By Robert Crampton

The Times Magazine
May 16 1998

I met Shearer in Newcastle on the day that he was launching his autobiography an anodyne account of the 27 years since he was born, in Newcastle, in 1970. The day before his press conference here, Newcastle had beaten Sheffield United 1-0 to go through to today’s FA Cup Final.

Shearer scored. (When he gets a chance, Shearer almost always scores, usually lashing the ball into the net like a schoolboy. “There’s no negative thought goes through his mind,” says Glenn Hoddle. “He expects to score and he does.”) He sits at a podium. His publisher asks that there be no questions on either Dublin (where Shearer was involved in a fracas that left his team-mate Keith Gillespie in hospital) nor on the administration of the club (this a reference to the resignation of directors Doug Hall and Freddie Shepherd following their comments to the News of the World in a Marbella nightclub likening Newcastle women to “dogs” and Alan Shearer to Mary Poppins).

So Shearer sits there saying how important the Cup is to the people of Newcastle, how everybody is entitled to their opinion but that nothing he does seems to be good enough for some people. He says this more than once. I am surprised that given that he usually gets a very good press, and given that, all Manchester United and some Blackburn fans aside, most of the country likes him he feels got at. The recent calls for him to be dropped from the England team following the FA’s charge of misconduct for allegedly kicking a Leicester City player in the face at the end of April are a rare blot on his copybook. But his lack of perspective is a reminder that he is just a young man good at kicking a football. With his thick neck, thinning hair, and an air of self-assurance that comes from leaving home at 15 to live 400 miles away, he seems, in general, older.

He is tanned. His pale blue, almost grey eyes are small and sharp. His gaze is candid. He has a slight blond stubble on his chin. He is 5ft 111/2 in tall and he weighs 13st 2lb. Much of that is in his legs. For a man of 184lb, his top half is surprisingly skinny, his waist going right in like that of a very thin person, then out again to big hips and thighs. When he stands at the end of the question and answer session, you can see that his ankles are thin and slightly misshapen, from injury presumably. He is wearing Umbro head to foot.

Local journalists cluster around him. They want him to sign their copies of his book. The mood is buoyant. He is treated with respect verging on awe, but he shows no trace of arrogance. His manner is reserved, but friendly enough. One reporter expresses surprise that he has just apologised for moaning to referees. “Aye,” says Shearer, “but it wasn’t a sincere apology.” Everyone laughs at his canniness, his confidence.

Upstairs, he is methodically signing copies of his book. His manner is casual, without being either offhand or pretend-matey. He moves to an armchair and sprawls, looking out of the window at the leaking mist on the Tyne: “Still raining.” When we start, his gaze locks on to mine and does not leave. He proves to be a combative interviewee, saying “you tell me” a lot, forcing you to commit, trying to knock you off the ball. He goes to some lengths to stop defenders doing their job, and he seems to have the same approach to interviewers the conversation gradually turns into a contest that he wants to win. Never was a man more miscast as Mary Poppins. To ask whether we got on would be like asking whether he will “get on” with Tony Adams this afternoon: an irrelevance.

A man from his agent’s office (this man refused to give his name “It’s not relevant…”) sat behind me throughout the interview, where Shearer could see him and I could not. Shearer could play to this gallery, but he acts like the man isn’t there. All credit to the lad for that he’s harsh, but he’s fair.

We talk about Newcastle. Shearer was brought up on a council estate in Gosforth. His father was still is a sheet metal worker at American Air Filters: “Welding and whatever.” Shearer has been there once. “He knows he doesn’t have to work. That’s just him being him and me mam being herself.” His mother worked still works as a home help for the council. Three years ago they moved to a new house ­but still five minutes from where Alan was brought up. Shearer supported Newcastle as a boy. “I’d have been there yesterday if I wasn’t playing.” The family were keen on football, “but there was never anyone with the ability to take it any further”. His father supported Newcastle. So did his grandfathers. As far as he knows, his family, on both sides, have always lived in Newcastle.

His background sounds like the epitome of respectable working class. “I was brought up to be polite and well-mannered. That’s the right way to be brought up.” His parents “always did things right” and taught him to “give me best, whether it’s football or writing a letter or whatever”. His dad was strict and determined. His mother hid reports of Alan’s poor school performance (he left with no qualifications). Shearer talks to his parents several times a week, as he does to Joe Hixon, the Southampton scout who discovered him. The family is close, but he seems to have been self-sufficient from an early age. At Southampton, he “missed home but it wasn’t an obsession. It was important for me to stay down there and not come back up here every week.” He married Lainya at 20.

His father was always in work; many on their estate were not. “I was fortunate,” says Shearer. “We weren’t by any means a well-off family, but we never went short. The house we lived in is still there now with the cobbles outside. I’m very proud of that. It wasn’t a great area but we were very fortunate to have a roof over our heads, and I still realise that now. There’s many people in the world that are not as fortunate as we have been, but having said that me dad worked his socks off every day, six days a week to get what he wanted and to bring us up. And me mam.” Now, he lives in seclusion down the A1 near Sedgefield, on the estate developed by Sir John Hall, Newcastle’s chairman and benefactor.

He is proud of being from Newcastle, and proud of being working class. On his first day back in town, having signed from Blackburn as the world’s most expensive footballer, he “drove past the old house and the old piece of grass where I used to play”. Why? “Just to officially say, ‘Look, I am back in Newcastle, and this is where it all started’.” He says that “there is a special feeling of being a Geordie. If you go away you always want to come back.”

I mention the room downstairs where he gave his press conference, the Heritage Room. In the windows of the room designs are picked out in lead. The designs depict pit ponies, ships, glassblowers, cranes, more ships. In other parts of the country, heritage means thatched cottages, duckponds and whatever literary figure with a local connection the duckpond can dredge up. Here it means is chosen to mean working-class industry. The football club is a link to that industry, and a major part of the present attempts at replacing it with leisure and retail. Shearer nods as I talk about ships and cranes. “People are very proud of it, yeah, very proud to come from here. This is working class and they just wanna enjoy themselves and live life to the full. They work all week, pick their wages up at the end of the week and they spend it over a weekend by having a good time and watching the football. That’s their life.”

On the doors into one of the club shops (there are four in all in the city more per capita than any other place in the land) is the date 1892 and the letters NUFC. Newcastle United Football Club was founded that year. I have been in the megastores at Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge, the shops at Highbury and Hillsborough. None make such play of the club’s history. Certainly, only on Merseyside is football such a core constituent of local pride. The repatriation of Alan Shearer in 1996 was meant to be the crowning glory. He knows that.

For years, the north-east clubs have either sold their best players Gascoigne, Waddle, Beardsley or failed to attract them in the first place Robson, Shearer himself, Bruce. Geordies are supposed to play for their local clubs either as kids or as senior pros, not at the peak of their careers. When Shearer came home, aged 25, right after his goals had nearly taken England to the final of the European championships in 1996, 15,000 people turned up unbidden at St James’s Park and stood in a rainstorm just to watch him wave. When he said “I’m just a sheet metal worker’s son from Newcastle” they knew he meant it, and a million Geordie hearts the world over must have swelled with pride. It was as if the Lindisfarne Chronicles had walked back up the A1 of their own accord.

The trouble with Newcastle United is that they never win anything. They are a huge club St James’s sells out every game and probably would if it were twice as big. But today’s appearance in the FA Cup Final is the club’s first for 24 years, and they haven’t won the league since 1927. Shearer is acutely aware of the burden of expectations placed upon the club. His talk is studded with references to the fans, the city, the size of the club and the success it craves. In his first season the club were runners-up in the league. This season largely because he missed half of it with injury has been mixed: a flirtation with relegation plus the cup run.

“It can make their week or it can break their week, really,” he says. “It can be the difference between their enjoying the week or not. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but that’s always been the case.” How did he feel as a teenager when Newcastle lost, as they did a lot in those days? “It was depressing. You used to get on the Metro and sit with your head in your hands and didn’t know what to do. Fortunately enough, a man called Kevin Keegan came along and cheered things up really, both as a player and as a manager.”

Shearer moved for £15.6 million and about £30,000 a week, so it seems strange to say he didn’t move for money. But he didn’t. His boss at Blackburn, Jack Walker, a man with even deeper pockets than Sir John Hall, could and would have topped any offer. So, almost certainly, would Alex Ferguson at Manchester United. Shearer moved for sentiment, and for “a man called Kevin Keegan”, the man whom he had idolised as a boy when Keegan, as a player, was helping Newcastle to their last-revival-but-one in the early Eighties. The man who, within five months of Shearer’s homecoming, abruptly left the club he had, as manager, nursed from the edge of relegation from the old Second Division to the very brink of the Premier League title.

Shearer may have learnt his interview technique from Keegan’s successor, the famously terse Kenny Dalglish, who also managed him at Blackburn, but Keegan is his model. Like Keegan, Shearer has, through sheer work, turned himself into one of the best players in the world. He has the humility to improve his game combined with a ruthlessly realistic assessment of his own worth. At 18, he demanded a pay rise from his then manager, Chris Nichol, at Southampton. He did not get it, but “I was in his office for two hours and eventually he lost his temper”. Two hours! He is now better than Keegan was. “The outstanding English player of his era by a mile,” says Keegan. England will probably not win the World Cup this summer they lack a world-class defender and home advantage, both of which they enjoyed in 1966 but Shearer’s ability could take them very close.

We talk a bit more about how he’d like to take his kids (Chloe, five, and Hollie, three) to Disneyworld and McDonald’s but he can’t. He is careful to say that he isn’t complaining. “The advantages of being a footballer far outweigh the disadvantages.” Then I mention this image of him being boring. I expect some jocular response, another celebrity who has learnt to go with the grain of his persona. Instead he goes: “Hmnnnn.” The Hmnnnn is meant to indicate he is not happy. He says: “If you met someone for the first time, you wouldn’t tell them your intimate secrets. You wouldn’t divulge everything, would you?”

After this, it all becomes more difficult. He reverts to what we see on the television, star footballer as Ministry of Defence spokesman, treating run-of-the-mill information as a state secret. For instance, I ask how fast a runner he is over 100 metres. Has he been timed? “No.” Has he been timed over shorter distances? “Yes.” How about 50 metres? “I don’t know, we don’t do 50 metres.” I try to draw an analogy between him and Keegan. Keegan, I suggest, was seen as the archetypal manufactured player? “Yeah.” Is that a description that could be applied to him? “I don’t know. I mean, you tell me.” Does he think there’s a distinction usually drawn between the George Best type footballer and… “I’ve never possessed the same skill as a Matthew Le Tissier or a David Ginola or a George Best. I’ve never had that skill and I certainly won’t ever have it now.” What’s the best part of your game? “You tell me.” For variation, I turn to the man with no name behind me. What does he think? He simply ignores me.

Back to Alan. Why was he so honoured to be made England captain? “You just can’t buy that. There’s only 100 people ever done that.” Is he very patriotic? “Yeah. Yeah, without doubt, really proud to be English and it’s a great feeling.” What does he like about being English? “Just being myself, being in this country, being part of it. I love it.” What in particular? “Just everything about it. The people here, the people here in the Northeast I like it.” You won’t end your career here at Newcastle, presumably? “Can’t say that. Dunno. Don’t know what happens in football. Never know what’s around the corner. What I can say is I’ve got three years left on a contract and I’d be surprised if I didn’t see those three years out.” But you’ve taken Italian lessons? “No.” That’s not true? “I’ve never taken Italian lessons, no.” Where did that rumour come from? “Haven’t got a clue. Probably your lot started that.”

Is it your sense that football has become more fashionable than it used to be? “Yeah, I think it has, yeah. I think football is huge now.” Then he says: “That’s through no fault of any footballer. All we do is play football. If someone wants to pump huge amounts of money into the game and make it more glamorous that’s through no fault of ours. We can’t do anything about it.” This notion of fault sounds strange and comes out of nowhere, almost as if he is apologising for the bourgeoisification of the game, as if he is, if not guilty, at least embarrassed about all that money. Later, I check a passage I had noted in his book. Sure enough, he says: “Compared with people like doctors and nurses and others who are not properly rewarded for the vital work they do, we are massively overpaid.” Could it be that, in keeping with his roots, Shearer the multi-millionaire, Shearer the star employee of arch-Thatcherite Sir John Hall, is a closet leftie?

I ask if he has read Fever Pitch. “I’m not a great lover of reading to be honest, I can’t sit still for that amount of time, unless there’s a football match on the telly.” What does he do with his time? “I’ve got two girls. I like to play golf. Apart from that there’s not a lot goes on in my life. So I am boring, aren’t I?” He says this without a trace of a smile. There’s a school of thought that says Shearer is actually Mr Deadpan, that he’s just winding everybody up. He was once challenged by team-mates to incorporate the title of an Abba song into a post-match interview, for a laugh. So he answered a question with: “Yes, but the winner takes it all.” Nonetheless, from the way he speaks I would say that he does care, that he resents the boring tag quite a lot, but he is too proud, too straightforward, too northern to bother laying on the charm and talking himself up. They don’t really do charm in Gosforth.

I save the newsy questions till last, knowing it could get a bit frosty.

Does he think Newcastle replica shirts are overpriced? “That’s got nothing to do with me.” He had a Newcastle kit when he was a kid? “Correct”. How much did it cost? “Haven’t got a clue. Is it a matter which interests you? “What?” The price of Newcastle replica shirts? “Again, I’ll give you the same answer.”

Something less controversial, I say: the women in the streets around Newcastle, do you think they’re unattractive? “Same answer.” Surely, Alan, you can say that you think the local women are…? “No. I think you should respect me by what the publisher said downstairs. I think it’s not being respectful asking me questions because you know what answer you’re gonna get.” So that was that. My hope is that when the next installment of Shearer’s life is published we shall learn that he was appalled by his erstwhile bosses sniggering about making shirts for a fiver and selling them for 50 quid to people who can’t really afford it. But he’ll probably say they were entitled to their opinion.

At Asda in the Metro Centre, the retail park in Gateshead that made Sir John Hall his money and paid for Keegan’s team, including Shearer, the queues were stretching around the block. Inside, his arrival having been greeted with a huge roar and applause, Shearer sits signing books. It is a cliche to say Shearer is worshipped on Tyneside, but the event does have a religious flavour. Old ladies in wheelchairs, babes in arms, a young blind man all are led into his presence.

Outside, hundreds of fans, again in the rain, their only protection the nylon black-and-white shirts of their club, their toddlers on their shoulders, have been queuing for three hours. Two-year-old Jordan Dey is with his dad. Does he actually say Shearer, then? “Oh aye. Jordan, say ‘Shearer’.” Mrs Dey joins in. “Jordan, say ‘Shearer’. Say ‘I love you Shearer’.” And Jordan pipes, “I love you Shearer.” And if I am wrong and Alan Shearer’s goals do get England to the Stade de France on July 12, then you, me and pretty much every citizen of the country for which he plays, then we will demonstrate pretty much the same level of critical faculty as young Jordan Dey.