It can’t be easy for Newcastle United coach Ruud Gullit to talk confidently about his team’s chances against Manchester United in the FA Cup final, but he makes a good attempt. Paul Wilson reports
Ruud Gullit was at Wembley for last year’s FA Cup final as a TV pundit, employing his formidable insights and famously expressive gestures to form the conclusion that Newcastle United had been blown away by a vastly superior team.
Then it was Arsenal but the fact that Manchester United stand in their place on Saturday is the only difference to the script most lay observers can identify. Newcastle now are a happier, brighter, sexier team than last year’s model, but nothing they have done all season suggests they are capable of spoiling Roy Keane’s fun on his last outing of the season.
Gullit, unfortunately, has had a significant job change within the last 12 months so he cannot possibly comment. Well, he can, but between the impossibility of being bullish about his own team’s chances, and the undesirability of banging on for too long about what a great side Manchester United are, there is not a lot left to say: “We are underdogs. That’s fair comment,” he said, “but that doesn’t bother me.”
Neither does what Newcastle have done in the past – namely nothing. Yes, there were the ups of the Nineties, the romance of the Kevin Keegan years, the coup of signing Alan Shearer and the mass blubfests after losing vital games to Manchester United and Liverpool, but the trophy cupboard has been bare for 30 years.
“It is not new for me to come to clubs with little recent success,” said Gullit. “Chelsea had not won anything for years and it was the same at Milan, even Eindhoven. All had been in the doldrums for years.”
Gullit left off the words “until I arrived” because he does not want to advertise himself as a miracle cure. A cure, possibly, though miracles take a little longer. “I want Newcastle to have an identity, but not my identity. They won’t play like I played, but hopefully they will play with pleasure, with a lot of ball contact, and they will play winning football.
“Good teams just keep trying, then all of a sudden it comes together. That’s what happened at Manchester United, but it took five or six years, and they had good players all that time.”
The fact that Alex Ferguson did not achieve overnight success at Old Trafford, and was almost sacked before he turned the club around, has become an all-purpose straw for less successful managers to clutch. Gullit is unlikely to get five or six years’ grace on Tyneside, though he knows Ferguson used an FA Cup victory in 1990 to buy time.
His own success two years ago failed to win him much favour at Chelsea, though Newcastle would be a different matter, especially if success was achieved at the expense of Manchester United.
Stranger things have happened, and if Gullit manages to make Wembley one of those rare occasions when Shearer and Duncan Ferguson take the field at the same time, Newcastle can pose problems for Manchester United in defence, especially if Jaap Stam is forced to miss the final. Ferguson was only a substitute for Everton when Manchester United were beaten in the 1995 FA Cup final, though he has a good scoring record in league matches between the two sides.
Realistically, Newcastle’s best chance appears to be in hoping their opponents have their minds on Barcelona. Gullit professes not to care. “It really doesn’t matter either way to us,” he said. “We concentrate on our own game; we don’t look at opponents in a psychological way. I only want to look forward, to be positive, be relaxed. I can’t afford to get nervous, because if I get nervous the team gets nervous.”
Manchester United won the premiership title on Wednesday and will turn up at Wembley on schedule for the treble, so Gullit’s team will be nervous enough already.