Shola Ameobi now compares Eddie Howe to Sir Bobby Robson

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Shola Ameobi worked under one of the true greats of football management in Sir Bobby Robson and has now compared current boss Eddie Howe to the Geordie legend.

Sir Bobby Robson was one of the game’s greatest ever managers and one of the nicest men to ever grace the sport and Shola Ameobi has looked back on those days fondly in an interview with The Chronicle.

Finally getting the opportunity to manage his beloved Newcastle United, Sir Bobby Robson turned the club around after the disastrous Ruud Gullit experiment and got Newcastle back to being a title-challenging Champions League side again.

Ameobi has said there’s no better time to be a youth at Newcastle

One thing that Robson placed a huge emphasis on was using talent from the academy which saw Shola Ameobi rise to prominence from the youth set up to scoring against Barcelona in the Champions League.

In his interview with The Chronicle, Ameobi has noted the similarities between Bobby Robson and Eddie Howe saying: “Sir Bobby Robson was notorious for bringing young players to the club and developing them through the Academy system. You look at Eddie Howe, he has looked at young players to coach. There’s never been a better time for a young player to be at the club since Sir Bobby’s time.

“Eddie wants to engage with the younger players and he gives them opportunities every single day. I think young players trained 320 times or so with the first-team last year, that’s a heck of a lot of time to train with the manager, he wants that time with the Academy.

Eddie Howe has what it takes to become as revered as Sir Bobby Robson

“If you do well, like Elliot Anderson has, you will stay there. That’s great to see for me, he want to give them the opportunity.”

Eddie Howe is already held in high regard by the Toon Army but being put in the same league as Sir Bobby Robson is a special accolade and I’m sure as time goes on for Howe he’ll earn more and more similar praise to the beloved former boss.

There’s always been a rhetoric that fans forced Robson out of Newcastle and regardless of how true that was, there aren’t many, if any fans who will look back on his time at Newcastle with anything other than fondness. It was very much a case of “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.