It looks like we’re in for yet another season where the pleas for patience try in vain to drown out the voices of angry frustration. Fans of every club tend to go into the season with over-optimistic expectations, but I do feel that there is an undercurrent of bitterness about Geordie protests that make us almost unique. At times like these, I do wonder whether we are still bearing the scars of the failure of 1996.

Many explanations have been advanced for the surrender of our huge lead, but a major component was a loss of nerve. As the front runners, we were the hunted, not the hunters, and unlike Man Utd, we had no recent history of success to give the players or the fans the sort of confidence and resilience that allows the victor to close the contest out under pressure.

The game that still gives me nightmares is not the Man Utd, or the Liverpool games (both eminently losable), but Blackburn away. Having fought to take the lead with ten minutes to go, there was a peculiar paralysis of the will. We neither attacked nor defended and conceded two soft goals. Had we won, we would have gone into the last home game only needing a win.

But enough of the gory details. My feeling looking back is that season 95-96 gave us a dangerous pair of messages. One was that we could win the league. The other was that we wouldn’t. This cocktail of frantic desire and pessimism has driven us crazy ever since.

I occasionally read that the fans had assumed that the title was as good as won, but that is not my memory at all. Amidst the euphoria, there was a nagging feeling that something was bound to go wrong. Perhaps inevitably, it did. After many seasons of mediocrity, the chance of success seemed slightly unreal, and that brought its own pressure on to the club.

There is a saying that it’s not despair that drives you mad, it’s hope. I’ve been a supporter since the late sixties, and until the Keegan-Hall era, no-one thought of winning the league as being anything but an event that happened to other clubs. The up side of that was that the atmosphere among the fans was more relaxed and philosophical. In fact, during the club’s poorest ever season, where we narrowly escaped relegation to Division Three, I have many good memories of the crowd cheering on the valiant but doomed efforts of Ossie’s callow youngsters, as they slumped to defeat after defeat. There was no shortage of patience during those dark days.

But following 1996, we are no longer perennial strugglers, we are failures. That brings a pressure that communicates itself from the stands and the newspapers, right on to the manager and the players. Defeats are far too painful now to be tolerated for any length of time, because they reinforce the idea not only that we will fail, but – more uncomfortably – that we are destined to fail.

I recently watched the Reading-Arsenal game. As is now common with the Gunners, the game quickly became one of attack v defence, in which the only question was how long it would take before the likes of Fabregas would find a way through. However, the Reading fans seemed quite resigned to the unfolding humiliation, and cheered every time a defender made a tackle or hoofed the ball into the stands.

Now I couldn’t help but feel that the reaction at St James’s Park would have been one of anger. I’m not saying that we should accept lower standards. None the less, the reaction of the Reading fans was helpful to their team, whereas I don’t think our players would have gained the same encouragement.

It may seem strange to think of a club being psychologically damaged by events of a decade ago, but I think what we are experiencing is simply an extreme version of a syndrome that happens all the time. It seems to me that Spurs haven’t completely recovered from missing out on a Champions League place to Arsenal on the final day two years ago, after being fourth for most of the season. Despite laying out a fortune, they still seem to be slipping backwards.

Within our own history, we had to face the trauma in 1990 of missing promotion to the top division through losing to Sunderland in the play-offs, after we had been cantering along in third place for most of the season. Less than two years later, we were fighting relegation to Division three. Raising morale after a narrow defeat on the last lap is probably the most difficult task a manager can face.

So now Sam Allardyce is the latest man to shoulder the challenge. One encouraging sign is that he is prepared to adhere to the well-tested principles that the first priority for success is a strong defence, and that a team must be hard to beat before it can think of defeating the opposition. The lack of a strong defence was always likely to hold back the efforts of Keegan and Robson, and Allardyce shows a readiness to rectify this.

However, a problem that Allardyce is now experiencing, that was largely absent from Bolton, is the demand that supposedly mediocre opposition be swept aside right away. Allardyce is told that he is now at a big club, and ordinary performances will not do, even in the short-term. The trouble is, Allardyce must start with the situation that he inherited, not the situation where we all think the club ought to be. We cannot outspend the opposition any more, and that means that success must be built up gradually.

It’s often said that Allardyce needs time, but time in itself will not be an asset if he is plagued by demands for jam today, not jam tomorrow. He needs to be judged after a couple of seasons, and not on the game by game basis which seems to be the prevailing mood.

Bob Yule