Touching Distance : Kevin Keegan, The Entertainers, and Newcastle's Impossible Dream

Martin Hardy is an enthusiastic Magpies fan, but this adds to, rather than detracts from this fascinating overview of one of the greatest seasons in Premiership football. As he says, Newcastle became everyone’s second favourite team, and neutrals everywhere were saddened by their failure to clinch the title at the end. Yet the team will never be forgotten as the most gallant and entertaining runners-up. Keegan emerges as a genuine hero, a larger than life personality who invigorated a moribund football club, and indeed, a whole region. Premiership matches are viewed through the perspective of different players, management, officials and fans. Recommended!

The cover emotes feelings that I'd long confined to the darkest parts of my memory.The intro is great and sets the tone.Then there's a chapter called Alan Pardew. I closed the book and never read another single word.As depressing as coming close to the title was and failing, having to endure anything more to do with that charlatan (even just typing his name) makes me want to go on a murderous rampage.Anyway, I jest.Having only read the first few chapters, so far we have a fantastic little insight and accounts of those directly involved the the most entertaining period of football here in Newcastle.How we didn't win it (Graeme bloody Fenton I'm looking at you!) is criminal for such a unique, beautiful and thrilling team.People say that no one remembers runners up. I tell you something, everyone remembers this team and this book helps us recall the finer details lost due to years of alcohol abuse.

Memories are made of this. The writing was simple like most football books but I couldn't put it down as it transported back to the only potential time in my lifetime that the Toon could have (should have) done it. I was so engrossed I was hoping the end might have worked out differently!

What a fantastic story, so many wonderful anecdotes. What really comes across is the love for Keegan and how kind and generous he was. Best football book I’ve read in ages and I’m not a Newcastle fan either!

As a Newcastle fan ever since I was a small kid in the early 70’s and a dedicated aficionado of football nostalgia I couldn’t wait to get stuck into this book. I was eagerly anticipating a trip down memory lane to relive all the highs and lows of the most eventful season in my team’s recent history. My interest in this book however fizzled out a lot quicker than Newcastle’s title challenge in 95/96.This book is full of background detail put together from extensive interviews with the players, management and coaching staff involved with Newcastle that season. This might initially sound good because you wouldn’t want the book to be just a collection of match reports. Where the book falls down altogether however is that it is pretty much all background. There isn’t really any kind of narrative till the closing stages of the season when the dream was slipping away. More than half the matches Newcastle played that season aren’t even mentioned. Nor is there anything from the fans point of view. Nothing at all that captures the mood on Tyneside during that memorable season or the spirit of those glorious seven months from August to March when Kevin Keegan’s entertainers were sweeping aside all comers and Newcastle fans everywhere were feeling on top of the world. There isn’t even an appendix of Newcastle’s results that season for the reader to refer to. Without this kind of context, the material in the book, even the brief coverage of matches that season, becomes pretty meaningless and ends up just being nothing but a series of anecdotes.Every chapter follows pretty much the same format. It will focus on an individual player or coach who was involved with Newcastle that season and there will be several pages that tell the story of his background in football from first kicking a ball as a kid to the day he joined Newcastle. There then follows a page or maybe a page and a half if you’re lucky of personal recollection of that individual’s most memorable moment in the 95/96 season. It isn’t long before this becomes monumentally tedious.I wanted to be reading all about the drama, excitement and heartbreak of that unforgettable season, not endless paragraphs going into intricate detail about Steve Howey’s convoluted daily journey by public transport from the suburbs of Sunderland to Newcastle’s training ground when he was an apprentice, Peter Beardsley’s job sweeping a factory floor after leaving school or Darren Peacock’s career threatening leg injury as a teenager.This book was a huge disappointment to me because it simply doesn’t do what it claims to. It doesn’t tell the story of that remarkable season. It merely produces tantalising snippets in among all the endless in depth biographies of those involved. This is essentially a book about the lives and times of the players and coaching staff who were with Newcastle that season rather than the story of the season itself. In fact the book is so chock full of frankly irrelevant and at times excruciatingly boring background material that less than 20% of the content actually deals with the 95/96 season. To give an example, there are 15 pages detailing Terry McDermott’s football career from standing on the Kop as a 10 year old to becoming Newcastle assistant manager 30 odd years later but only 3 pages on the defining game of that season, the 4-3 at Anfield. Those three pages amount to more coverage than any other match that season gets too. Believe it or not, it gets even worse than that. There is even a whole chapter given over to a certain French Kung Fu specialist who wore the number 7 shirt for Manchester in the mid 90’s. In a book about Newcastle United. I ask you. [I would have given the book two stars if it wasn’t for this chapter].On a final note I would have to add that naming of every chapter after a well known song title is incredibly cheesy to say the least. It’s also nonsensical that the titles are by and large songs by Manchester bands. This may be a cryptic reference to the fact that Newcastle eventually lost out to a Manchester team that season but I think it’s more likely simply to be a reflection of the author’s own musical tastes. Either way it’s not impressive. If you are going to go down that road, at least pick songs by bands from North East.Newcastle may have been going for the title that season but this book is pure relegation material.

Went through the book in a few days, Great insight and read which brought back some super memories, and heart aches

This book tells the story of an era where Newcastle fansenjoyed fabulous football and hopes of glory.They had a manager who respected and made time for the fans.There is a lot of explanation of the problems Kevin Keegan had and as a Keegan fan I appreciate his time here.There are no nice words I can use to describe the disappointment in his second reign.