure in every moment, perhaps not even over the course of an entire season. But it is always building.
My family on my mother’s side are all from the north east and the name “Newcastle United” would perennially be uttered with an inflection of dark humour or rolled eyes which stopped for a year or two and then carried on again.
Even that mid-1990s peak only established Newcastle United as a synonym for glorious failure.
Under Mike Ashley, dark humour gave way only to darkness. This was not all on him – at least not at first – and the relationship wasn’t always sour.
Newcastle played in five quarter-finals in the space of nine years and lost them all; that wasn’t all the owner’s fault. Who knows what might have changed had they beaten Brentford, Hull City, Tottenham, Manchester City or Benfica?
But over time, the insinuation towards Newcastle’s owner shifted dramatically. The accusation, abetted by Newcastle’s first relegations since 1989, was that he ran United like one of his budget sports superstores where the only big cups were given out as free gifts.
Those were the lost years because Newcastle’s fanbase and revenue should have allowed them to compete. Instead they appointed managers badly and were barely even able to play catch-up on their own incompetence.
Ashley responded to criticism with stubbornness that eventually manifested in strangulation. The only thing worse than failing to win trophies was having your belief suspended that your club was even trying.
That is one reason why the takeover by Saudi Arabia was met with celebration without widespread concern in many corners of the city. Ashley’s greatest crime was making ownership of the club by the Saudi state feel like the right step. It is on him.
What is also pertinent here is how, just like the Leazes and the East Stand, Newcastle and Newcastle United became one and the same thing. A football club that mirrors its city.
In the 1950s, the city’s industry was booming: shipyards, coal, steam turbines. Newcastle had been a powerhouse of the industrial revolution and the Tyne maintained that reputation.
At the same time, Newcastle United were winning trophies with those who would become immortals: Milburn, Mitchell, White.
The decline of heavy industry hit vast swathes of northern England, but the north east was decimated beyond belief by the double whammy.
The deep coal mines began to close in the 1980s and the shipyards followed suit in part because there was less coal to transport.
United were relegated in ‘78 and didn’t come back to the top flight for six years, their longest fallow spell since the war.
The revived Quayside in Newcastle is a point of pride, and there were peaks here in the 1990s: new North, New Labour, Newcastle United on top of the Premier League with a King Kev in charge and a sheet metal worker’s son up front.
But nothing could ever hope to atone for the mass unemployment of rapid deindustrialisation. Just because the period of exponential decline is over, it doesn’t mean life isn’t hard.
With that, a feeling of communal resentment multiplied, focused on the suspicion – with strong evidence behind it – that their part of the world was being deliberately abandoned by those in power.
London felt like a city a thousand miles away. Even those schemes to assist northern communities seemed to tilt towards the west of England.
Newcastle United 3-1 Brentford (Wednesday 18 December)
- Game no.: 49/92
- Miles: 352
- Cumulative miles: 7,941
- Total goals seen: 137
- The one thing that I’ll remember in May: The view of the East Stand lights that half-obscure the club name on the front. Another classic 1990s football view.
The stereotype of Geordies being friendly and party-loving is true and not intended to be patronising; I know enough of them, family and friends, to appreciate the accuracy and to have been deeply warmed by it.
But they are also fiercely loyal to their corner of England and fiercely discontented that they have been forced to fend for themselves for longer than is fair.
In August 2023, the perfect news story: Conservative MPs demanded “urgent explanations” from ministers after an official report detailed that plans to move thousands of civil service jobs to Newcastle had been abandoned because “a review identified that they no longer aligned with strategic requirements”.
To which this city said as one: “We know the explanation: it was always this way”.
That is relevant to Newcastle United now. At the first home game after the Saudi Arabia takeover, a huge banner was unfurled in the Gallowgate End.
It made no reference to the new or departing owner, instead quoting a Jimmy Nail lyric from Big River, a song lamenting the decline of industry in Newcastle.
It read: “Everything they tried so hard to kill, we will rebuild”.
Who are the “they” in that banner? Everybody. The London elite.
Successive governments. Ashley, the Walsall-born billionaire who pretended to be one of them but eventually showed his true colours.
The media, who they believed had not held Ashley to account quickly, often or scathingly enough, or perhaps just didn’t really care.
This was a paean to their city and their football club in one go.
That doesn’t mean the takeover was a good thing. I wrote that at the time as someone who cares about Newcastle United, even if it’ll never be as much as they do.
The arguments about Saudi Arabia investing in Disney, Uber and Walmart, and about the Government selling arms to Saudi Arabia “so why did people only kick off when it was Newcastle United?”, contained a killer flaw: football clubs are special.
And Newcastle United are a special club. You feel that in Strawberry Place and the Gallowgate and in the dozens of chares that people dash through in search of shortcuts to and from St James’ Park. It is too special to be the arm of any state: UK, Italy, Guatemala, Saudi Arabia.
But I also get where most supporters were coming from, those who didn’t cheerlead for Saudi Arabia but acquiesced to the takeover.
You consider the ownership model to be deeply unideal, but you never had control before and you certainly don’t have control now. You’re never going to stop supporting your team because you never have before.
We can all criticise that response but must also ask ourselves this: would we really give up supporting our club?
What the takeover did do is to warp that eternal pressure at Newcastle. Excuses had been removed but so had the rules of engagement.
If you’re going to be owned by a state for means of diversifying their global reputation away from oil and human rights violations, you really do have to have success. Here, success means ending the trophy drought.
That places this current class in an important position. Under Eddie Howe, they have reached a first domestic final in 24 years and played in the Champions League for the first time in 21 years.
Those are both important mileposts but also count for less than their worth in the moment if they do not fall your way in the end. Newcastle didn’t turn up at Wembley in 2023 and finished bottom of their Champions League group.
For this manager, and this group of players, 2024-25 is of vital importance. There are players in this squad who may well be linked elsewhere if they are to go without European football for a second season in a row.
Howe’s position has already been widely questioned by supporters online, although that has not yet entered the stadium yet and Newcastle have since responded with a fine burst of form. It will mean everything if it leads to something and nothing if it doesn’t.
“It’s for Newcastle, trying to end this club’s wait for a trophy is the burning desire,” Howe said in the build-up.
“We want to be the team that gets over the line and achieves something special.”
What else can he say when everyone else is thinking the same thing? What else can he say when 23 different Newcastle managers have said the same before him?
All of them thought that they had a chance. Few have had a grander platform than Howe.
In this cup quarter-final, the tension within St James’ Park is pierced by an early Sandro Tonali goal.
Tonali is one of those expensive signings who they believe can be the difference maker here and he’s busily doing exactly that.
After both of his goals, Tonali gestures to the Leazes Stand as if to ask them to roar him and his teammates on. As ever, they are happy to oblige because they always have been.
In the final 15 minutes, with passage to a cup semi-final sealed beyond doubt and pessimism’s long reach, a traditional song rings around St James’ Park.
“Tell me ma, we won’t be home for tea, we’re going to Wembley,” they sing.
The chant itself is a call back to ancient history, sung in cars and on trains down to London.
Then it was unthinkable that Newcastle wouldn’t keep winning trophies and that the club would cease to be an industrial powerhouse.
Now they know to make the most of the moments because you never know how long they will last. And still they wait. And still they hope.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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