Chairmen of football clubs, don'tcha just love 'em?

Since the Russian-enforced exile of Ken 'blast-off' Bates at Chelsea and the near-disappearance of Deadly Doug Ellis from Aston Villa - he's still there, but would you know it - the status of the chairman as the bete noire of the elite game has lost some of its impetus.

That is until now. Step forward, Freddy Shepherd, the chairman of Newcastle United and the out and out inheritor to the mantle of principal blustering boardroom buffoon.

Now don't get me wrong, I like Newcastle United. No, I'm not a fan as I exclusively support one club and that is Liverpool. I do not subscribe to this phoney phenomenon of having not just one team to follow, but two or three or...right through to nauseous ad nauseam. Nope. You follow one club and one alone. It's that's simple and it's why you are a fan.

But sorry, I digress. As said, I do like Newcastle United. In its Premiership incarnation the club has produced some of the most maverick football played in this era of excess and mega-hype. Those black and whites have thrilled and teased and tormented, as well as usually collapsing like so much monotone marshmallows at Anfield.

And before the Premiership was elevated to its current status as an academy of avarice, Newcastle are steeped in a glorious heritage. Wor Jackie Milburn, the Robledo brothers, Malcolm Macdonald, Kevin Keegan, Peter Beardsley, Paul Gascoigne and through now to Alan Shearer - players and personalities who excite and enthral and whose playing virtues deserve to be extolled.

Above all else, the club is backed by a groundswell of support that has the magnificently-appointed St James' Park regularly pulsing to a Geordie heart-beat of die-hard dedication. It's a Toon army to admire and appreciate.

But nothing would give me greater pleasure than for Newcastle to buckle and fold in the FA Cup third round in which they have been drawn against non-league Yeading. As former player and manager Keegan might have said: "I would love it, love it."

Now the likelihood of such an exit offers longer odds than finding Shergar being employed by Lord Lucan Incorporated to provide donkey rides on Scarborough's south sands.

But only a massive cup humiliation on the scale of Hereford's coup de grace delivered to the Magpies in the early 1970s might go near to pricking the pomposity of Shepherd.

The man, who once famously ridiculed his club's prime marksman Alan Shearer as Mary Poppins, caroused another impression of a famous Smiths' song - Big Mouth Strikes Again - by declaring how the future of football would be better served if the Premiership took over the running of the rest of professional football in England.

The bejowelled one reportedly bellowed still further that "when we have got 52,000 fans at every home game the last thing we are worried about is clubs in the Third Division."

Oh yeah? Wasn't it Keegan, whose second arrival as Magpies' Messiah, this time as a manager, rescued the famous club as it listed perilously towards the old Third Division?

And wasn't Keegan himself plucked from relative basement obscurity by Liverpool en route to him becoming one of England's finest players?

Remember Freddy. Your club does boast a remarkable tradition and with it a deserved place in football's folklore - but it's a reputation founded on success largely from the 1950s. Fans apart, Newcastle United are themselves not a major force and never will be until they once more discover the price of Brasso rather than the brass-neck of an audacious chairman.

So wherever the third round tie between Ryman Premier League side Yeading and Premiership Newcastle is played - it may yet have to be moved from the underdogs' The Warren base to a neutral venue - then come on Yeading, shepherd those Magpies into third round embarrassment.

Updated: 10:56 Tuesday, December 07, 2004