Rafa Benitez is the messiah Newcastle so desperately need, and why they are desperately trying to keep him
Following relegation to the Championship the club and its support are focused on retaining the services of the Spaniard, explains Martin Hardy
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Your support makes all the difference.Raffertys. The name could not be much better. Raffertys is a bar, a proper bar, five minutes up a side street from Newcastle Central Station, the kind of bar where, if you were pushed over, you would move but your feet wouldn’t.
A group of lads - certainly not guys - with an age range of 19 to 49, a 30 year stretch of Newcastle support, were there on Saturday night, after a goalless draw for their team at Aston Villa and a victory for Sunderland against Chelsea had brought reality crashing into their lives.
It did not feel like a time for optimism for a football club, with relegation staring a city in the face for the second time in seven years under a disliked owner, with the Premier League gravy train now no longer using the city as a port of call.
It felt like the latest small death of Tyneside’s football club, but instead one song, as it had throughout the day, offered defiance and the tiniest morsel of hope.
The day had been all about Rafa Benitez; his knowledge, his chance of staying, to see out the three-year contract he had surprisingly signed in March, and about his song, a version of La Bamba which has unified the support in a similar way to the Blaydon Races.
With each chorus of the song, in that bar, up a side street in Newcastle, the volume went up. People were banging things and there was a mood of defiance.
It was five to 11 on Saturday night. Realism told you it was over and that the walls of Newcastle United had once more crumbled.
There was none of that in that bar though. No mention of Mike Ashley, staring at his second relegation inside seven years, or Lee Charnley, the managing director who fired £120 million of the club’s hard earned money across Europe on a bunch of misfits who cannot score goals, nor the man who now found them, Graham Carr.
It was all about a 56-year-old Spaniard who had been in Tyneside for just eight weeks.
There is a race to use the religious metaphor about the North East and football, that the game means so much to the people. It annoys some outside of the area. It is a cliche and there is too much of that in the game, and yet.
When Sam Allardyce had been asked two weeks earlier, about the significance of the game to the people of a region he was working in for the fourth time - player with Sunderland, youth coach with Sunderland, manager with Newcastle and manager with Sunderland - he spoke of a unique feeling for the club that he felt, for all his travels in the game, was only matched by those at West Ham.
He used globalisation as part of his argument, of a changing support in London for the big clubs. He said it meant everything to the people in the North East, it was part of their heritage.
To Newcastle that has translated, during its successful periods, into the shape of bold figureheads, people who have united a club and moved it onward and carried the great weight of expectation of the support.
Benitez has done that, to a level few expected after his surprise succession to Steve McClaren. McClaren’s departure was so ignominious that he was forced to take training each day whilst talks with Benitez went on.
He had become head coach after being sacked at Championship Derby. John Carver, his predecessor, had last served as a full time manager at Toronto FC in 2009. Alan Pardew, the man before him, had been working on the radio after being sacked from
League One Southampton.
Benitez’s last job had been at Real Madrid.
It was a u-turn, and the support has rallied to a figurehead.
The cloud has been the release clause in the Spaniard’s contract, the end to the three year deal if Newcastle were relegated. Demotion, of the team, was confirmed on Wednesday night, when the Stadium of Light rejoiced at their safety and their rivals’ demise.
From here, if he leaves, Benitez can plot a path back to the top level of Spain. Valencia and the national job are possibilities. In England, Robert Martinez’s sacking opened a door in Merseyside. There remains doubt about Arsene Wenger. Ronald Koeman’s success at Southampton could see him move on.
They are gaps you get asked to fill when you have a European Cup and ten other major pieces of silverware on your CV.
But there has been a connection between Benitez and Newcastle’s supporters. Allardyce, his one time foe, spoke of the desire to be loved in the immediate aftermath of securing Sunderland’s safety.
It may have an undercurrent of the Life of Brian to those outside of the area, but the messianic status of glorified manager has worked. First Kevin Keegan, who led the club from the Championship to the Premier League summit (as Benitez is now being asked to do), then Sir Bobby Robson, who took Newcastle from the foot of the the top division to the Champions League.
It has taken nine years - with brief spells of Alan Shearer and Keegan again - for Newcastle to arrive back at the same place. There has been no reinvention of the wheel from Ashley, or his side kick Charnley. Neither man has altered the DNA of Newcastle as a football club or a city.
It needs an inspirational figurehead. It needs someone who is allowed to manage, to choose players, to make big decisions, not to be sneaked in a side door, as McClaren was, for their first day in office.
Newcastle United needs a big name manager. In Benitez they have one, which is why, right now, they have started the fight to keep him. It began in talks at the clubs trading ground yesterday. It is a fight they cannot lose.
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