Someone puts on Busker. I look at the photos. “I’m coming home, Newcastle” I am home | OneFootball

It was The Strawberry that did it.

All Sunday I’d held it together – roared myself hoarse at the final whistle, jumped up and down with joy with my son, joined the thousands of smiling faces outside St James’ Park.

But as I stood with another pint in The Strawberry looking up at the players of today and those of all our yesterdays, I went.

Everyone’s cried since Sunday and that was my first – though certainly not my last.

Because what it brought home to me was this: Newcastle has made everything in my adult life.

Love, family, children, work, study, friends – and, above and around all these things, a true sense of belonging.

As anyone who’s ever spoken to me will know, I wasn’t born in the North East.

I grew up in the West Midlands to parents from the East Midlands who were – and in my mam’s case still are – fantastic, loving people but who really didn’t do sport. My mam will still tell anyone within earshot – and that’s quite a few people given the volume of her voice – that she ‘hates football’ and finds it ‘so boring’.

My dad – 28 years gone next month – loved music, literature and comedy but really couldn’t tell one end of a football pitch from the other.

My brother – a couple of years older than me – maintains a lifelong indifference to sport.

But I couldn’t get enough of it.

A supremely untalented footballer, I made up for my lack of ability with a passion for something which was almost akin to forbidden fruit in my house. Beyond the FA Cup Final – sufficiently important in the Walker house to permit a grudging viewing every May – sport may as well never have existed on our TV. I well remember conducting an intensive yet sly campaign to be allowed to watch Match of the Day and The Big Match once they started broadcasting on Sundays, dropping what I thought were subtle hints about how lots more people had started watching football on TV when it wasn’t on late on a Saturday. To be frank, it only worked once I was old enough to share a portable TV with my brother.

To love football, you have to have a team though. Which team should be mine? By rights it should have been Stoke City (where my dad was from) or Derby County (where my mam is from) but as we’ve established, that was never going to happen.

‘Support your local team’ – Redditch United, triers though they are, were never going to be in the league, let alone Division One (yes, it was the early 1980s).

So what was left? Following your mates.

(Yes, here’s where the confession comes).

It being in the early 1980s and me growing up in a nondescript new town, who did almost all my mates support?

Yes reader. It was Liverpool.

What was I to do? I was young, impressionable and wanted to fit in. So that’s what I did – joined in with the gloryhunters even though I’d never been within 50 miles of Liverpool.

I realise this will appal every right-thinking person in the North East but I’m not going to shrink from it. You were lucky where you were born. I wasn’t. But that changed.

Home Newcastle

The very first time I set foot in Newcastle, I felt at home.

I’ve never been able to figure out why this was or pinpoint any real reason behind it. God knows it was a bloody long way from the Midlands up here so I should have felt like this place was outer space when I stepped out at the Haymarket Metro station and headed towards Newcastle University on a cold February day in 1990.

Yet there I was. Feeling so instantly at home, comfortable in my surroundings and happy to be there at the university open day.

I’d set my heart on going to Manchester – Madchester being the main draw for all that – but a combination of a rotten course, some of the only real advice my dad gave me and that feeling of being at home meant there was only one place to go.

My three years at Newcastle University were easily some of the best of my life. Back in the days when they even paid you (a very small amount) to go to university and timetabled hours on English Literature courses were in middling single digits per week, a whole lot of fun could be had.

And of course, there was the football.

My first match at St James’ Park was on October 6, 1990. I’ll not lie – I wasn’t the young boy in wonderment gawping at the expanse of green and falling in love as the famous Bobby Robson quote had it. But I thoroughly enjoyed standing on the Gallowgate, smelling the hops from the brewery and seeing Mick Quinn score in a 2-1 win – although the lads crammed tight near the scoreboard scared the living sh.t out of me so I stood comfortably far enough away towards the Milburn Stand. And whatever the hell ‘Mackems’ were, it was clear they weren’t very well liked.

Great stuff. Must go again.

Alas, setting the pattern familiar to so many, the second game was diametrically opposed to the first. A miserable, bad-tempered defeat to Middlesbrough in the Rumbelows Cup in which Quinn got sent off. Clearly not all fun.

The next time was the last game of that 90/91 season and another characteristic experience: a delirious schadenfreude at the misfortunes of those from Wearside (yes, I’d learned what Mackems were) as I took part in the happy pitch invasion which greeted Sunderland’s fall from Division One.

NUFC faded into the background as the other traditional pastimes of the 1990s student took to the foreground. Rumours that the club could even fold (‘that’d be a shame’ I thought with astounding insouciance as the next night out hoved into view) and then a thunderbolt.

Keegan back.

Anyone who’s lived in the city knows that even if you want to, you cannot shut the football club out of your life here. It seeps into the pores and through the cracks, it’s like jungle drums that can’t be silenced. Keegan returning as manager, club still hanging on by a thread and then it survives.

Suddenly on my infrequent walks to lectures through Leazes Park, I’m seeing an actual end being built where once there was just a gap for students in Leazes Terrace to watch the largely indifferent fare on offer.

I’m hearing ’10 in a row – can you believe it? 10 in a row!’.

As I’m preparing to say goodbye to student life and farewell to the city, I join the thousands following the Championship-winning open top bus down to the Civic Centre, bits of trees broken off and being cast down into the Great North Road like Keegan and the lads are a latter day Jesus. Which, let’s face it, they pretty much were.

“This is amazing – such a shame I’m going to have to leave,” I thought as a return home to save the pitiful amount of money I’d be getting as a trainee journalist beckoned.

And that, I thought, was that.

But as the film says, just when I thought I was out… they pulled me back in.

Tyne to go back

Durty Nellys.

Not a great name for a pub, is it?

Classic faux-Irish begorrah nonsense dreamt up by some posh marketing bod from Hampstead.

But it changed my life.

It’s November 1995. It’s Newcastle again. That team I’d left behind who were hoping to do well in the recently formed Premier League are laying waste to all before them.

Yes, even Liverpool.

I’m back on Tyneside to see a mate from university who ended up staying here and we’re in an Irish bar near the station with his girlfriend and her flatmate.

It’s snowing outside and there’s girls walking round in miniskirts and little else. I forget how wonderfully mad this place is.

So the conversation’s flowing and it comes round to football.

“Just started supporting them because they’re winning, have you?” I say to the female flatmate.

In hindsight, I think I’m still lucky to be sitting here typing this after coming out with that zinger.

What actually happens is a pretty much uninterrupted 15-minute dressing down from someone who I rapidly learn knows far more about football than I ever will. It’s a scene played out with different variations to similar idiots over the next 30 years and I never, ever tire of seeing it.

In many ways, I have very much more than met my match.

To cut to the chase, reader I married her three years later – on a Saturday: West Ham at home, we lost 3-0, Stuart Pearce got sent off, still think I’ve not been fully forgiven.

Nothing worse than an ex-smoker

At this point, it is still a mixed marriage but bloody hell I’m weakening.

It’s been engrained in me that you can’t change your team. I know, I know, I know – but, but…

NUFC aren’t even much cop by this point. Dalglish has been in and wrecked Keegan’s Entertainers, an FA Cup final happens but might as well not have done and Shepherd & Hall are badmouthing the women of the city to an unconvincing sheikh.

But I’ve been back to the games. And despite the presence of a striker from Sweden who you really wouldn’t want to gimme, gimme, gimme there’s something so addictive about it all.

Typically it’s a defeat which decisively turns the tide.

I’ve got a ticket for the 1999 FA Cup Final and as I make my way past the already crowing Man Utd fans and negotiate the lake of pi.. which is the old Wembley, I’m in a black and white strip. Well, I cannot go there without one, can I?

Sheringham and Scholes score without making any tangible effort and within a few hours I find myself disconsolate in a pub in my erstwhile home town.

When a Man U fan walks past making some snarky remark about Newcastle United, I snap and, in quite a stunning piece of two-faced shamelessness, I have a go at gloryhunting fans who’ve never been to Manchester and how I’d sooner take being a NUFC fan and winning nothing than being a plastic Man U fan and winning the treble every season.

Like Jekyll turning into Hyde, the transformation is complete. I’ve joined the ranks of the glorious doomed. This is my city. These are my people. And I’m so happy to be here.

And just like ex-smokers are the most vociferous against smoking, I make up for my years of gloryhunting with a dedication to happily following NUFC through the nowhere years. There’s the all too brief Robson renaissance to stir the blood and stoke the belief then we go down, down through Souness and teammate tear-ups, Dennis Wise and Executive Director (Football)s to the loveless hell of the Ashley Years. By this time, we’ve inflicted the birthright on our kids so they suffer with us as we all fight not to go to the match and watch Bruce throw on four half-baked strikers to keep us ‘ticking along’ in the bottom six before the inevitable return to the Fizzy Pop League.

But.

That little spark of hope is just there. Maybe, just maybe.

Redemption songs

A heady rush of news, a new dawn, real hope and a survival when all looked lost and suddenly we’re somehow back at Wembley.

It’s all too much as we fail to turn up – ‘shame again’ as the old Sunday Sun headline had it back in 1999, although this time we clean up our mess in Trafalgar Square rather than trash the town in the Bigg Market.

Lost our chance. Again. Will it ever return?

Back again. Last time it was my son who had my ticket, this time it’s my daughter. Greater love hath no man and all that.

My son – whose introduction to cup football at nine was Leicester away where the last 10 minutes was us chanting “we’re sh.t and we’re sick of it” – is now old enough to legally drink so we meet in the Three Bulls at high noon.

Precisely a week ago I had no hope. But stupidly from somewhere I’m feeling there might be a chance. I tweet my mates an hour before kick-off: “Lads. God help me. I think we’re going to win this.”

We agree that the first five minutes are crucial. “We are definitely in this” is the verdict. I’m already standing on my bar stool fist pumping like an idiot with every Joelinton roar.

Standing at the bar getting in before the half time rush. Dan Burn. Dan f…ing Burn. Christ we’re winning.

“Don’t take your foot off their throats” I scream to no-one at all as the second half starts.

Sh.t. So close. That goal should stand surely.

But just a minute later. Oh Christ it’s two. Throat shredded. Pub deafened.

70 minutes, 80 minutes, 90 minutes – they’ve not laid a glove on us.

Eight minutes of injury time. But of course – Liverpool are losing.

Offside goal. But it’s not offside.

Still 4+ minutes to go. But I’m calm. We will do this, we will do this, we will d-

Players are on their knees.

It’s the final whistle.

We’ve won.

Everyone’s taking photos of the telly or kissing the person next to them or taking photos of the telly while they’re kissing the next person to them.

Fella next to us says he’s 75, remembers the last cup win and didn’t think he’d see another. Stories like this all night.

We stay until Sky wring every last drop out of the match and we soak it up like eager sponges then head out.

The queue to the Tesco Express indicates it’ll be bedlam outside the ground.

And it certainly is. Glorious, wonderful, joyous, happy delirium. Aal wi smiling faces, the takeover joy ramped up even further as Strawberry Place is sectioned off by police vans whose occupants need take no further action, so good natured is the scene.

This is ridiculous. It’s a living cliche, but if you were there you’ll know it’s true. There are old men, families, young kids, Asian people, black people, Chinese people, the whole of the city utterly united in sheer joy.

Considerably refreshed, my son says he’ll have to go back to his university flat (talk about full circle) to charge his phone. I’m desperate to talk to my wife and my daughter in London but my battery’s nearly out and I have to capture this scene because it won’t happen again.

For a good half hour I soak it up before Nature makes a pressing demand for relief.

The Strawberry it is.

Only right to have a pint if I’ve used the facilities.

“I cannot believe it” we all say to fellow fans as they come in. Hugs. Photos. Cheers. More hugs. Sam Fender’s on the jukebox – “but I would hit him in a heartbeat now” – we all sing along. True redemption songs.