STEVE McCLAREN had been the head coach of Newcastle United for less than a week when he called a meeting in the strategy room at the club’s Benton training ground.“You all have a part to play in this team,” he said. “You all matter. We’re all in this together.”
There was not a player in the room. The tea lady, cleaners, chef, laundry girls, medical team, they were all there. Standing room only for some. The message to the first-team squad was different. “When you succeed, deflect praise.”
Dotted around the walls are hand-written notes by Steve Black, a motivational coach who worked with the likes of Jonny Wilkinson and the Wales rugby team. The notes deal with something that was learnt in a game or about the importance of putting your all into every training session. It is an exhausting quest to alter the trajectory of a football club.
The road home from the training ground, four miles from the pulsing centre of Newcastle, has been getting ever longer since McClaren took the reigns at a club that sometimes feels like England; years of failure, mood swings. Uncontrollable.
He has been down that bleak path too, but McClaren has emerged better for it, less selfish, by his own admission, more human, more believable, and you have to be that to have a modicum of a chance at England’s most unsuccessful big club.
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“I used to plan my career and think I want to do this and that,” he says. “My only focus now is to make a success of this job. We will see where it leads. Did the battering with England prepare me for Newcastle? Absolutely.
When you have worked with the national team, you never get bigger batterings than that. After England, I could have worked the next day. Get back on the horse.
That’s what I wanted to do. It was a massive blow to my confidence and belief but I still had that. I felt I had a lot to do and prove. I was only 44, 45, at the time, so I knew I was young and I had to recover.
Don’t get me wrong, after England I had dark days, but I always believed. I certainly felt that the experience abroad was great. I thought we would do it with Derby but it wasn’t to be. So this is a great opportunity.”
Perhaps his last one. “It is always 24-7, thinking of this, that and the other, wherever you are in the league,” he says. “You love working with players and when you get it right, but you want to do it more for the other people the older you get.”
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To that end, McClaren is quietly manoeuvring to add flexibility to a rigid recruitment structure at Newcastle that has not worked. It has been suggested that the club will alter their recruitment policy in January.
No longer will they only sign players under 25. If so, it is a huge victory but the motivation is for another day, as the sheer depth of Newcastle’s malaise as a team needs immediate remedy.
The magnitude of what McClaren has to do would make keeping Newcastle up his biggest ever achievement. They have won once in their past 19 league games. The average survival level in the richest league in the world, over the past five seasons, is 37 points.
Newcastle, after eight games, have three. They need 34 points from 30 games to reach that safety net, something like nine wins and seven draws. The shift in form now has to be seismic, starting against Norwich today.
Bit by bit there is an attempt to rebuild shattered confidence in the players he has been handed. He uses videos of what went right from games to show them. They don’t see what went wrong.
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From the 2-0 defeat at West Ham last month, there was a seven-minute video. After the 6-1 drubbing at Manchester City there was a 20-minute highlight reel, all of the first half, none before the surrender.
“How will we get the wins?” he asks. “We have to have the self-belief that we can do what I see on the training field, what I’ve seen in the first half against Chelsea, against Man City.
“I showed them a video after West Ham and we said that’s what we want, when the attitude and display was great for seven minutes out of 90. Then the positivity from the Man City game.
I’ve wanted this job for 15 years. It’s been a long journey back, and a tough one, but I want to make a success of this club because it can be huge.”