Newcastle United finally win a trophy

 Newcastle United finally win a trophy.

After exactly 70 years without a single domestic trophy, you'd have thought they'd be declaring a national holiday on Tyneside. Footballing droughts are hardly more barren when you've spent seven decades banging your head against the proverbial brick wall. The fact is that Newcastle United have finally won a reputable football trophy and the folks back home are dancing from semi and terraced homes, council estates, cottages, mansions, villages and, surely, shopping centres in the North East. 

Yesterday, Newcastle won their first trophy in dear old England since Bobby Mitchell, the Robledo brothers and Jackie Milburn brought home the FA Cup in 1955 against Manchester City. In 1969, Newcastle laid their hands on the old Fairs Cup in Europe, their precious victory in the Final against Ujpesti Dozsa of Hungary breaking the oldest of underachieving cycles of failure. It's all come right though on the day for Newcastle just when we were beginning to think a gypsy curse may have been placed on the club. 

Up in the celebrity boxes at Wembley, delight and jubilation was unconfined, otherwise cynical figures who may have despaired of ever seeing their club winning anything again, jumping up and down with pleasure quite openly. Ant and Dec, those jolly, chipper and chirpy TV presenters who always seem to see the good in everyone and everything, turned around to one another, hugged each other unashamedly and then congratulated themselves for being there to see their team triumph on this momentous day. 

Meanwhile, Newcastle's greatest, most deeply revered and loved strikers Alan Shearer, a St James Park icon and legend for eternity, threw his hands up into the air, barely able to control his black and white scarf and scarcely able to hold it all back. When Shearer signed for his hometown club during the 1990s from Blackburn Rovers, the feeling was that the local boy had returned home to look for his spiritual roots. Shearer scored lorry loads of goals for Newcastle and the Toon were simply overjoyed. Sadly, the club were never able to deliver the Premier League for Newcastle but the North East had been revived as a major force in the land. 

But it was good to see a team who have been so cruelly starved of any kind of success throughout recent decades being finally rewarded for their stubborn perseverance. In 1998, Shearer's Newcastle were outclassed by Arsene Wenger's seemingly unbeatable Arsenal. You had to go back 51 years ago to find any semblance of black and white striped Wembley glory tarnished only by FA Cup Final defeat to the team they overcame yesterday Liverpool when Kevin Keegan, Steve Heighway and John Toshack were just irresistible on the day. 

Yesterday, Eddie Howe's Toon marauders struck the perfect balance at Wembley by winning the old League Cup Final or the Carabao Cup Final and all was good in the world. Even before yesterday's straight contest between the North East and North West, there was a real excitement. They say that everything comes to those who wait and that patience is a virtue and never has this been more applicable. The stars were shining and the lights were beaming on Newcastle and this vast, sprawling city can finally acknowledge an emotion that they may have thought would become permanently elusive. 

On the day, Newcastle fulfilled their season's long held potential, their up and down, fluctuating Premier League season now redeemed by something tangible and positive. Some of Newcastle's football this season has been astonishingly impressive, free flowing, fluent and enormously pleasing on the eye. But then there have been the roller coaster moments when there have been cracks on the road, defensive shortcomings and spasmodic defeats at home and away. So the Premier League may be their next project, their overriding objective and something to plan ahead for. 

But now they find themselves stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. Newcastle are still deeply respected by the wider football community and still regarded as a big club. But the more demanding fans will now want more of the same, perhaps more prestigious silverware to adorn the club's cabinet. Their children and grandchildren will now tell their generation and generations to come that St James Park is still the place to watch top class football. 

During Sunday afternoon, the whole of London's West End became a colony of black and white, massive throngs of passionate supporters sitting on the roof of old Covent Garden piazza buildings, firing off flares and then watching small wisps of smoke drifting across that delightful area where once the barrow boys would trundle their fruit and vegetable stalls across the Victorian cobble stones. It was also the venue where Charles Dickens would wander around at midnight, filling up his fertile literary mind with hundreds of ideas, images and symbolism. 

And then finally those same supporters would fan out into Trafalgar Square where the tall, imposing figure of Nelson's column may well have indirectly inspired them to feats of heroism that could hardly have been imagined for years at Newcastle. Then they would raise the scarves in unison again, chanting those famous old songs that were born in the Industrial Revolution.

 For a while they may have pondered on those days of thriving Tyneside mining collieries, the melodious Blaydon Races, the fathers and grandfathers who emerged from the pits with grime and sweat on their faces. This was far from being a rags and riches day for Newcastle since Newcastle fans felt they deserved their moment in the sun. You remembered the cheeky, impish grins of Ant and Dec, that joyous smile on Alan Shearer's face and were deeply grateful for football's endless capacity to enchant and enthral. This was a moving and poignant day for Tyneside and how uproariously triumphant it was.