SO MUCH CRUELTY. BOTH SETS OF supporters had to endure some of the poorest passing seen in the Premiership this decade and Graeme Souness had to watch Fulham, a much smaller club than Newcastle United, with their own injury crisis, somehow produce a player of the calibre of Steed Malbranque to come off the substitutes’ bench and win the game for them.
It was almost enough to make a grown man weep. But Souness will not be sobbing and he does not expect his players to, either. “A lot of my chat to them is that you don’t feel sorry for yourselves — that’s for losers. I don’t and I don’t expect them to,” Souness said.
Souness is, you suspect, becoming immune to the criticism of his style of management. He was not particularly interested in whether the chants for him to be dismissed came from the visiting team’s fans, or from the home side’s supporters in an effort to be provocative. “I’m a big boy,” he said. “I’ve been called everything I could possibly be called, certainly as a player because I wasn’t the most popular player, and it’s been repeated as a manager.”
But is Souness being resolute, or is he simply resigned to his fate — that dismissal cannot be far away if Newcastle continue in this vein? “This can be a very cruel game at times — you sometimes get more than you deserve and other times you don’t get what you deserve,” he said. “Sometimes Lady Luck will not shine on you. At this moment in time she’s not with us.”
At least Souness admitted that this is the most difficult time he has experienced in management with the numbers of injuries that his squad has suffered from. “The margins you operate in in the Premiership are so fine,” he said. “If we had Kieron Dyer and Emre, or Emre and Scott Parker, or Michael Owen — any one of them might have made a difference.”
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Malbranque scored with a tap-in after Collins John’s strike had been blocked by Shay Given, but for the time the French midfield player was on the pitch, Fulham were more cohesive.
The match began brightly, Tomasz Radzinski forcing a fine save with a dipping volley, and then degenerated until the introduction of Malbranque. After Heidar Helguson’s shot hit the woodwork, Antti Niemi, on his debut after joining from Southampton, made an impressive double save, first from Michael Chopra and then Lee Bowyer, and the Newcastle players claimed that they should have been awarded a penalty for a handball by Ian Pearce.