Whatever you say about Alan Shearer – and I have said a fair amount myself, particularly in the wake of an attempted interview two years ago, which used up time I might have more profitably spent drilling in my back garden for Newcastle Brown Ale – the temporary Newcastle United manager is unequivocally his own man. I therefore doubt whether he has spent any of his own time reading the newspaper reports of his appointment, or any of the accompanying opinion pieces about the chances of him prising the Magpies from the jaws of relegation. He doesn't need to know what journalists think.
In yesterday's sports pages, however, there was one item which might have caused the great man a moment's reflection, and it was nothing to do with either him or Newcastle. It was the report about Diego Maradona's Argentina being hammered 6-1 in a World Cup qualifier, by Bolivia.
The closest we get in this country to the kind of idolatry heaped on Maradona in Argentina has been in evidence at St James' Park this week, with Shearer's stirring ride, not on a white charger but in a black Range Rover, to the rescue of the oppressed Toon Army. My challenging interview with him in April 2007 took place at Gosforth East Middle School in Newcastle, but first I stood at the back of the assembly hall as he walked on to the stage, his arrival entirely unexpected by the 360 pupils. It was like watching the leader of a religious cult materialise in front of his worshippers. The place went wild. Even the sensible kids, the prefects and monitors, bowed down before him. As did several teachers.
Now, to return to Maradona, the shattering defeat in Bolivia has reportedly made no inroads into his massive popularity at home. On the contrary, he has been widely praised for not blaming the poor performance on the altitude. Thus it will be with Shearer even if he fails in his mission to keep Newcastle up; he will be commended for trying. And I fully understand why he felt obliged to take on the challenge. But it would be tragic, not just for the Newcastle fans and their hero, but for the romance of football, if ever the Gallowgate End resounds to cries of "Shearer out!" And it might. It might.
Please think of mum on Grand National day
The former National Hunt jockey Simon Sherwood lives a few fields from us in north Herefordshire, which in these rural parts makes us cheek-by-jowl neighbours.
Simon's enduring claim to fame is his association with the late, great Desert Orchid, and his teenage son Jack is following in the old man's hoofmarks, having already won at Hereford as an amateur. Anyway, back in 1989, just a few weeks after Simon had partnered Desert Orchid to victory in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, he finished third over the Grand National fences on The Thinker.
It was the most successful of his eight rides in the big race; he also knows what it feels like to come crashing down on the Aintree turf. I love asking Simon about his triumphant rides, but at a social gathering recently it took a woman – my wife, as it happens – to pose the really salient question. What did his poor mother go through when he rode into the mayhem that was so often the Grand National in those days?
Ahh, replied Simon, he and his mum had an arrangement whereby if he fell off then he would raise an arm, to show her that he was unhurt. So this afternoon, if you see otherwise prostrate jockeys raising an arm in the still-formidable shadow of The Chair, spare a thought for their old mums either in the grandstand with a pair of binoculars, or at home in front of the telly, heaving a sigh of relief.
Want a winning Formula for TV? Just take away the ads
My musings last week, ahead of the first Grand Prix since 1996 to be televised by the BBC, about the amount of live action sacrificed to commercial breaks during ITV's 12 years of Formula One, prompted an indignant email from James MacLeod, ITV Sport's media relations manager. He wrote that "these 'blasted' commercial breaks, as you describe them, enable some of the biggest sporting events to remain available to mass audiences for free". And he added that in the last two years the most-watched sporting events on television have come from ITV Sport, with almost 16m viewers watching both the 2007 Rugby World Cup final and the 2008 Champions League final, while 13m were tuned in to last year's climactic Brazilian Grand Prix, to see whether Lewis Hamilton could pull it off.
"It is just not possible," he continued, "for subscription TV to achieve these levels; and it is similarly not viable for the licence fee to sustain all free-to-air sport. Plurality of provision is vital and ... the commercial funding model has enabled ITV to offer viewers the largest portfolio of free-to-air football in recent memory."
I really can't argue with any of that. But I still enjoyed watching Jenson Button winning in Australia last Sunday morning with not the slightest possibility of the Andrex puppy getting a look in.
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