Going to the match, taking photos, talking shite #nufc
Newcastle Upon Tyne, England
Joined July 2026
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The Trent and The Gallowgate, name a better combo, I’ll fucking wait.
#nufc
@TheTrent1861
So back to basics. Going to the match, taking photos, and understanding why every hair on my head is grey. #nufc
Lone Magpie retweeted
'This is a church to Kevin Keegan' 🥹🤍
Moving pre-match scenes at St. James' Park as Newcastle and Liverpool come together to pay tribute to King Kev.
📻 @bbcjohnmurray & Pat Nevin
#BBCFootball #NEWLIV #NUFC #LFC
The View from the Afternoon
"Alreet mate? Been up to much?"
Fourteen weeks. Ninety-eight days. A World Cup came and went. There's a new Prime Minister. The country had the hottest summer it's ever had and every one of us developed our own coping techniques. Boxer shorts in the freezer, for the win.
"Na not much pal, you?"
"Fairly quiet like, just the usual."
That's it. That's the summer recap sorted. Eleven words, and now we're onto whose round it is.
Nobody's lying, mind. That's the odd part. Something will have happened to every single one of them since May.
A job gone, an important scan at the hospital, an issue with the missus. Go round that table and ask properly and you'd find a full year of life sat there. Nobody asks properly. That isn't the problem. That's what the group is for.
Because there's plenty to talk about that isn't any of that.
Like that lad, in a pub I won't name just in case, who comes in on his walking sticks. Always gets his preferred seat. Sympathy is a powerful thing at a busy match day pub. Then when it's time to go, he marches past the lot of us on the way up, sticks tucked under his arm like a rolled-up newspaper, only for them to become absolutely crucial to his mobility again at precisely the point he reaches the top of the hill. And crucial again to get his cushty seat in the ground.
We'd all be furious if we weren't so fucking impressed with the cheek of it.
That's the level. That's what fills the space where the life updates would be, and none of us would swap it.
Then up the hill. That hill with the cathedral at the top, where the hopes and the dreams and the prayers get filed and very rarely answered.
In front of you, a lad in an Asprilla shirt. Number 11. Too young to have seen him play. Nobody clocks it as strange, because on this walk it isn't. Half the shirts going up that hill belong to seasons that finished before the lads wearing them could walk. It's the one place in the country where turning up dressed as 1997 is completely normal.
Say all of this out loud to someone who doesn't go and they'd think it was a bit sad. Grown men, twenty-odd years of knowing each other, and the deepest it gets is a running joke about a lad and his sticks.
They might have a point. I'm not going to pretend they haven't.
But here's what they've got wrong. Everywhere else, somebody wants an update. How's work, how's the family, how are you doing really.
The pub before the match is the only place left where nobody needs to ask, and that's the beauty of it. You get four hours where you're not the sum of what's happened to you since May. You're just the lad whose round it is.
And it beats being dragged round fucking Ikea on a Sunday afternoon.
"Aye, canny mate... Anyway, your round wasn't it?"
#nufc
Lone Magpie retweeted
Bring on the backlash
"He just gets it ya knaa!"
And he did. Some of them go through the motions, mention the city, mention the region, mention the fans and the stadium.
Heard it all before mate, just perform on the weekend and then we'll see.
He did that as well.
Arrived in the relegation zone, hardly a word of the language, no exit clause if the worst happened. Left with a trophy tattooed on his leg. And his gleaming, emotional face tattooed on plenty of others.
Happy to fight, happy to play, happy to shed a tear, but most of all, happy. Happy to represent the club that took him to their heart. Happy to leave? Yeah, probably. But that's football.
Players come and players go. When we bring a replacement in we won't give two shites about the club and the fans he leaves behind. That's football. That's the game. Players with a price on their heads.
They have a price. Everything has a price. But what about the value?
It's singing the songs they really asked you not to sing on the stage on the Town Moor, either drunk on something consumed or just the sheer energy of that day and what it meant to all of us, or possibly both.
It's putting others ahead of you at the moment the trophy was there to be lifted, and then pushing the manager towards the crowd for his moment too.
Football fans aren't daft. They can see through people when there's no substance, or simply just empty words or gestures. Fuck knows we've seen it plenty of times before and no doubt will again.
But he did get it, ya knaa. And maybe that's why it hurts.
And so the backlash. The scar tissue of Gascoigne, Beardsley, Waddle, Cole and all the others who wanted to leave for more money or trophies or the lifestyle or whatever the fuck they or anyone else could think to say to make it not hurt.
More recently it's been Carroll, Cabaye, Gordon, Tonali and of course Isak. Seeing the greener grass of pastures new. Or of currency. All leaving in their own way. Playing when it suited them, when the stage was right. Or for some, not playing at all.
Does it make it easier to see him in the colour of another club? Fighting against us? Of course not. Perspective and philosophical thinking has never been, and hopefully never will be, at the forefront of a football fan's thinking. It's tribalism. It's kill or be killed. It's with us or against us.
It's like the last song at the school disco and that lass who said all the right things and laughed at all the daft jokes is off with that smooth-talking posh cunt.
So then. The name calling. The retrospective "glad he's gone actually". And no doubt the ever so popular booing.
But nothing is owed here. No debt to pay back. It's all been left out there on the grass.
So go on bonny lad, go make your move for whatever fucking reason you want to do it for.
There'll always be those memories. Those goals, those chases back, those fouls and those screams to the crowd. There'll always be the 16th March 2025, and that shiny cup with the black and white ribbons on it. He got that. And so did we.
And the backlash? Aye, it'll come. If that helps ease the pain then fine. But I know, and you know, it's not real.
It's just a smokescreen for the sadness of knowing something was amazing and the realisation that it's now gone.
#nufc
Bring on the backlash
"He just gets it ya knaa!"
And he did. Some of them go through the motions, mention the city, mention the region, mention the fans and the stadium.
Heard it all before mate, just perform on the weekend and then we'll see.
He did that as well.
Arrived in the relegation zone, hardly a word of the language, no exit clause if the worst happened. Left with a trophy tattooed on his leg. And his gleaming, emotional face tattooed on plenty of others.
Happy to fight, happy to play, happy to shed a tear, but most of all, happy. Happy to represent the club that took him to their heart. Happy to leave? Yeah, probably. But that's football.
Players come and players go. When we bring a replacement in we won't give two shites about the club and the fans he leaves behind. That's football. That's the game. Players with a price on their heads.
They have a price. Everything has a price. But what about the value?
It's singing the songs they really asked you not to sing on the stage on the Town Moor, either drunk on something consumed or just the sheer energy of that day and what it meant to all of us, or possibly both.
It's putting others ahead of you at the moment the trophy was there to be lifted, and then pushing the manager towards the crowd for his moment too.
Football fans aren't daft. They can see through people when there's no substance, or simply just empty words or gestures. Fuck knows we've seen it plenty of times before and no doubt will again.
But he did get it, ya knaa. And maybe that's why it hurts.
And so the backlash. The scar tissue of Gascoigne, Beardsley, Waddle, Cole and all the others who wanted to leave for more money or trophies or the lifestyle or whatever the fuck they or anyone else could think to say to make it not hurt.
More recently it's been Carroll, Cabaye, Gordon, Tonali and of course Isak. Seeing the greener grass of pastures new. Or of currency. All leaving in their own way. Playing when it suited them, when the stage was right. Or for some, not playing at all.
Does it make it easier to see him in the colour of another club? Fighting against us? Of course not. Perspective and philosophical thinking has never been, and hopefully never will be, at the forefront of a football fan's thinking. It's tribalism. It's kill or be killed. It's with us or against us.
It's like the last song at the school disco and that lass who said all the right things and laughed at all the daft jokes is off with that smooth-talking posh cunt.
So then. The name calling. The retrospective "glad he's gone actually". And no doubt the ever so popular booing.
But nothing is owed here. No debt to pay back. It's all been left out there on the grass.
So go on bonny lad, go make your move for whatever fucking reason you want to do it for.
There'll always be those memories. Those goals, those chases back, those fouls and those screams to the crowd. There'll always be the 16th March 2025, and that shiny cup with the black and white ribbons on it. He got that. And so did we.
And the backlash? Aye, it'll come. If that helps ease the pain then fine. But I know, and you know, it's not real.
It's just a smokescreen for the sadness of knowing something was amazing and the realisation that it's now gone.
#nufc
End of an era.
An absolute legend of NUFC, as deserving of a statue as anyone else in the club’s history.
It probably won’t happen, but that doesn’t mean people will ever forget what he gave us and how he made us feel.
Onto the next… 🖤🤍
#nufc
I can’t believe that I thought I was emotionally stable enough to watch this.
I am not. 😢
#nufc
Very few people will ever truly transcend football in the way that Kevin Keegan did.
He was a romanticist, a dreamer and above all an all-round fantastic human being.
Looking through the flowers, scarfs and notes left by fans from clubs all over the country says it all #nufc
The start.
A simple premise: go to the match, take photos, and mainly talk shite.
Give me a follow, drop a comment, don’t be a cunt.
#nufc
