Alan Shearer’s Newcastle are truly desperate

With five minutes left to play of yesterday's 3-0 defeat at Anfield, the game long since lost and Newcastle United's hopes of avoiding relegation fading fast, the Liverpool fans started to jeer Alan Shearer with a chant that riffed on the current joke about how the difference between Newcastle and their manager is that Shearer will be on Match of the Day next season," observes Richard Williams in the Guardian.

"Shearer rose from the dugout and strode to the edge of the technical area, where he glanced towards the Kop with a rueful smile." With the chaos and despair that imminent relegation threatens at St James's Park, "that must have taken some doing."

The strange thing was that Shearer's charges had played far better at the start of the game than at the beginning of their previous outing, a desperate home draw with Portsmouth. "Joey Barton busying himself in the hole behind Mark Viduka and Obafemi Martins, for 20 minutes they gave a fair impersonation of a football team with a proper structure and appeared likely to vindicate Shearer's decision to leave Michael Owen, his club captain and old friend, on the bench."

Then everything fell to pieces. "Nothing in Shearer's background has prepared him for the sort of decisions he needed to take in the heat of battle yesterday. There will be more to face over the next three weeks as he attempts to save a club with so many intangible assets but, as we saw again yesterday, such inadequate resources on the pitch, thanks to a recent history of conflicting motives and endless upheavals."

Predicts Williams: "It does not take a Nostradamus to conclude that there will be no happy ending." ·