Shearer craves glint of silver amid the reminders of what might have been

It was approaching midnight when a weary, downcast Alan Shearer emerged from the away-team dressing room and into the foyer of the Estadio Jose Alvalade. Graeme Souness had said his players were feeling "lower than a snake's belly", and his captain was patently suffering from the venomous sting in the tail of Newcastle United's two-legged Uefa Cup quarter-final tie against the Sporting Clube de Portugal.

"Have you felt any lower in your football life?" someone enquired. "Ask me on Monday morning," Shearer replied, his dream of lifting one cup having been shattered by a 4-1 defeat on the long night in the Portuguese capital, a 4-2 loss on aggregate. "Sunday, obviously, is all-important for us now. It's a big, big game. We've got to try to get this out of our system."

This afternoon, Shearer will be attempting to pick himself and his battered and bruised colleagues up off the floor in an FA Cup semi-final in Cardiff against the club whose advances he spurned when he chose to go back home to Newcastle nine years ago. "Do you ever think about the medals you could have won with Manchester United?" he was asked, with less than diplomatic timing.

Shearer dropped his gaze to the marble floor and shook his head. "Don't ask me that," he said. "Don't ask me that now." And with that, the man who turned down Manchester United was off towards the exit. Had he glanced to his left he might have been dazzled by the glare. At the home of Sporting Lisbon, they have a trophy room, rather than a cabinet. They have won 13 major prizes since 1969, the year Newcastle captured their last.

At St James' Park there has been no trophy cabinet since the Milburn Stand was redeveloped - just a display case in the café, featuring a replica of the old jug-eared Fairs Cup and jerseys, programmes and other memorabilia. It was not quite what Kevin Keegan and Sir John Hall envisaged when they had a stage built at the Leazes End back in August of 1996 to unveil the homecoming Shearer in black and white. Nine years on, the £15m human trophy they prised from the grasp of Sir Alex Ferguson remains the only prize that Newcastle have paraded since the Fairs Cup in 1969.

It looked like being different in October 1996, when Shearer scored the fourth goal in a 5-0 win against Manchester United at St James'. Keegan, having seen his side lose their 12-point lead to the Mancunian United in the race for the Premiership the previous season, appeared to have acquired the missing piece of a trophy-winning jigsaw. Three months later, though, the Newcastle manager was out of the picture himself, having argued with his directors about selling players to make payments owed on the £15m deal that brought Shearer from Blackburn.

And so now, at the age of 34, Shearer needs to get the better of Manchester United at the Millennium Stadium today to stay on the personal grail quest of winning some treasured silverware with his hometown club. He might not get any closer in his "final" final season next year.

"We're all bitterly disappointed about the Uefa Cup," the former England captain reflected, before the wounded Magpies winged their way from Lisbon to Cardiff yesterday. "We thought we had enough to get through, but we have a semi-final against Manchester United now. We've got one or two players missing, which will make life tougher for us, but we'll stick together and give it a right good go.

"Manchester United are not in great form. Whether they can turn the tap on and off remains to be seen, but I think we will see a different Man United on Sunday than the one that got beaten at Norwich last weekend. They are beatable - no shadow of a doubt - but they've got some big players who are used to big occasions and who are used to winning."

Shearer, of course, had his chance to win things as one of Manchester United's big players. He met Sir Alex at David Platt's home in Cheshire in the summer of 1996 and went house-hunting in south Manchester, disguised in a baseball hat and dark glasses. He even spent a night "envisaging myself in the red shirt, alongside quality players such as Eric Cantona, Ryan Giggs, Roy Keane and the rest - it was a mouthwatering prospect".

It was not quite as appealing, however, as the prospect of wearing the black-and- white No 9 shirt once filled by Jackie Milburn. When Keegan, his boyhood hero, came calling, Shearer's heart overruled his head and tugged him back towards home - thus missing the boatload of trophies that have landed at Old Trafford since then: one European Cup, four Premierships and two FA Cups.

In his 17 years as a senior professional, his medal count numbers one: from Blackburn's triumphant Premiership campaign of a decade ago. "Even if Alan finished his career in five years' time, he would still not win as many trophies as his individual play has warranted," Souness, his manager of the past eight months, reflected. "He should be sitting in a room full of medals."

If Shearer is to have any hope of sitting in a room with two medals by the end of his penultimate season he will have to lead Newcastle to what would be only their second victory against Manchester United away from St James' Park since 1950. Their most recent success was a 2-0 win at Old Trafford on 5 February 1972, against a home team featuring George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton - seven days after the not-so-mighty Magpies had been famously humbled by the part-timers of Hereford in the FA Cup.

"Whatever has happened in the past between the two clubs is gone," Shearer said. "We can't do anything about it. What we can do something about is the semi-final on Sunday. There is pressure on both clubs - on us because we have not won anything for so long, and on Manchester United because they have to win something. For them, to win nothing in a season is not acceptable. Fingers crossed; that is the ideal scenario."

It is a scenario that also happens to underline the gap between the Uniteds of Manchester and of Newcastle: the trophy haves and the trophy have-nots.