My Life in Football by Kevin Keegan

Author:Kevin Keegan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

13

RIDING THE MONSTER

It probably summed up our ambitions during the following years in the Premier League that at one stage Douglas Hall took it upon himself to fly to Italy and turn up, unannounced, at the home of Juventus, with the intention of bringing one of the game’s authentic superstars back to Tyneside.

It’s a great story. Douglas took Freddy Shepherd, Freddie Fletcher and Terry McDermott with him on a private jet to Turin. Then he walked through the entrance of the club’s offices, introduced himself as a director of Newcastle United and asked for a meeting with the Juventus president, Vittorio Chiusano, to arrange a deal for Roberto Baggio or, failing that, Dennis Bergkamp.

I told Douglas he must have been round the bend to turn up off the cuff and think one of the giants of European football would let any player of that calibre go. It was never going to happen, and I did gently point out that it wasn’t really the way the top clubs conducted transfer business. But I had to admire his nerve, even if it wasn’t necessarily the way I would have gone about it myself. The message from Juve, unsurprisingly, was that no one at the club was available to meet them and that, in any case, their star players were not for sale – and arrivederci. Which, in this case, could probably be translated as ‘sling your hook’. Douglas came back with a souvenir from the trip – a Juventus shirt with ‘Baggio’ and the number ten emblazoned across the back – laid out on the back seat of his car. Sadly, he never got anywhere near the man himself.

I can laugh about it now, and I cannot fault the man for having a go. There are all sorts of different ways to get a transfer done, and I used a few tricks of my own when it came to signing Peter Beardsley from Everton and putting together the strike partnership with Andy Cole that helped us finish third in our first season in the Premier League.

I knew Peter’s qualities from our days as teammates, and I was convinced it would give him a new lease of life if we could bring him back to St James’ Park. The only problem was that Peter was thirty-two. Everton wanted £1.35 million and the directors didn’t like the idea of spending that amount on someone that age. We were also interested in Benfica’s Russian striker, Sergei Yuran, and on the way to meet Peter at a hotel in Wetherby, I took a call from Freddy Shepherd to tell me the only way it could be ticked off was if I signed both players at once. I didn’t understand the logic at first and I wasn’t quite sure what he was telling me – until, that is, he told me to do the maths. Yuran was twenty-six and the board had decided it wouldn’t be a bad investment to sign a thirty-something Beardsley if it averaged out that the two players were twenty-nine.

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