Keegan's burning ambition

FOOTBALL: While Newcastle's early form raises Tyneside's championship hopes, their manager says the team can still improve: Guy Hodgson meets Newcastle's manager and finds him impressed with the impact being made by his expensive signings

"Remember who I am," Kevin Keegan bellowed across the Durham University training ground. In some people that would be a boastful plea for recognition. However, the Newcastle manager was shouting to his reserve team goalkeeper, John Burridge, and the message was wholly different.

Anyone who wonders whether the will burns as strongly in the Newcastle manager now his boots are made for training, needed only to watch him at play. Keegan was in a shooting competition with Warren Barton and Keith Gillespie as part of an Adidas promotion and he was using any device to prevail. "Remember who signs your contract," was the hidden warning.

Not that it made a scrap of difference because Burridge, 43, would risk a broken leg to save if he was playing a team of under-fives and he soared defiantly to tip his manager's shot over the bar. Keegan made a mock grimace and then smiled in recognition of a kindred competitive spirit. Gillespie was on his way to winning the test of skills.

Just as Newcastle are currently winning the test of skills in the Premiership with four wins out of four, the only top-flight team with a perfect record. Tyneside, whipped to a frenzy of anticipation by the progress under Keegan, waits and expects. "I'm beginning to enjoy sitting back and watching things develop," he said. "We're going to get better."

Even in a summer when football clubs made Viv Nicholson's "spend, spend, spend" declaration seem like the voice of parsimony, Newcastle were extravagant. Les Ferdinand, Barton, David Ginola and Shaka Hislop cost pounds 14m and that fortune will only seem truly well spent if the championship comes to Tyneside for the first time in 69 years.

Still the portents are good. Keegan is more than satisfied at the way his expensive acquisitions have fitted in. Ferdinand and Barton he was confident about - "I'd watched them a lot, the Premiership holds no fears for them" - but his gambles, if they could be described as such, have come off too.

"I'm particularly pleased about Shaka," he said. "I know you're going to say he didn't cost a lot, pounds 1.5m, and the pressure must have been on Les Ferdinand but I think he had the toughest job because he came so late. He was stuck in for a friendly at Tottenham and told: 'You're definitely in for the first two games'."

Four games on and only one goal has been conceded. If the defence has been sound, however, the clamour has been directed towards Ginola who has arrived in England with the elegant impact of his French compatriot, Eric Cantona. His silky and destructive skill, more than anything, is making Tyneside believe this may be the year.

"He'll get fitter and stronger and he'll adapt," said Keegan, whose enthusiasm for his Gallic playmaker approaches that of the Toon Army. "You sit back with him and light the blue touch paper. He's like a firework, you don't know what's in there, what's going to happen."

David, Daveed, as Keegan correctly pronounces it, has the free role in the team. "I've told him to enjoy himself, 'we'll fit in with you'. He's changed everything, his country, language, training styles and if I started saying 'David, you don't do this, you don't do that' I'd be taking away from him. I didn't buy him to change him."

Others have had to adapt though. Robert Lee, for one, is having to play in a more restricted manner, his role reined in as a sacrifice for Ginola's liberty. The result, Keegan estimates, is the best form from the England midfield player for nearly a year. He holds the fort in front of the back four and Ginola storms at the opposition down the left.

"I've told John Beresford," Keegan added, "that he can give the ball to David and don't worry if there's anyone tight on him. There's a lot of players you wouldn't want to do that with, but David's got so much ability to go past people, good players too. And not just get past them, leave them for dead. A touch and he's gone."

Keegan's enthusiasm expands beyond his own import. The Premiership, he believes, is reinforced by the introduction of world-class foreign players; the standard of play bound to rise when footballers of the stature of Ruud Gullit can act as an exemplar.

"If you love and can afford to watch football, there's some fantastic players to see. Someone living on the moors between Oldham and Sheffield, for example, would have a terrific choice of matches within close driving range.

"It's inevitable that standards will rise in the Premiership, which is rapidly becoming the greatest league in the world. We've always said it is but we've been kidding ourselves. Now, when you look at the quality of the players coming in, it makes you proud of the game. We should get away from the argument that these players will deprive youngsters of a chance to get in. It's a fallacy, a poor excuse."

The poverty extended to Keegan's own excuses for failing to win the skills contest. "I had a poor team," he said looking at the journalists who had comprised it. "The odds and sods who couldn't get in with Keith or Warren."

You suspect it will be the one occasion this season when Keegan or anyone else will accuse him of having a bad team.