Alan Shearer was the epitome of the classic English center forward, strong in the air with a keen eye for goal, returning an extraordinary return of a goal every other game.
An impressive feat, even more impressive when taken into context that Shearer’s accomplishments came at Blackburn and Newcastle, two of the lesser high profile teams of the time and he was only once ever part of a title winning team. But there was so much more to Shearer’s game than finding the back of the net, originally a midfielder in his youth, he was an intelligent and robust character, not afraid of hard graft, instilled in him from his working class roots in Gosforth. Far from afraid of confrontation either during his career, Shearer was one of the few players that could match the era’s hard man Roy Keane for attrition and intensity, so it came as no surprise that the pair clashed on number of occasions, the most famous of these came in the 2001/02 season with Keane receiving his marching orders after the two nearly came to blows.
A product of Wallsend Boys Club, Shearer attracted interest from a number of clubs including Manchester City, Newcastle United and West Brom ; he was eventually signed by Southampton in 1996 making his professional debut two years later scoring a hat-trick, the youngest player to do so at 17 years and 240 days against Arsenal in the old first division. However he didn’t mark his time on the south coast with the plethora of goals that were to follow later on his career. In 153 appearances for the Saints’ he found the net 43 times over a four year period in which at times he was asked to play as wide man in a three man attack that included Matt Le Tissier. But he was turning heads for his tireless work rate and link up play, most notably Alex Ferguson and Manchester United were on the verge of signing Shearer but for cash flow problems in 1992 – hard to believe that United would have such a problem.
There were no such liquidity problems at that time at Jack Walker’s bankrolled Blackburn Rovers and Shearer made the switch to Ewood Park for a British transfer record £ 3.3 million. However his first season at Rovers was cut short after snapping his cruciate ligament in December missing the remainder of the season. But he did manage a respectable 16 goals in 21 games with Blackburn ending the season as the league’s top scorer.
The following season, Shearer netted 31 times in 40 league games as Blackburn improved on the fourth place they managed the previous season to finish runners-up to Manchester United with his efforts rewarded with the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year award. The 94-54 season that was to follow was to be Shearer’s most successful in his history, he forged a potent and prosperous partnership with new signing Chris Sutton nicknamed ‘’the SAS’’ yielding 49 goals between them. Shearer himself bagging 34 of them and in the process breaking Manchester United’s stranglehold on the Premier League title as Blackburn won their third ever league title and first in over 80 years.
In addition, Shearer ended the season winning the first of his two PFA Players’ Player of the Year awards. Blackburn finished a disappointing seventh the following season over 20 points behind Manchester United, however there was no let-up in Shearer’s goal scoring prowess finishing with yet another 30 plus return but his time though at the Riversiders’ was coming to an end. During the summer of 96 Shearer was a central figure in England’s run to the semi-final of Euro 96, finishing as the competitions top scorer with five goals re-igniting Alex Ferguson interest.
However despite lengthy negotiations Ferguson was to miss out yet again on Shearer as in the end a last minute intervention by Newcastle manager Kevin Keegan persuaded Shearer to come back to Tyneside. It cost the ‘’Toon Army’’ a world record fee of £ 15 million to bring ‘’The Prodigal Son’’ home installing a high sense of expectancy with the Newcastle faithful that their messiah would lead them to ending their 70 year title drought but Newcastle fell short again for the second season running, this time by seven points in the end .
“Big Al” contributed 25 goals in 31 games, topping the Premier League goalscoring charts for a third year in the row and winning his second PFA Player of the Year award in the process. That was the closest that Newcastle would come to tasting league success during Shearer’s time at the club. The following season Shearer’s league campaign saw him return just two goals in an injury ravaged season, though he did spearhead Newcastle’s assault on the FA Cup scoring 5 goals on the way to their final defeat against Arsenal.
FA Cup glory eluded Newcastle and Shearer again the following season in 98-99 with Manchester United this time inflicting the misery with Shearer again netting 5 times on the way to Wembley. In the league Newcastle were confounded to mid-table meritocracy for the following two year’s despite there being no let up in Shearer’s exploits in front of goal. At the turn of the year during the 01-02 season the Magpies sat at that top of the table, but their title challenge would eventually fizzle out tamely finishing fourth in the end with Shearer notching 23, his best tally since the 96-97 season. In the two following seasons Shearer’s goals helped Newcastle to punch above their weight finishing 3rd and 5th respectively, netting 22 in the 03-04 season. An out of form Shearer declared his intention to retire during the 04-05 season but he changed his mind after some convincing from manager Graeme Souness that he still had much to offer the Magpies. Taking up a player-coach’s role during the 05-06 season, he broke the club’s all time goal scoring record held by Jackie Milburn for the previous 49 years.
When Shearer finally hung up his boots in 2006, he had found the back of the net 283 times in English top tier football in 559 games, add 97 goals to that for club competitions and a further 30 goals in an England shirt in 67 games, it can be said without doubt that Shearer is the greatest English goal scorer of the modern game. Imagine what he could have achieved if he had decided to don the red of Manchester, its unfathomable to think how many more goals he would have scored in United’s title winning teams and European escapades but it was testament to his character that he stayed at his boyhood club during many years of playing with second rate players when his talents could have shone on a bigger stage.
But throughout his career Shearer was one never to yield to the accepted norm of what a footballer should be, he never once courted publicity in a time when football in England was undergoing a monumental change with the advent of Sky Sports. Nonetheless he was never far away from the public eye, he was ridiculed in the media throughout his career, being labelled as boring and uninteresting, though admittedly he didn’t help himself when he told reporters he would celebrate winning the league with Blackburn by ‘’creosoting the fence’’. Imagine if England had ended up winning Euro 96, the deck scrubber could very well have been gotten out! Even his famous one handed goal celebration came under the spotlight for its mundaneness, but that was Shearer in a nutshell a man famous for his no-nonsense approach to the game and to life in general.
