Having been beaten at Old Trafford in the opening game of the season, one match preview rather prematurely declared that NUFC were sitting ‘precariously’ above the drop zone. Give us a chance! Although comfortably outclassed by Manchester United, the proper United never gave up, never capitulated, and there were signs that performances like that against weaker opposition would produce better results.

And Villa were as weak as they come – probably as poor as any side Newcastle faced in the Championship last term. After John Carew skied his early penalty, he and his teammates looked resigned to defeat.

Newcastle started sloppily, but improved to put together some good passing moves that Villa were too lacklustre to get on top of. The Toon’s lack of pace in the middle was never exposed, with Joey Barton in particular offering great energy. Carroll looked formidable, although he’ll face much stiffer tests as the season progresses.

Mike Williamson had another assured performance at centre half (and got forward to set up two of his team’s goals). At one point early in the second half he stood up to a swiftly advancing Ashley Young and dispossessed him with a solid block tackle. Simple stuff, but so refreshing after watching countless NUFC defenders over the years dive in and end up floundering on their backsides. Here’s hoping Williamson won’t be shunted out of the side when Sol ‘Bunter’ Campbell claims match fitness.

A few other first home game observations: There seemed to be a much lower take up of new home shirts than is usual at the start of a season, with the new Puma effort far outnumbered in the stands by older versions. This despite Sports Direct’s shirt ads being plastered all over the Eldon Square redevelopment…

The new SJP ‘meal deals’, including two bottles of beer and two pies for the best part of 12 English pounds, understandably failed to entice the stay-away majority back to the catering counters.

This season’s half-time ‘entertainment’ slot is even less entertaining than last season’s. Even the kids involved seemed underwhelmed and confused.

And whoever at Bid England came up with the idea of handing out promotional red and white scarves at a Newcastle match was sadly ill-informed.

Also, ‘Today’s man of the match, as voted for by the coaching staff and directors…’? We all know that NUFC have lost sponsors, but should the club be singling out their own man of the match? Handing yesterday’s award to Carroll was hardly controversial, but there could be ructions in the future.

Anyway, 6-0 eh? For those sports reporters frustrated by Chris Hughton’s lack of quotability, the emphatic result provided plenty to write about. If Hughton’s team continue to make headline, the journos will forgive him for his blandness in pressers.

Louise Taylor in the Guardian, of course, managed to find a negative angle. She decided that the 6-0 stunner was ‘overshadowed by Joey Barton’s questionable goal celebration’, which basically involved him pointing to his comedy moustache and deserves no further examination than that. The Guardian is a decent paper, but with so many good sports reporters in the North East it’s unfathomable why they can’t get someone with a bit of common sense to cover the NUFC beat.

I wrote last week that there were ten mediocre sides in the Premier League that Newcastle could beat to avoid relegation. Villa weren’t one of the ten. So this victory represented something of a bonus.

But let’s not get carried away. There will be much tougher opposition to face, and inevitable slip-ups against weaker sides. This was just one win and three points. We’ll need a lot more performances like this before the season is over, but this is certainly a time for optimism.

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The club surprised many and most last season by winning the Championship at a canter. Having been tipped to ‘do a Leeds United’, it was a remarkable turnaround after the pitiful Premier League relegation season. Chris Hughton and the players deserve lots of credit for the way they regrouped, knuckled down, and ground out results. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. A similar approach will be vital if Premier League survival is to be achieved. But even that might not be enough.

Perhaps even more surprising than the success found on the pitch has been the stability found off it. There have been remarkably few media circuses or PR disasters at St James’ Park of late, and the name of Newcastle United has been pretty much absent from the Sky Sports breaking news ticker. Chris Hughton has been accepted as a decent, hardworking bloke who deserves to be given a chance, and his lack of interest in generating soundbites has actually been refreshing.

There has even been a truce of sorts declared between the fans and Mike Ashley. There have been grumbles about the lack of investment in players, and Ashley and pals haven’t been spotted wearing black and white stripes in the Bigg Market for a while, but the general opinion seems to have settled down to one of ‘better the devil you know’.

Expectation among the fans remain realistic. Survival is the aim. Let’s not kid ourselves – the Championship that Newcastle bossed last season was a poor league. The lack of quality was evident in every game. Saturday’s Premier League opening day fixture in which top flight champions Chelsea thrashed second flight runners up West Brom 6-0 clearly highlighted the gulf in class between the two leagues.

The main worry is that Newcastle return to the Premier League with a squad that is, on paper, just as weak as the one that was relegated last time around. There have been few additions, and several players who thrived in the Championship might well have done so because they had ‘found their level’.

Dan Gosling looks like a good prospect, but he’s injured for the long term. James Perch rarely stood out in an average Nottingham Forest team, and Sol Campbell hardly fits NUFC’s stated transfer policy of recruiting promising youngsters.

Of the signings made last term, Leon Best failed to score in 13 appearances. (Hardly a prolific striker, Best only scored 19 times in 92 appearances for Coventry City.) Mike Williamson is untried at the top level, and Wayne Routledge has flattered to deceive at numerous other clubs.

Among the players that remain from the relegation season, the deficiencies are well known. Last season, Kevin Nolan was one of the best players in the Championship. In the previous season, he was one of the worst in the Premier League. Two years older and certainly no quicker, can the influential club captain make the grade on a return to the top flight?

Can Andy Carroll continue to provide the goals that helped propel the club into the Premier League? Which Fabricio Coloccini will turn up – the commanding powerhouse from the promotion season, or the error-prone softie from the relegation season? Can Jose Enrique avoid injury? Can Joey Barton avoid trouble? Will Jonas Gutierrez learn to cross a ball? Whither the lesser-spotted Xisco? These, and, many more questions will be answered over the next few months.

Last season, West Ham finished fourth from bottom with 34 points. In the previous season, Newcastle were relegated with the same total. So let’s take 35 points as a bare minimum for survival. That’s 9 wins and 8 draws, or a similar combination.

There are at least ten mediocre teams in the ‘best league in the world’ (West Brom, Blackpool, Wigan, Wolves, Bolton, West Ham, Stoke, Birmingham, Blackburn, Sunderland…), and they’re all likely to be beating each other on a weekly basis. The trick for Newcastle United will be to beat all of them at home and at least draw with all of them away. That’ll generate 40 points, and pretty much guarantee staying up.

In some ways, tonight’s opening fixture against Manchester United at Old Trafford represents the best possible start to the season. Whatever the result, it will leave the players, the manager, and the owner, in no doubt about the challenges that lie ahead.

As always with Newcastle United, what follows will be entirely unpredictable. Who wouldn’t be looking forward to that?

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Let’s face it, few would call the tournament a classic. It started slowly and only rarely moved into high gear. The group stages were littered with draws and one-nils, and star players like Ronaldo, Messi and Rooney struggled to reproduce their club form on the world stage.

Rooney – now sporting a long beard and living in a caravan if that Nike advert is to be believed – was largely anonymous, only waking up long enough to hurl abuse at his own fans. England as a whole were poor, wanting in tactics and lacking in ability. Not good enough. Of course, England weren’t the biggest failures of the tournament – France and Italy filled those roles with aplomb.

Once England were out, the enjoyment levels were raised. But World Cup 2010 was only a feast of football in the sense that there was a lot of it.

Genuine excitement was rare, and mostly linked to controversy. The climax of the Uruguay vs Ghana match – handballs and penalty misses – was particularly thrilling. But much of the fun was linked to poor refereeing decisions, with Frank Lampard’s phantom goal a relatively minor error compared to others that changed the outcome of games.

Spain, the Netherlands and Germany were the best teams to watch throughout the tournament, and deserved their one-two-three placings. But overall there was a real lack of quality. Some may blame the much-maligned Jabulani ball, but the best goal of the tournament, Van Bronckhurst’s 30-yard rocket, proved it could be controlled.

On TV, the BBC expectedly trumped ITV, largely due to ITV’s persistence with the incessant verbal borefest that is Clive Tyldesley. In the studios, ITV’s big signing Adrian Chiles did his jokey bloke thing but was mostly outplayed and out-gagged by the boy Lineker.

The BBC thankfully ditched the incomprehensible Emmanuel Adebayor, and they produced several really good documentary pieces about South Africa, some of which didn’t include footage of an ex-pro gazing wistfully from a Robben Island window. Garth Crooks interviewing Kofi Annan about Paul the psychic octopus was, however, a lowlight.

ITV sacked Robbie Earle after match ticket ‘misappropriation’, although the real scandal was that a TV pundit had been allocated 36 tickets that could have gone to fans. But ITV’s biggest fail was cutting to an ad break on ITV HD and missing Steven Gerrard’s goal against the USA. England fans had so little to cheer that depriving them of that moment was unforgivable.

And Spain went and won it. Deserved to, overall. But it was hardly a vintage performance, in a final where fouls outnumbered chances, closing a tournament that promised much more than it delivered.

Like the vuvuzela, we’ll remember World Cup 2010, but not particularly fondly.

More World Cup stuff:
England: The World Cup Pie Chart of Blame
Football not soccer: Watching the World Cup in the USA
UFWC vs the World Cup: unofficial football heaven
How World In Motion changed English football forever

But, if the rise in the number of visitors to the UFWC website over the course of the World Cup is anything to go by, combined with a number of interview requests and press features from around the world, interest in the Unofficial Football World Championships is growing fast. If you’ve missed all this, where have you been?

If you have been following the UFWC, you will know that the Netherlands, some say Holland, are the current Unofficial Football World Champions, and have been since November 2008, since when they’ve been on a record-equalling 20-match unbeaten run. Few tipsters backed the Dutch before the World Cup began, but it’s likely that plenty of UFWC followers had their money on them. Except, unfortunately, for me (although, as a very minor form of consolation, I do have them in the Sure for Men last 16 sweepstakes competition, with a big 50 English pounds up for grabs…).

But what is the UFWC? Basically, it’s a simple method of working out football’s champions using a continuous title match system, going all the way back to the very first international game in 1872. Winners of title matches become unofficial champions, and take their title into their next match. All FIFA ‘A’ accredited matches count, including friendlies. So, when the World Cup is packed away into a box for four years, the UFWC carries on regardless.

It’s all pretty simple, and while 138 years’ worth of statistics covering 800-plus matches involving 40-plus teams might seem to to be dauntingly complicated, in fact the UFWC is all about great stories rather than the actual statistics. The continuous and open nature of the competition means that it has involved a series of unlikely champions and unsung heroes, and its lineage represents a fascinating alternative history of football.

A brief glance at the archives throws up the facts that previous champions have included Angola, Israel, Venezuela and the tiny Dutch Antilles islands, and that Scotland have won more title matches than any other nation, and are therefore ranked as the all-time UFWC champions. But, occasionally, the UFWC collides with the World Cup. That’s what has happened in South Africa this summer, and it’s all pretty interesting.

As for my involvement, I ‘created’ the UFWC around 8 years ago (in that I set up the website and wrote an article for FourFourTwo about it), although I can’t take credit for the idea of an unofficial championships. That idea was probably first properly raised by members of the Tartan Army after Scotland beat official world champions England and raised a claim to be unofficial champions.

Aside from giving groups of fans the excuse to make outlandish claims, the UFWC adds an extra dimension to football, particularly during the ‘downtime’ that falls between the World Cup and other major tournaments. The UFWC never stops, and turns otherwise boring friendly matches into must-win international cup finals.

So, when the Netherlands take on Uruguay tomorrow evening, they will be playing for even more than a place in the World Cup final. They will also be playing to retain their title as Unofficial Football World Champions. The winner of the game will take the UFWC title into the WC final. And whoever wins the final will walk away as both unofficial and official champions and holders of a unified title.

Over the course of the World Cup the UFWC has been featured in the Guardian (not once but twice), and in publications from the USA, Australia, Germany (also here, here and here), Austria, Spain, Greece, and lots of other countries that Google Translate can’t identify the language of… It’s also been fun to watch news of the UFWC spreading in various languages via Twitter (although, with hindsight, they could have been discussing something completely different beginning with the initials U, F, W and C for all I know…).

You can follow the UFWC through to the conclusion of the World Cup and beyond at www.ufwc.co.uk and on Twitter (@UFWC_Football). There is also a book, written by me, which is out of print, but is still available from ‘other sellers’ on Amazon. What the hell, while I’m shamelessly plugging stuff I might as well try to hawk some of the UFWC T-shirts which, like the book, I only get a few pennies out of, but every penny counts, right?

Anyway, that’s the UFWC for you. Enjoy the football.

Why did England crash so spectacularly out of the 2010 World Cup? There are many factors, individuals and organisations involved, but thankfully the Pie Chart of Blame simplifies a very complicated answer.

Now let me say right up front that international football is not nearly as important as club football. Come on, England jetting home is hardly your side getting knocked out of the Carling Cup is it? So the England Pie Chart of Blame may not necessarily be as seriously considered as the Newcastle United one. Anyway, that said, let’s begin the international blame game…

ITV HD. England desperately needed to get off to a good start at the World Cup, for example with Steven Gerrard scoring in the fourth minute in the opener against the USA. Sadly, if you were watching on ITV, that never happened, as the broadcaster inexplicably cut to an ad break at the crucial moment. A bafflingly bad error, even worse than the BBC’s decision to hire ultra-fast-talking naughty-phone-ringing Emmanuel Adebayor as a pundit.

The Vuvuzela. How to make football more entertaining? I know! Let’s accompany it with a constant, thoroughly annoying drone, like having a wasp stuck in each ear. The novelty plastic trumpet has made watching the games a chore, and surely must have affected the England players’ ears and thus sense of balance. Note to those intending to take vuvuzelas to English grounds next season: you will be less welcome than Michael Barrymore at a pool party.

UK Tabloids. They build ‘em up, they knock ‘em down. White van drivers (and indeed less stereotypical sections of the British public) lap it up, creating a brainless, unfounded sense of optimism, followed by a furious, self-perpetuated backlash. The truth is that a not very good England team did not very good. The media built them into something they weren’t, creating inevitable disappointment. See also that ‘do it for Bobby’ Carlsberg ad.

James Corden. I’ve somehow managed to successfully avoid hearing his World Cup single, but I do know that the only thing that could have made watching 90 minute of England failing to win any worse was following it with 30 minutes of James Corden failing to be funny.

Cheryl Cole. It’s simple – England were good when Heaton’s finest was one of the WAGs, and rubbish after she left ‘love rat Ashley’. Come on, Cheryl, couldn’t you have overlooked your husband’s indiscretions for the good of the country just this one time? (And, granted, all of the previous times?) To be fair, Wayne Bridge’s ex-missus probably had something to do with the whole sorry ‘affair’ as well.

The Germans. No need to mention the war. Or beach towels. Or even penalties. This time the ruddy Hun went and had the gall to be substantially better than us at OUR national game. And to get the benefit of a dodgy goal-line decision, just like we did when we won that World Cup we always harp on at them about. Talking of which…

FIFA. The ball was over the line! FIFA’s refusal to adopt goal-line technology robbed Frank Lampard of a pointless consolation goal. Of course, the disallowed goal was pretty much the only thing that put any fire into the England players’ bellies during the 90 minutes. If it had been allowed they might have played on with even less purpose. Which would not have been much purpose at all.

The FA. For an amateur organisation they seem to get paid an awful lot of money. Any fool knows that English football has been mismanaged for decades. The whole Capello contract saga was ridiculous, but to present any manager with a new contract on the eve of a major tournament is a ludicrous proposition, and will cost them dearly when they hand Fabio his P45.

Fabio Capello. Combats England’s lack of available talent by constructing a robust 4-5-1 system for the qualifiers. Then, for no apparent reason, goes 4-4-2 for the finals. He failed to instil confidence or ideas, made some baffling selection decisions, and refused to change things when they went wrong. Also, there were those pictures of him in his Speedos. Arrivederci Fabio.

The Players. Overpaid and under-enthusiastic. Maybe they would have played better if the FA hadn’t already arranged for their match fees to be donated to charity. The truth is that England doesn’t have as many world class players as it thinks it does. Many of those who shine in the Premier League flopped on the international stage. Several of them have done so for years. Prepare the tar and feathers for the ‘golden generation’. For three lions, read three words: ‘Not Good Enough’.

So that’s England’s World Cup over. Now we can sit back and enjoy the rest of the tournament unfettered by the spectre of disappointing underachievement. Then we’ll be back to proper home grown domestic football. And everything will be back to normal. Except for that bloke sitting next to you with a bloody vuvuzela. And there’s Frank Lampard! He was rubbish in the World Cup! BOOOOOOOOOOO!

It was on TV, in bars, on billboards, on T-shirts, and, crucially, in the minds of the public. Around ten years ago I wrote an article called The Round Ball Game, looking at how soccer had progressed in the US since the 94 World Cup and found that, despite creating the professional MLS and vastly improving its international team (one player I singled out was a 20-year-old Landon Donovan), the great American public didn’t really seem to care. In 2010 this really seems to have changed.

I started in California, where the time difference meant the World Cup constituted breakfast telly. (Every morning I woke up to the sound of vuvuzela…) The US coverage was provided by ESPN, with some key games being screened on ABC. And pretty good the coverage was, too. The team was very familiar, including commentators Martin Tyler and Ian Darke, and pundits Ruud Gullit, Roberto Martinez and, erm, Steve Mcmanaman.

There were also a few unlikely co-commentators popping up here and there (Efan Ekoku, Robbie Mustoe…), and that inimitable statistic-heavy lingo so representative of US sports seemed a bit out of place when applied to football. During the USA v England match we were informed that it was the fourth time in 17 matches that the US had allowed a goal in the first 15 minutes… or something equally banal.

But the broadcasters really did seem to be making an effort. The game was more often than not referred to as football, not ‘soccer’, and nil-nil draws were no longer ‘zero-zero ties’.

ESPN’s Sportscenter news programme regularly led with the World Cup, often ahead of the ongoing NBA finals, and the coverage also extended to network news bulletins, which provided round-ups and goals, and paid close attention to the US team’s fortunes.

The World Cup also seeped into US TV’s numerous ad breaks, with many companies using football to sell their products, and several of the ads we’ve seen over here airing over there, including Nike’s Rooney-in-a-caravan Write The Future campaign.

I was in Hollywood for the USA v England game, and ended up watching it in a bar full mostly of fellow tourists. The event was a bit of a damp squib but at least ESPN didn’t cut to an ad during Gerrard’s goal. Irate friends back home watching on ITV HD pointed out that I was the only one of them who saw the goal live, despite being an extra 5,000 miles away.

On a side note, almost every bar I went in during my trip broadcast sport in HD (and, unlike the majority of UK bars, in the proper aspect ratio). The first time I ever saw HD sport was in California a few years ago, and now it seems pretty much standard in the bars and hotels – hopefully a sign of things to come back in stoneage Blighty. ESPN also broadcast some World Cup games in 3D – something neither BBC or ITV managed over here.

Moving around California I was struck by the number of football shirts I saw – Brazilian fans with face paint and flags, Japanese fans with, well, cameras, obviously. Locals also seemed fascinated with the World Cup. Store greeters and people in elevators asked me about games. The guy behind the bulletproof window in a Santa Monica gas station said to me, wide-eyed and shaking his head in amazement, ‘Did you see Germany this morning, man? 4-0! 4-0! Incredible!’

Of course, that 4-0 win was a rarity during the early days of the competition in that it provided goals. I was worried that the general lack of excitement on offer might dampen American enthusiasm, but then I watched the NBA finals decider. It made the most lacklustre World Cup stalemate seem exciting.

By the time of England’s game against Algeria I was on the other side of the country in New York. This time I watched the match in a sports bar favoured by the US team’s Sam’s Army, and was surrounded by already inebriated American fans who took a fervent anti-England stance, and spent the build-up singing charming ditties such as ‘Freedom From Tyranny’. The US team had just come back from 2-0 down to draw 2-2, and free drinks promotions from both Magners and Miller only improved the atmosphere.

The chanting intensified during repeated showings of a jingoistic car ad depicting George Washington seeing off the pesky British army in a Dodge Challenger. I could deal with the chanting, but I must admit the whooping and high-fiving did start to grate. As it happens, the utter ineptitude of England’s performance soon wore the US fans down, and sheer boredom eventually caused them to shut up and drift away.

Outside, Times Square had been turned into a bit of a fan park, with racked seating, sponsors’ promotions, and all of the games shown on the many huge screens. The area was evacuated shortly after the England v Algeria match due to a jumper on an adjacent building. There was nothing to suggest it was a disgruntled England fan. (He didn’t jump, by the way, but it was an impressively efficient operation by the NYPD to clear thousands of people in a matter of minutes.)

Later, as we wandered through posh Greenwich Village, a group of lads in US team shirts burst out of a bar with a football and took turns kicking it at a lamppost across the street. You wouldn’t bat an eyelid at this sort of thing in the UK, but here it seemed symbolic of the general positive attitude of the Americans to the World Cup.

There’s no doubt this country is sports mad, but does it have room in its heart for ‘soccer’? If reaction to the US team’s qualification for the last 16 is anything to go by then the answer could be ‘yes’. It’ll be interesting to see how far the US can go, and how World Cup 2010 changes the country’s affection for to the greatest game of all.

And there, in 30 seconds of televisual madness, John Barnes manages to both hit a new career low and defile the greatest football record ever made.

Quite an achievement for a man whose playing career ended with lumbering embarrassment at Newcastle and relegation at Charlton, and whose managerial career with Celtic (‘Super Caley go ballistic’ etc) and Tranmere must surely rank as one of the least successful of all time.

Barnes never exactly pulled up any trees playing for his country either, and some might say his original rap on World in Motion was the best thing he ever did for England. It would be hard to argue with that opinion.

Because World In Motion by New Order, some say EnglandNewOrder, is indisputably the best football record ever made. You can keep your Three Lions, and your Back Home, and your All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit.

It is the best football record ever made because: a) It is really very good; and b) It helped change the face of English football – and some might say football in general – forever.

Cast your mind back to the end of the 89/90 football season. English football was virtually unrecognisable to the bells and whistles phenomenon it is today. Liverpool won the Barclays First Division, but they didn’t get into Europe. English clubs had been banned from European competition for five years, and Liverpool for six. The shadow of hooliganism still hung over the game.

It was only a year on from Hillsborough, and the memories of that disaster remained fresh in the mind. Racism was prevalent on the terraces, and football was hardly an attractive place to take the family.

And on the pitch things were fairly uninspiring. The PFA and football writers’ players of the year were David Platt and that man John Barnes, and there was very little foreign talent around.

Not that you would get much of a chance to watch it. Armchair fans were restricted to the occasional Big Match and lamentable highlights shows on ITV.

Overall, English football was in a pretty miserable state. There was absolutely no reason to think that the national team would have any success at the World Cup that summer in Italy. There was very little optimism.

And then came World In Motion. New Order, fresh from the success of the Ibiza-infused Technique, teamed up with Keith Allen, Dad of Lily, to record the track. Also roped in were Barnes and various team-mates including Paul Gascoigne and Peter Beardsley, both of whom, legend has it, recorded versions of the rap that never made it onto the final track. Throw in some Kenneth Wolstenholme samples, and the end result was something quite special.

The genius of World In Motion is that, as the rap admits, it ain’t a football song. Yes, there is talk of creating space and beating your man, but really it’s bigger than that. ‘Love’s got the world in motion,’ the chorus proclaims. Love, not football. It’s only at the end, as it swells to a climax, that the song throws in, ‘We’re playing for England, En-ger-land!’, and by then you’ve been drawn in and can hardly help singing along.

World In Motion helped create belief in a national team that arrived at Italia 90 with little to no chance. Peter Hook has said that the song ‘enhanced patriotism’, and that’s true. These were the days before every other car flew a cross of St George, and just about the most commitment anyone gave to showing their support for England was to collect World Cup coins or Panini stickers.

It’s obviously an exaggeration to say that World In Motion propelled England into the semi finals, but it certainly helped. It encouraged us to go out and buy England shirts, have a couple of beers, throw our arms around our mates and holler, ‘En-ger-land’. It encouraged us to love the game again.

What happened next is securely stored in the memory of any football fan. Sir Bobby’s genius, Lineker’s goals, Waddle’s penalty, Gazza’s tears. And that was that. English football was never the same again.

Within a couple of years we had the Premier League and wall-to-wall TV coverage. We had an influx of new talent, sponsors and money. There were new stadiums and kits and haircuts and multi-coloured boots. Not all of the changes were positive, of course, but overall the game became a bigger and better thing.

And World In Motion was the starting point. Had it not created a surge of pride and goodwill that propelled the England team into the semi finals of Italia 90 who knows where our national game would have ended up? We might still be watching the bloody Big Match. And that would be no good at all.

So now it’s 20 years on, and it’s World Cup 2010, and England have no chance of winning the thing. Or do they? If they hold and give and do it at the right time, anything is surely possible.

New Order – World In Motion (Spotify)

After being deservedly demoted from a relatively poor top flight last season, with a raft of sub standard players on the pitch, no manager off it, and destabilising uncertainty involving the ownership of Mike Ashley, few predicted the Magpies would make such a swift return to football’s promised land. Instead, a financially crippling extended stay in the lower leagues was forecast, and the entire future of the club was placed in doubt.

However, instead of rolling over and going to sleep, Newcastle United has fought back and righted a lot of wrongs. And full credit must be given to Chris Hughton and the players. A lot of criticism was flung at them last season, much of it deserved, as the relegation inarguably proved. But they have taken a long hard look at themselves, rolled up their sleeves, and restored their pride.

A major turning point looked to be the shocking 6-1 pre-season defeat to Leyton Orient. Managerless, up for sale, and with any player of value being offloaded, it appeared things couldn’t get much worse. But, somehow, the remaining players came together. A hard-fought 1-1 draw at West Brom on the opening day of the season proved they weren’t about to lie down. And things improved from there.

It hasn’t always been pretty. The team got into a routine of scrapping out results without playing particularly well. A couple of decent acquisitions in the January transfer window added some much needed bodies to the squad, and the quality improved in the run-in. But the quality didn’t matter. All the Toon Army wanted was results. And now they’re back in the big time.

Mick Dennis mustn’t have slept well last night. The Daily Express hack was furious when Newcastle secured promotion, launching a tired and familiar attack on the Toon Army entitled Disloyal Newcastle Fans Still Deluded. Astonishingly, hilariously, Dennis claimed Newcastle fans were disloyal because they had ‘only’ sold 81 percent of their tickets this season.

Newcastle’s average attendance so far this season (before a sold out match against Ipswich on Saturday) is 42,987, the fourth-biggest in the country behind Manchester United, Arsenal and Manchester City, and bigger than the likes of Chelsea or Liverpool. But then statistics can prove anything, such as the fact that 99 percent of fellow journalists think Mick Dennis is a t***.

Dennis conjured from thin air the claim that Newcastle fans were clamouring for the return of Keegan or Shearer or both, and also found time to blame his apparent nemesis Shearer for the club’s decline. The Express website’s Have Your Say comment section was deluged with reasonable responses from Newcastle fans, before being shut down. Clearly it is Dennis who is ‘deluded’, not Newcastle fans.

A quick mention must also be made of Louise Taylor, who covers Newcastle for the Guardian and edits the official Sunderland magazine – a conflict of interests if ever one existed. Taylor seized upon the admittedly disgraceful training ground incident between Andy Carroll and Steven Taylor and attempted to use it to derail the promotion campaign. Hughton had failed to deal with the incident, she argued, and in any case, the team was being run by a cabal of players led by Kevin Nolan and Alan Smith. While there is no doubt some truth that the senior players have worked alongside the inexperienced Hughton to drive the team forward, this was lazy sniping and her ‘journalism’ is best ignored.

I’m not linking to Dennis or Taylor’s pieces here. Instead read George Caulkin in The Times, who regularly offers a much more intelligent and informed view.

So now that promotion has been secured, and rare silverware has been won, what happens next? Despite a fantastic season in the Championship, the squad remains ill-suited for the Premier League. While some have improved, the truth is that many of the players have found their level in the Championship. Certainly, changes will be required.

Following the last promotion campaign, in 1993, then-manager Kevin Keegan ruthlessly dispatched star players such as David Kelly and Gavin Peacock, determining that they weren’t good enough to make the step up to the top flight. Does Hughton have such a ruthless streak? And does he have money to spend to buy replacements?

As always with Newcastle United, next season will undoubtedly be another rollercoaster ride. For now, sensibly, there will be no open top bus parade, no celebrations in the street. Top flight status has been restored, but the reputation of the club still requires some reparation. There is plenty of work to be done to re-establish Newcastle United as a top football club. But allow us a quiet cold drink. The Toon Army are back in the big time.

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More importantly, it will further damage this once great football club, and sadden the hearts of its hundreds of thousands of fans. Mike Ashley is no longer a successful businessman, but he is certainly still a f*ddl*st*ck*ng t*gb**t.

I’ve not written about Newcastle United so far this season. That’s because, after 16 years as a season ticket holder, this summer Mike Ashley drove me out of the club I love. I decided not to renew in the hope that Ashley would depart, and with the determination that he wouldn’t take my season ticket money with him. As it transpired, Ashley didn’t go anywhere. So I did.

This was not an easy decision – and it hurt. I felt guilty at abandoning my team, and angry that I was being pushed away. And, of course, I had nothing to do on Saturday afternoons. I spent my season ticket money on Sky Sports HD, but that overhyped emperor’s new outfit hardly filled the void.

Inevitably, I couldn’t stay away for long, and I’ve been back to enough individual matches this season to determine that Chris Hughton’s team, thin in number and talent, is top of the Championship by virtue of the standard of the league being absolutely woeful. Saturday’s Newcastle United versus Doncaster Rovers match was, for long periods, excruciatingly bad, like watching two hungover pub teams. And the worry is that things are going to get even worse.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Saturday’s match was the attendance – a remarkable 43,949. That’s just 239 less than watched Liverpool versus Manchester United in the Premier League 24 hours later. Newcastle’s home attendances in the Championship this season have averaged 41,251 – well over 10,000 more than any other team in the division, and more than almost every Premier League team with the exception of Man United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Man City.

That’s an incredible show of support for a club that has treated its fans with such disdain over the past year or so. But, ironically, the faithfulness of the fans, and the huge injection of cash they continue to provide, has offered the stability that allows Ashley to stick around.

Yesterday, Ashley announced that the club has been taken off the market. He clearly believes that the team will win promotion, and the value of his hobbyhorse will subsequently rise. Last season he clearly believed that the team would avoid relegation, and that his investment wouldn’t implode. The guy knows less about football than a chimp knows about quantum physics.

Meanwhile, Chris Hughton has been appointed as permanent manager on an 18-month contract. There is no question that Hughton is a decent bloke who has done a more than decent job with the paltry tools afforded to him. But, by his own admission, he is not a manager. He is, however, both cheap and a “yes” man. He will not be kicking Ashley’s door down during the January transfer window, and he’ll continue to toe the party line in press conferences. And he isn’t that pesky Alan Shearer. All good news for puppet-master Ashley.

For the players, the permanent appointment of Hughton is unlikely to inspire greater effort. It seems more likely that they will get out the deckchairs, pipes and slippers. There has been much talk of the team spirit that Hughton has fostered, but he has also abandoned many of the disciplinary measures introduced by Shearer. The players no longer eat together, and are no longer fined for persistent lateness. Injured players are no longer required to attend the training centre for ice baths and extra treatment. No wonder some of the players are happier. No wonder some of them are persistently late and repeatedly injured.

The final insult in Ashley’s announcement was the claim that he will look to sell naming rights for St James’ Park. This is not an out-of-town, flat-packed, identikit arena of the type inhabited by the likes of Middlesbrough, Bolton or Wigan. This is a city centre stadium that has evolved as a hub of its community over more than 100 years of history. Any new name would be ignored by all right-thinking football supporters, and any interested sponsor should think very carefully about the implications of becoming involved in such a deranged scheme.

Ashley doesn’t even properly own the stadium. And he certainly doesn’t own the fans who fill it. What does he own? The contracts of a bunch of overpaid, overrated and unloved players, and a big thick wad of debts. Does that really constitute owning a football club? The fact is that without the fans Ashley has nothing.

The day St James’ Park is renamed the Cillit Bang Arena is the day we should all finally withdraw our support and our money, and leave Mike Ashley to count the cost of destroying one of the world’s greatest football clubs.

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My book about Newcastle United is Black & White Army.

The game is also a crucial qualifying match for some tin pot competition to be held in South Africa next year, but obviously the player’s minds will be on the UFWC…

Scotland are the all-time UFWC champions, having won 86 UFWC title matches – more than any other nation, ahead of the likes of England, Argentina, Russia – and the Netherlands, who have won 38 title matches and are ranked fifth overall.

Scotland have not had an easy time of things in UFWC competition in recent years. The Scots last held the title in March 2007, having ended a 40-year drought by beating Georgia, only then to lose out just four days later to official world champions Italy.

The UFWC website has all the build-up to the game, and will cover the action on Wednesday night. The game will be shown live in the UK on Sky Sports 2.

If you have no idea what the previous 200 words mean, you can read an explanation of sorts at www.ufwc.co.uk.