Newcastle vs Liverpool

Last weekend I took the long trip (isn't that long these days but back then it was really long) trip to the old army camp where I lived in for 1-2 months in 1996. They were probably the longest part of my national service. That place was one of the most bleak and barren places in Singapore (although it was not as bleak and barren as Snowy Hill). 

At that time, there was this great football match: Newcastle vs Liverpool. It finished 4-3. It was, back then, billed as the greatest match that we’ve seen since the EPL started. Back then, the EPL wasn’t a great product. It was still coming out of its doldrums, and it would not be taken seriously: the various failures in Europe made it seem that the EPL was left far behind. 

After the ban on the English football ended, it experienced a rebirth. Alex Ferguson’s Man U had won a European trophy in the cup winner’s cup. But sustained success in Europe was a long time coming. European competitions were dominated by the Germans, the Spanish and the Italians in the 1990s. Even when Man U was dominating the domestic league, it wasn’t until 1999’s treble that they won the European cup, and the sheer romance of that occasion highlighted that they won it as underdogs, rather than as one of the favourites who were expected to win it. 

In this backdrop was the Liverpool Newcastle match. 

There was a fork in the road regarding the premier league. It hadn’t been a league that was as dominated by juggernauts the way it eventually became, after Man U won the league title against Newcastle. For a time, people were wondering whether Man U’s dominance was going to last, particularly as back then there wasn’t anything inevitable about Man U’s ascendence to the top of the pile. The other great sports dynasty of the 1990s was Chicago Bull’s dominance of the NBA, and for some reason it didn’t outlast Michael Jordan being part of that team. 

Various clubs challenged for the top of the premier league. There was a power vacuum because at that time, Liverpool were on the wane. Anybody could be the next powerhouse in football. At various times, it could have been Leeds, who won a title. Or Aston Villa. Or Sheffield Wednesday, who won a few cups and reached a few finals. Or Norwich or Nottingham Forest, who reached Europe. It could have been Blackburn, who actually did win one premier league title with the great 1995 team. Or it could have been Newcastle. 

Newcastle and Liverpool had a lot in common. They had a passionate support. They were northern teams. Newcastle had former Liverpool great players managing them, in Kevin Keegan and Kenny Dalglish. Newcastle was supposed to be the next Blackburn Rovers, who had a generous benefactor bankrolling them. 

Manchester United were there for the taking, it seemed. The season started with an infamous defeat against Aston Villa, where the former Liverpool player turned pundit Alan Hansen said, “you’ll never win anything with kids”. But those kids were not just… it usually is the case that you have one or two great academy products coming through a season. But United had a great bumper crop, in Beckham, the Nevilles, Scholes, Giggs and Butt. And there were the ones who didn’t make it, but had respectable careers with mid-table sides, like Robbie Savage and Keith Gillespie. 

They had a youth team with a miraculous crop of youngsters. Only to be rivalled with the Barcelona youngsters who formed the core of Barcelona when Barcelona and Spain ruled the world. Or the Chelsea of recent times. 

The match was played under very tense circumstances, with Alex Ferguson turning the heat up on Kevin Keegan, the way that he threatened to hound Blackburn off the title race. In fact, there were a lot of tense title races with Man U during that time. There was 91/92, which he lost to Leeds. 92/93 when he had to rough it out against Aston Villa. 93/94, he won at a canter. 94/95, he lost it to Blackburn. 95/96, he had to fight against Newcastle. 

Newcastle were letting the title slip away. Around that time, both Man U and Newcastle were playing Leeds United around the same time, and Alex Ferguson made a mischievous remark about which of them Leeds was going to fight harder against, and Kevin Keegan had an outburst which made it plain that the heat was getting to him. 

It was a big, pulsating match, full of twists, turns, excitement, and one to remember for the ages. This may be me looking at it through the lens of myself also being a teenager, but the EPL seemed to be going through some adolescence during that period of time. The football wasn’t yet world class, but the players were very good, it had the potential to be extremely exciting and entertaining. The players were all free to display their authentic parts of their personality. Eventually this would change: first in the 00s, the players were all media trained to give very prosaic answers that reduced the jeopardy on themselves. And then later, after the rise of social media, then they would be trained to become circus clowns designed to “drive engagement” and be an upstanding citizen of the clownshow which is social media. 

Tactically, it was a freer and more open environment. This would not be Brazil 1982, when everything revolved around individuals. But both teams combined attacking flair and skill at the expense of defensive solidity. In contrast, the league cup finals of 2025 would show two teams which were so defensively well drilled, they defended from the front. (This is now known as “pressing”.) 

In the 1996 match, Newcastle were a new pretender to the throne, and Liverpool were the old guard who had lost their throne and were looking to retake it. (It would have been very demoralizing for them to know that they had to wait until 2020 to see Liverpool win the next league title.)

The fact that Newcastle won this match does suggest that this time, Newcastle actually wins something. They had a rough time after topping the table 12 points ahead at Christmas 1995. They came in second twice. Then they fell apart when Ruud Gullit tried to implement “sexy football”. Bobby Robson restored some pride with a champions league finish, but that was as good as it got. Following their tradition for having former Liverpool greats, they got Graeme Souness, and turned into a grim mid table side. 

Then the Mike Ashley period began, and it was a thinly disguised asset stripping exercise. That only ended when the Saudis bought it over, installed Eddie Howe, and produced a lean and mean side capable of challenging for champions league places. 

It’s possible that the era of oligopolies is finally over. This may not be the post-Alex Ferguson, pre-Guardiola period where the league title pinged back and forth between an unsteady Man City, Chelsea and of all clubs, Leicester, when Tottenham were threatening to win a title. But we now have an elite that not only contains the usual suspects (Man City, Arsenal, Liverpool), but a few genuine UCL places contenders (Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, Bournemouth) and a few lost sheep who are hankering for former glories (Man U, Tottenham, Chelsea).