The most famous image of Kevin Keegan is of a man shaking with emotion, gripping a microphone, headphones clamped down over his ears, shouting how he would “love it, absolutely love it if we beat them”.
He seems a man on the brink, who knows that he will not beat Manchester United and that his vivid, passionate affair with Newcastle would not end well. Keegan, the young naïve optimist, brought down by the curmudgeonly wiles of Alex Ferguson. Keegan is like the young card sharp, Steve McQueen, who in The Cincinnati Kid stakes everything on his belief that the old poker hand, Edward G Robinson, does not have the jack of diamonds. He is wrong.
The 1995/96 Premier League season had the feel of a film. Newcastle, young, buccaneering, full of goals and glamour, tore through the old order – although defensively they were remarkably tight. On 23 December, they were 12 points clear at the top. Tyneside was going through something of an economic boom. The Quayside had gone from being a place of derelict wharves to a place of clubs and bars with names like The Quilted Camel.
If you turned to the screens of some of the new sports bars, you had a good chance of seeing Kevin Keegan’s face. He was forever giving press conferences, armed with the soundbites that fuelled the dreams of a club that had not won the title since 1927. If he were a politician, he would have been Tony Blair, who claimed to be a Newcastle supporter and invited Keegan to the Labour Party Conference, where they were photographed heading footballs.
