As the new manager of Newcastle United, Rafa Benitez will receive as hot a baptism of fire as any in a managerial career that includes Valencia, Liverpool, Inter, Chelsea, Napoli and Real Madrid.
Because on Sunday, he will take charge of Newcastle in not only one of the most important Premier League games of the season thus far, but possibly the most important game in the north-east for a generation. The second Tyne-Wear Derby of 2015-16 will take place at St. James Park where Newcastle and their arch-rivals Sunderland will play for more than Premier League points and local pride. They will be playing, ultimately, for their top-flight status with both teams enduring dismal seasons – the result of many years of mismanagement, as Rory Smith’s article on ESPN FC analyses quite well.
For starters, Benitez will be looking to end a six-game losing streak in Tyne-Wear Derbies that began in 2013 and current League form in which they have lost their last four. For Sunderland, those wins have been little short of priceless for a club whose position has been ever more precarious. It is worth noting that their current nine-season stay in the Premier League is the longest they have been in the top-flight since their first-ever relegation in 1958, while their six-game Derby winning streak is the longest run either side has enjoyed. Furthermore, Sunderland manager Sam Allardyce – the club’s seventh full-time manager in a decade – is one of a select group of people to have had an association with both clubs, having played briefly for Sunderland in the early 80s and having a brief and ill-fated tenure as Newcastle manager in 2007-08.
While Sunderland’s recent form has only been marginally better than their rivals and they are just out of the relegation zone, whether or not indicative of a greater stomach for a fight, their 25 points is only one more than their rivals and unflatteringly only six more than the 19 points they won in all of 2002-03, when they lost their last 15 games. They have also had to deal with some serious off-field issues in the meantime.
Newcastle, on the other hand, has often been accused of not being up for it, of lacking fight reflected in the manner of some of their losses. In fact, both teams do possess enough quality to escape their predicament, certainly more so than the hopeless Aston Villa. However, the steady decline in fortunes is in danger of becoming a snowball, not helped by the fact that clubs promoted in relatively recent times – Stoke, West Bromwich Albion, Swansea, Southampton, Crystal Palace and to say nothing of Leicester – have established themselves and made measured progress, while those promoted last season such as Bournemouth and Watford already look like embedding themselves in the Premier League landscape. All of these are also rather better-run than either Newcastle United or Sunderland.
Both clubs have experienced yo-yo fortunes in modern times with extended absences from the top level of football. Sunderland indeed sunk as low as the Third Division in 1987-88, and it took Kevin Keegan to save Newcastle from a similar fate a few years later, the springboard for the much-celebrated “Keegan Revolution” on Tyneside. The possibility exists that the Tyne-Wear Derby will be a Championship fixture next season, which would be the first time since 1992-93 – when the Toon were promoted under Keegan and the Mackems only narrowly avoided relegation under Terry Butcher – that this would be the case.
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When it occured in the late 70s, there were a few derbies worth mentioning. There was the February 1979 game at St. James Park where Sunderland won 4-1 featuring a hat-trick by Gary Rowell. That season, Sunderland narrowly missed out on promotion while Brighton and Hove Albion won at Newcastle to go up. The following season, 1979-80, Newcastle topped the Second Division after a derby win on New Year’s Day. However, their promotion challenge collapsed as that of Sunderland gathered momentum and won promotion in their final game.
A decade later, in 1989-90, derbies in the Second Division took place again. Under the management of Jim Smith, Newcastle finished third and only missed out on automatic promotion on the final day while Leeds and Sheffield United went up. Sunderland were under the management of Denis Smith, who resurrected the club by winning the Third Division championship in 1988, finished 6th. Thus it went to play-offs in which Newcastle seemingly had the edge after drawing 0-0 at Roker Park. In the second leg, Sunderland managed a 2-0 win to set up a play-off final with Ossie Ardiles’ Swindon Town side. They lost that one, but were promoted through the back door as Swindon’s promotion was cancelled.
For some, Sunday’s game could turn out to be the most important since 1990. Newcastle’s failure to gain promotion occurred amidst a brewing boardroom battle that would see Sir John Hall emerge victorious, and lay the foundations for the club’s 1990s resurgence. For Sunderland, the 1990s would see the club pull back from the brink with two promotions under Peter Reid, a new stadium, and followed that up with two respectable Premier League seasons spearheaded by Kevin Phillips, who won the European Golden Boot. Time will tell how their most recent top-flight stay will be viewed, but increasingly the words “squandered opportunity” seem appropriate.
Should one or both north-east clubs plunge out of the Premier League, it may yet be an even bigger blow amid even more widespread coverage. This is because a slow decline in fortunes on and off the park is often more painful, as Aston Villa amply demonstrate, with the potential to snowball into something far more hideous. For this reason, Sunday’s Derby could be one that few can miss or few will forget – even if not for all the right reasons.
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