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Your support makes all the difference.Those who witnessed Newcastle United's only full season under Kenny Dalglish would consider it faintly ludicrous that England should be expending so much anxiety fretting over Jon Dahl Tomasson's fitness.
A man who scored four goals in an entire season for Newcastle is now seen as the greatest threat to England's progress in the World Cup in Niigata this afternoon, and the state of his groin injury is enough to make tabloid back pages in both countries. But this is the man who scored six times in five games in qualifying and four in this World Cup alone, including the goal which to general astonishment confirmed France's elimination. The misfit of St James' Park is gone.
Indeed, Sepp Piontek, who as Danish coach oversaw the 1-0 victory at Wembley which ensured England would not make the 1984 European Championship, thought his successor, Morten Olsen, was deliberately exaggerating the extent of Tomasson's injury, "to take pressure off his own team and make England underestimate Denmark more than they already do".
In Newcastle, Tomasson might seem worth underestimating. Dalglish's 19 months on the Tyne can be summed up with three names. Mention Andreas Andersson, Stéphane Guivarc'h and Jon Dahl Tomasson on Tyneside and you will be given an explanation of how Dalglish frittered away the club's money on lightweight imports, who proved unable to fill the boots vacated by Peter Beardsley, David Ginola and Les Ferdinand. Between them they played expensively and ineffectually; 54 games at a cost of £9m.
Dalglish's house in Durham was fitted to receive just about every football match screened in Europe and he checked all three meticulously. Tomasson, the first to be recruited, was considered to be one of Europe's most exciting young players, then plying his trade at Heerenveen in the Dutch First Division, but he chose the worst possible moment to arrive.
In July 1997, Alan Shearer ruptured his Achilles tendon in a pre-season tournament at Goodison Park which would keep him out of action until January. He was injured just when Ferdinand had been sold to Tottenham to finance the final installment of Shearer's own transfer. Dalglish's attack now rested on the shoulders of Tomasson, who had rarely played as an out-and-out forward, and Faustino Asprilla, who was capable of striking a hat-trick against Barcelona one day and incapable of hitting a barn door the next.
Tomasson impressed in training, "a frightening talent", Beardsley remembered, but his debut against Sheffield Wednesday was marked by an appalling miss from which Beardsley thought he never really recovered.
It would not happen now. Tomasson, according to Olsen, has learned not to dwell on failure. "He can be incredibly effective when he wants to be. He can miss a great opportunity then he can take a chance and score," Olsen said of his most valuable asset. "Against the French he played in the role in which he had struggled at Newcastle; that of centre-forward. And you saw how disciplined he was."
He was also homesick in Newcastle. You can catch a ferry to the Danish port of Esbjerg, where the air reeks of fish processing plants, from Tynemouth but Tomasson felt isolated. Curiously, what attracted him to choose Milan over Barcelona and Hamburg when his contract with Feyenoord expired last month was the presence of two Danish players, Thomas Helveg and Martin Laursen.
What really did for Tomasson at Newcastle was ironically a film made about Sunderland. As Tomasson was struggling to come to terms with the Premiership, television screens in the North-East were dominated by Premier Passions, a brutally frank documentary detailing Sunderland's unsuccessful fight to stave off relegation in which Peter Reid was seen berating Tomasson's agent for demanding £40,000 a week for his services. The inference to the Toon Army was obvious, if Tomasson was asking that much from Sunderland, who traditionally were parsimonious payers, how much was he extracting from Dalglish's altogether more profligate regime?
Tomasson vehemently denied he was on such an extravagant salary at Newcastle, but by the time the season ended with an emphatic defeat to Arsenal in the FA Cup final, a match in which he played no part, he was sold to Feyenoord for the exact fee (£2.5m) Dalglish paid for him. Unsurprisingly, Tomasson was not included in the Danish squad for the 1998 World Cup, in which they lost to Brazil in the quarter-finals, a fate they might yet embrace this time.
Thereafter, his career exploded. He struck 54 times for Feyenoord and took his leave of the club in the grand manner, scoring as they beat the Bundesliga champions, Borussia Dortmund, in their Rotterdam home, the De Kuip, to win the Uefa Cup last month.
Had he remained at St James' Park, Shearer thought his career might have followed a similar pattern. "It was the right move at the wrong time, as simple as that," commented the Newcastle captain. "There were moments of brilliance but all he lacked as a young striker coming through was the physical presence you need in the Premiership."
"I don't really regret my time at Newcastle," Tomasson says now. "But I was playing out of position. I was young, only 19 or 20, and and wasn't physically or mentally equipped to play as a centre-forward then. Shearer is one of the biggest names in English football and it was difficult for me to try to replace him. I could only really play behind the leading strikers then.
"These days I can play as a lone striker but back then I was too young to handle the pressure. That got to me. How do you replace Alan Shearer? It was hard at the time but looking back it made me stronger."
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