Newcastle United head coach Steve Bruce has revealed that a trip to the toilet got him thinking about how far the club have fallen in recent years.
The Magpies boss was doing his business on the bog and got to thinking about former Toon heroes Alan Shearer and Les Ferdinand, two players he’d love to have in his team today.
“I was sitting on the loo last week, turning over the paper,” he said, as per The Sun. “I saw Shearer and Ferdinand and thought, ‘Wow!’ We had the best centre-forward in England and both were England’s centre-forwards.
“But that’s gone in the past. The club has been down twice in ten years and it’s been in the bottom half of the division. We have to accept we are like ten, 11 teams. We are in the bottom half of the Premier League. That’s what we are. We’re in amongst that pack, which is always a fear.”
OPINION
Yeah, Bruce doesn’t quite have a striker like Shearer or Ferdinand at his disposal these days, however much he’d love to. Instead, he’s got Joelinton, Dwight Gayle and Andy Carroll – how times have changed, indeed. You can’t dwell on these things, though, however nice that toilet reverie was for the Newcastle boss. He needs to face up to what his team is like now and who he’s got at his disposal these days. Newcastle don’t have any England representatives anymore, and no one who looks particularly close to getting a call-up. There’s Sean Longstaff, of course, but he doesn’t quite seem to have done enough to win over Gareth Southgate just yet. So it’s certainly been a fall from grace for Newcastle over the past 20+ years, there’s no doubt about that. But it’s Bruce’s job to at least get them on the right track back towards where they used to be. That’s the task facing the former Sheffield Wednesday chief, and that’s what he needs to be concentrating on.
