Robson knew Robert would provide the vital quality of width and skill. Bellamy brought something which will always be one of football’s most telling commodities – raw speed. Robert gave Newcastle new balance and Bellamy supplemented the ageing legs of Alan Shearer. Now the old fox invests in the Portuguese prodigy Hugo Viana.
Width, speed, and youth – the lifeblood of a team on the move.Whether the shrewd instincts and inspiring touches of Venables and Robson will seriously impact on the Big Three is certainly one of the key factors in the new season, and the value of their doing so can scarcely be over-estimated.Ferguson and Wenger have not been slow to imply that the Premiership has become something of a personal argument, one that Houllier might be more inclined to join if he was not so understandably preoccupied with his hard-earned truth that winning any title is no substitute for the ability to watch the sun come up in the morning. But then, who knows, Houllier’s emergence from serious illness, his widening sense of the importance of life beyond the touchlines, may have released some inner tension from within both himself and his team. If the result is a greater spontaneity in a Liverpool already so well equipped with such talent as Michael Owen and Steven Gerrard and now augmented by the potentially wonderful panache of Senegal’s World Cup sensation El Hadji Diouf, Fergie and Ars?, not to mention El Tel and Sir Bobby, could all be left peering into the middle-distance.But if money is indeed scarcer now, enough of it may well have congregated in the same old places to confound all the devices of a Wenger and a Houllier, a Venables and a Robson. Apart from Keane and Veron, Giggs and Scholes, Beckham and Van Nistelrooy, United also have the one thing they so conspicuously lacked all of last season, the one through which they were supposed to canter like Nijinksy in a selling plate. They have a centre half of youth and proven ability who cost them £3m more than the combined summer spending of their principal rivals Arsenal, Liverpool and Leeds.United had the means to go out and solve their one glaringly identifiable problem in one stroke of the pen at a time when Barcelona admitted that they couldn’t cover the wages of one of the great stars of the World Cup, Rivaldo. That, in the dog days of plc football, was a statement of deep residual power.
It is why the bookmakers, in their remorseless disregard for romanticism, are probably right to offer United at a mere 5-4 For myself, I like Leeds at a far from generous 14-1. Roy Keane faces a 12 month legal nightmare after Alf Inge Haaland and Manchester City declared their intention to sue the former Irish skipper for his horror tackle in the Old Trafford derby in April last year. Take that you ‘.”I didn’t even wait for the referee to show the red card. There are some statistics, like the number of Soviet war dead or the distance between galaxies where you have to stand back and ponder the numbers Bobby Robson became a licensed FA coach in 1962. Alex Ferguson had just started out as an amateur for Queens Park, while Terry Venables had graduated from England schoolboy internationals to sign professional terms with Chelsea Peter Reid and Glenn Hoddle were at primary school Glenn Roeder wasn’t even born. Glenn Roeder wasn’t even born.
When people ask why Kenny Dalglish and George Graham, who began their managerial careers 20 years after Robson, are no longer involved in frontline football, the response is often that the game has passed them by.
