Alan Shearer has opened up on how he really felt about managing his beloved Newcastle United which ultimately ended in inevitable disappointment.
It’s been almost 15 years since the Premier League icon took his first and last managerial role and was given the impossible task for saving his boyhood club from relegation to the second division.
Of course, we all know it ended in disappointment, but on The Rest Is Football podcast, Shearer has claimed that he actually ‘loved’ managing the team, he just didn’t realise how much pressure he would be under.
Shearer admits he ‘enjoyed’ being a manager at Newcastle
It will come as a surprise to most as, at least externally, Shearer’s only foray into management was a disaster and completely put him off returning to football management at any point in the future.
While that may be true, the Newcastle legend has admitted that there were parts of the job that he thoroughly enjoyed, it was perhaps just the wrong job at the wrong time which resulted in a very negative experience.
Shearer also claimed that he had underestimated how much responsibility he was going to be given as a manger which was a huge shock to the system when he first joined, adding that he’d hardly slept during his short tenure.
If he hadn’t been given such an impossible job with just weeks left in the season, who knows how Shearer’s managerial career could have worked out, or maybe it was always destined to be a short spell into the industry.
On the podcast, Shearer said: “Honestly I loved it, despite what happened. But it did open my eyes to ‘Oh my God’. Because you don’t realise how tough it is and how much pressure you are under.
“As a player you turn up and your boots are ready, your food is ready, your tactics are there for you and everything is pretty simple. You just have to go and play and score goals.
As a manager you have to decide what they wear, what time they leave, what the tactics are, if it doesn’t go well on Saturday you are running through everything in your head.
“Honestly I must hardly have got any sleep for that eight weeks because I was going to bed at stupid o’clock and waking up at stupid o’clock. What happened even at the end of it, when we got relegated, I looked back at it and think I really enjoyed the experience but it also opened my eyes to how tough it is.”
Newcastle are lucky to have someone as talented as Eddie Howe
As Shearer has exemplified is that you can be involved in football your whole life, a brilliant player, a brilliant leader, and yet some just aren’t suited to be a manager in such a high pressure industry.
That’s what makes Eddie Howe so brilliant, no matter the circumstances, huge win or devastating loss, Howe always remains calm and level headed and it’s something that appears to have rubbed off onto his players.
There’s no real sense of panic in this squad. Yes, there’s lots of tiredness which has led to key individual mistakes, but the players have never looked scared to go again, Howe has managed to instil confidence into every one of them.
Keep that same mindset for the rest of the season and you may not achieve every goal you set out, but you’ll win the hearts of the supporters and you’ll be given more time to work things out, which is exactly what Howe has got.
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