Effort, endeavour and honesty aplenty, but they count for absolutely nothing

6:02am Monday 3rd March 2008

Newcastle United 0 Blackburn Rovers 1

SOMETIMES, in football, you have to be careful what you wish for.

When Sam Allardyce was boring everyone into submission at the start of the season, the accepted view of the 'average Newcastle fan' was that it was better to lose while trying to win than win while trying not to lose. After Saturday, it would be interesting to know if that 'average Newcastle fan' was feeling quite so cavalier.

With the clock ticking towards the 90th-minute mark, and the Magpies closing in on only their third point of Kevin Keegan's managerial reign, the fruits of a more entertaining, attacking policy became clear.

Eight Newcastle players poured forward to attack a corner in the Blackburn box, so when Morten Gamst Pedersen cleared the ball to the opposite end of the field, David Bentley found himself one-on-one with Jose Enrique.

The England winger slipped the ball infield to Matt Derbyshire and, with no Newcastle player within five or six yards of him, the Blackburn substitute calmly slotted past Steve Harper to seal the Magpies' fate.

It wasn't so much a sucker-punch as a body blow, yet with terms like pragmatism and percentages having been expunged from Newcastle's lexicon, it could also be deemed an outcome entirely of the home side's making.

"It was a genuine desire to win a game that caught us out," said Keegan, whose footballing beliefs did not appear to have been shaken one iota by Saturday's unsavoury conclusion. "Whilst you're disappointed, you don't want to be too hard on them (the players).

"There was a desire to get a winner, and I suppose that's the only criticism you could have. We've got a point and we've got a corner. While you can criticise them for what happened next, in some ways you'd be disappointed if they didn't want to get a win out of the game."

The attitude is commendable, but the outcome was catastrophic. Newcastle lost a game they almost certainly should have won and, with Middlesbrough also conceding a last-minute goal at home to 18th-placed Reading, relegation to the Championship has turned from an outside threat to a definite possibility.

The gap to the bottom three has shrunk to three points - Newcastle's dreadful goal difference means they can also be considered another point closer to all of the sides between themselves and Reading - and having won just two of their last 19 Premier League matches, United's form is certainly commensurate with that of a relegation contender.

Perhaps more worryingly, the Magpies are also giving off all the signals of a side in trouble. One of football's oldest adages states that one side plummets from nowhere into the heart of a relegation battle. This year, that side is Newcastle.

For all that the previous weekend's 5-1 home defeat to Manchester United represented something of a humiliation, teams do not get relegated because they fail to match the likely Premier League champions.

They get relegated because they lose games like Saturday's, games in which they dominate possession, create three or four gilt-edged chances, yet still end up paying for one moment of defensive madness.

The alarm bells should have been ringing loud and clear after Derbyshire's denouement, yet while Keegan was willing to countenance relegation as a possibility in the wake of the substitute's strike, his demeanour suggested it was a fate he was not willing to address too seriously at this stage.

"I view it the same as I did last week - you have to get around 40 points to stay in this division," was about as far as he would be drawn on the subject.

"That's what I think it'll take - 37 points to 40. And even then, you can't even be sure about that. I view it the same as everybody else - we're not safe yet."

Perhaps Keegan is right to be relatively untroubled given the quality of much of Newcastle's performance against Blackburn, a display that could arguably be described as their best of the season.

But while the sight of Michael Owen getting into goalscoring positions again is undeniably a positive one, it is difficult to remove a nagging worry that Newcastle are sleep-walking their way towards the bottom three.

Take Keegan's description of Alan Smith, for example, after another game in which the Magpies marksman earned top marks for effort but contributed absolutely nothing in terms of end product.

"Alan's the sort of lad who's gold-dust around the football club," said the Newcastle boss. "He always come in early and trains properly and, wherever you ask him to play, he gives it 100 per cent. If effort, endeavour and honesty won you things, Alan Smith would have medals galore."

'Yes', you want to shout from the rooftops, 'But they don't'. Newcastle are doing a lot of things whole-heartedly at the moment, but none of them are sufficient to win a football match, let alone a cabinet full of medals.

When it comes to the decisive moments of a game, be they in the opposition penalty area or in Newcastle's defensive third, the Magpies are currently being found lacking. Unless that changes in the last ten matches of the campaign, their "effort, endeavour and honesty" will count for absolutely nothing.

It didn't against Blackburn, with a failure to convert chances into goals costing Newcastle dear once Derbyshire made the most of Rovers' only opportunity of note.

Owen was the main culprit, spurning three fantastic openings either side of the interval. The first miss was the most glaring, with the England international rolling the ball past the right-hand post after ghosting around Brad Friedel. In his defence, perhaps he was merely shocked that Joey Barton's through ball had finished within five yards of its intended recipient.

Owen's next two misses owed more to Friedel's reflexes, with the Blackburn goalkeeper tipping a six-yard header over the crossbar at full stretch and turning a low shot around the post with his outstretched left leg.

"It wasn't to be, but Michael is a top-quality player and a great finisher," said Keegan. "On another day, those chances will end up in goals."

The same could probably be said of Damien Duff's goal-bound shot that was blocked by Pedersen and Smith's early free header that sailed over the crossbar, but a common trait of teams in trouble is the propensity to wonder about what might have been.

If only Newcastle hadn't been so adventurous in the final minute, they almost certainly would not have lost.

But then if Keegan's mindset had been a little more like Allardyce's, perhaps he would not have been the supporters' unanimous choice to take over at St James' Park anyway.

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