The man who had made his fortune from a shopping mall the size of a small Alpine state on the city's fringes took the football club over in 1990. That and a famously under-achieving football club, an outfit that, like the town, seemed to be living on half-remembered glories from a long-forgotten time when they actually meant something.Sir John Hall changed all that. Ship-building, coal, armaments, these were muscular, strong, masculine businesses that spoke of a sense of purposefulness and self-sufficiency. When the industries died in the Eighties there was nothing the place was known for any more except long-faced television detectives, a nightlife that was Ibiza-esque in its exuberance and three bridges across the Tyne sited too close together for sensible explanation. In the past their Geordie identity was tied up in the industry that made the place world famous. But somehow I knew it would happen, when we were 12 points clear I was tempted to go out and put a tenner on Man United. Typically I didn't." Newcastle is an isolated city, stuck up in the North-east in not quite Scotland, within easy reach only of Sunderland.
Like many island communities, its people are fiercely proud of the place, anxious to proselytise its virtues as if to explain why they have never moved to the mainland. Tonight, against Southampton, there is a chance to hold on to the dream, but no fan will be surprised if they lose in the 89th minute."After the Blackburn game I felt so empty," says Dave Smith, a 33-year- old United season ticket holder "It was like a great kick in the bollocks. All sorts of nonsense was talked after that game about jacking in my job and going round the world It was the lager, but I've honestly never felt that bad. The cause for the fatalism has been United's remarkable decline as the title reaches its climax, not just throwing away a twelve-point lead at the top of the league, but doing so by losing in the last minute of vital games.
Over the last month a blanket of despond has enveloped Tyneside, an all-pervading assumption that fate is conspiring against the town. When they do well the bars of the Bigg Market throb with triumph. And for nine months of this football season the tills have been ringing like never before as the team marched to the top of the championship table, offering the tantalising prospect that for the first time in an aeon all that devotion might actually be repaid with a trophy."On Saturdays when we've won," says Alan McDonald, a bar-man in a Bigg Market pub, "it's like a gold rush town here, people seem to spend without heed to tomorrow." But Toon fever is an unforgiving virus. Unlike other conurbations where you might have a choice of five or six football clubs to support, in Newcastle there is only one: everyone supports United.
